Cincinnati at Milwaukee

Milwaukee just dropped two straight at home to the Cubs, including an 8-2 drubbing, and now turns to Robert Gasser, a lefty still rebuilding his command in his first full season back from Tommy John surgery. Six starts in, his 4.50 ERA reads better than the work behind it. The underlying numbers, stripping out luck, sit well above that mark, suggesting he's more hittable than the line suggests. That's the soft spot. Cincinnati arrives off a loss at Pittsburgh and sits under .500, so no one's mistaking the Reds for a contender. That's the point, because this is a price play. My mathematical model projections lean Cincinnati by roughly nine percentage points on the moneyline, and there's a long-running pattern that rewards short road underdogs who are scuffling and coming off a loss against a team playing well north of .600. Cincinnati fits every piece of it tonight. At plus money against a back-end starter, the market is overrating; the Reds need to win only a little better than four times in ten to show a profit. Take the Reds on the road tonight.