Blue Jays best bet vs. Twins for Game 1 of wild-card series: Back Toronto's hot offence
The Toronto Blue Jays begin their postseason run on Tuesday versus the Minnesota Twins in a strong pitching matchup at Target Field.
The pregame narrative: Kevin Gausman will toe the rubber opposite Pablo Lopez for Game 1, which has a 7.5-run total. Toronto is a betting underdog for the wild-card contest after Minnesota captured the AL Central to get home-field advantage for the best-of-three series.
Blue Jays best bet vs. Twins overview
MLB oddsas of 8:54 p.m. ET on 10/02/2023.
Blue Jays best bet vs. Twins
Best Bet: Jays over 3.5 total runs (-115)
This is an arbitrary endpoint, but here are the facts: Opponents scored four-plus runs on the Twins in six of Lopez's final seven starts. He allowed at least three runs in five of them and had a 4.24 ERA, which includes a gem in which he threw eight scoreless innings and struck out 14.
Not to take anything away from Lopez, who enjoyed a fantastic season, but the level of competition he faced over that stretch was incredibly light, too. After getting hammered by the hard-hitting Rangers, the rest of his season looked like this:
- Guardians (twice)
- Mets
- White Sox
- Angels (no Shohei Ohtani/Mike Trout)
- Athletics
Cleveland, Chicago and Oakland were all bottom-10 offensive teams, per FanGraphs' wRC+, and Los Angeles was MLB's third-worst by that metric since Ohtani was sidelined in early September.
Lopez vs. Toronto
We think that soft ending with mixed results holds more weight than his lone start against Toronto this season, but he did allow four runs and two homers with six punchouts over 5.2 innings that outing.
Lopez has an elite strikeout rate (fifth among qualified starters) but don't expect gaudy numbers against the Jays, who had the sixth-lowest K rate in baseball.
Fewer strikeouts mean more balls put in play, leading to increased opportunity. While that doesn't guarantee anything, as not all contact is created equal and weak contact often leads to outs, it's certainly not a bad thing.
Toronto was a top-10 team in batting average and getting on base, and made contact at the fourth-highest rate. And maybe this is BABIP noise, but the two months opponents had the highest batting average against Lopez were in August and September.
There's also this: Lopez pitched more than a full run better over the same amount of starts (16) on the road than his home stadium, Target Field, which was an above-average park for offence this season.
Jays bats clicking
Toronto comes into this series with arguably a more dangerous lineup than it has had all year.
With Gausman going (AL strikeout leader, No. 2 in FIP), taking the under on 7.5 runs will likely be a popular pick. It comes with risk, though, based on the way both teams are swinging (the Twins were No. 1 in wRC+ over the last month of the season).
But there's value in taking the over on a light team total that Toronto eclipsed in 10 of its final 15 games and hit at a 70% rate over its last 30.
After Lopez, the Twins will deploy a bullpen that ranked top 10 in ERA and first in K rate over the final month of the season. So the Jays will need to at least do some damage off the Minnesota starter, and we believe that they will.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is coming off his best power month of the season. Bo Bichette had a .340 average and .940 OPS over the team's final four series. And Brandon Belt, who earned his paycheque off his work versus righties (.890 OPS, all 19 of his homers), came back at the most important time.
A lot of this is small-sample analysis. But what happened in April or June — Toronto's lightest-scoring month — isn't necessarily pertinent to this pick nor what matters most.
