A's vs Yankees Prediction, Picks & Odds for Tonight’s MLB Game

Lawrence Butler hasn't exactly liked the road this season. At least not when he's been on it for a while. 

The exciting young outfielder struck out four times in a game three times this season, and two of them have come in the first game of the second series during a road trip with no rest, just like this one.

Of course, that's a tiny sample size, and we're not taking Butler to strike out four times in a single game for our best bet. However, it's a nice baseline and a nice place to start for our best bet for him to strike out twice—a prop we're gladly grabbing with our projected price of -105. Let's talk about why.

Butler faced Will Warren, the exciting young New York Yankees pitcher who will take the mound this evening, earlier this year and finished with just one strikeout. But he was lucky. Butler faced three two strikes at-bats in all three of his at-bats during that one and saw just one sweeper. I suspect that the last part will change here because the data has changed on that pitch for both parties involved.

Since that matchup, Warren's sweeper has become much more deadly and effective. He'll come into this game with that pitch being utilized as a put-out pitch around 18% of the time and producing an impressive whiff rate of 33%.

He wasn't going to it nearly as much early in the year because of the batting average it was allowing. However, things change this time and in this matchup because of the data that's accumulated when Butler sees this pitch. It's certainly not good.

Butler already has one of the highest K rates in the sport at a whopping 27%, which places him in the top 10% of baseball. Additionally, Butler boosted a whiff rate of 32%, which places him even lower in that metric. What's even more problematic about this matchup is what Butler has done against the sweeper this season.

He can't hit it, for starters, with a batting average of .154, but better for us is that his K rate is an astronomical 54%. Even more significant, much of that data wasn't recorded on film or included in the scouting report from the first matchup because he hadn't seen that pitch – now he has.

The situational aspects at play here, like Butler being an eager young player looking to impress in Yankee Stadium along with Butler's tendencies to whiff more towards the end of road trips, is what put this on the radar.

However, it was the matchup of Warren's sweeper and his overall strikeout ability, which places him in the 90th percentile of baseball, that made it a play. I'd make this bet down to my fair price of -105. 

We're keeping this one simple and pairing the captain to have over 1.5 bases with our best bet. This answer? It's a pretty straightforward one. 

Mitch Spence is a flyball pitcher who occasionally gives up too many hard-hit balls (41 percentile of baseball) and is a bit worse when it comes to opponents barrelling up the ball (32 percentile). That alone is a recipe you'd like to work in Aaron Judge's favor. Add in the fact that he throws high-velocity stuff almost half the time, and you love the matchup.