Padres vs. Blue Jays prediction and odds for Tuesday, July 18 (Is Manoah back?)
For the first time all year, the AL East seems to be in doubt and the Toronto Blue Jays are in a good position to make a charge for it at 53-41.
After sweeping the Arizona Diamondbacks this weekend the Blue Jays are just six games back of Tampa Bay and five behind Baltimore. Now, they’ll kick off a three-game series with the San Diego Padres at home. The Padres have lost their first three out of the break and are 44-50.
For Game 1, the Blue Jays will go back to Alek Manoah for the second time since he was sent all the way to rookie ball to get right. Manoah is 2-7 with a 5.91 ERA. The Padres will counter with Joe Musgrove who is 8-2 with a 3.29 ERA in 14 starts this season.
Toronto will need Manoah to pitch like he did last time out for the rest of season if the team is going to compete for the division, and he gets his next test tonight against San Diego. Let’s look at the odds.
The question here is which version of Alek Manoah is Toronto going to get tonight. The version that it got for the first half of the season was the worst pitcher in baseball, but last time out he went six innings and gave up just one run on five hits with eight strikeouts and no walks.
That’s the pitcher they had last season, the one that was an All-Star.
The team obviously sent Manoah away to get himself figured out and now he’s had confidence for 11 days after that good start and I think that will materialize into another strong outing.
For the Padres, the same can be said about Joe Musgrove. Not the part where he was a disastrous shell of himself for three months, but the part where he’s coming off a great start with a lot of confidence.
Last time out Musgrove went six scoreless and gave up three hits with seven strikeouts.
Since May 26, Joe Musgrove is one of the best pitchers in baseball with a 1.79 ERA and 54 strikeouts to eight walks in 55.1 innings. That’s with a BABIP of .297, so this is no fluke.
The Padres are 7-2 in those nine games. The total is set at nine for this one and three of Musgroves last nine starts have gone over that number, three have gone under, and three ended with exactly nine runs.
Musgrove has been great and I’m choosing to believe in Manoah because it really seems like he fixed something. I’ll take the under in Game 1 of this interleague series.
Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change
