It's Opening Day! Giants and Yankees! Nuff said

It's opening day and we're back to follow the Giants through another season. A little review of our mission is followed by topics to be interested in this year (new coach, new players...) before we get into today's game.  A quick discussion of Webb vs. Fried--2 aces on the mound, and whether the hitters will be ready.  And, finally, we finish with the Safe Bet of the Day™ and a quick look ahead to tomorrow's game.

Welcome back!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Good morning, and welcome back to state with AM and the AM, your San Francisco Giants pregame podcast, bringing you previews, projected, and predicted before every Giants game. All you Giants fans. And I guess those listeners who, for some crazy reason, might not be Giants fans yet anyway. We are back. We are hopeful. We are excited. It is another year of Giants baseball, another year of wagering on Giants baseball. And I'd like to start off first thing with just a quick review for anyone not familiar with what we do or what we are doing. As you know, there are many baseball podcasts out there. There are many Giants baseball podcasts out there. There are a lot of gambling podcasts, a lot of betting podcasts, but I think we are the only podcast to focus on the giants and betting and putting that together for one strong bet each day. Now, I've said this before, and I'm just going to kind of repeat it in case you didn't hear last year. But Aiden and I, so we don't claim to be the two smartest people in the room, but again, this is what we have to offer, and that is that we are two longtime local fans focused on just one thing. And that is the best bet for today's Giants game. Aiden and I, we are a father-son team, we follow the Giants closely, we have for years, and we follow the betting lines closely. So what we hope to do is to bring those two together every morning and bring you the best bet of the day, or what we refer to as the safe bet of the day. So that's kind of the main idea. Now we don't give out picks for other teams, we don't give out picks for other sports, we just hone in on the Giants, we try to narrow down, we try to focus all of that together to try to bring you the one winner every day, like I said. So that's kind of the general idea. We hope that because of that focus, that we will maybe know a little bit more than the podcaster who was trying to handicap the entire Major League Baseball slate or the full slate of all the sports that might be going on, like many of them do. And they just don't have the time. So we hope that because we're focusing, we can have a little bit more success. But we'll see how that goes. Now, last year we started up right after the all-star break. We were kind of the Rafi Devers of the podcast world. We started late, we came over late, but we did the second half of the season, most of the second half of the season, until we had to call it quits, but we learned a few things along the way. And those are one, we want to make sure and keep this fun. If we're not having fun, if we don't feel like it's kind of enjoyable to do and it doesn't seem like listeners are having fun, then we would call it a day. We just want to make sure it's just a good time. We're doing this, it's a labor of love. Also, we will focus on just one bet. We're gonna try to stay narrow. Last year, when we started out, we had some leans, some suggestions, some thoughts. But we are just gonna pick one bet of the day like we did at the end of last year. We hadn't kind of narrowed it down to that at the end of the year. We will try to minimize Homerism, which I think we got a lot better as the season went on last year, as we went through our season, I guess. We will try to be completely transparent. There is really nowhere to hide. You guys, anyone can listen to this all the time. We will keep a running total. Hopefully, we will do good enough that we will be happy about that running total. And we will do a variety of bets again. Last year we started out at the beginning doing mostly, you know, money lines, over-unders, just kind of the basic bets. And then as we went along, we kind of transitioned into more arcane, I guess, esoteric type bets. And it was a lot more fun. I think we had a lot of fun. We did a we did pretty well on them. It kind of showed that we were focused in on the giants in a little better way. So those are some of the things we've learned, some of the directions we're heading, I guess. Also, this year, a couple other things. Aidan's role is going to be a little different. He graduated and got a job, one of a dream job, kind of. And so he will be a lot busier than he was last year when he was in school. So, with that being said, he will not be able to contribute every day. He will, when he has time, probably on the weekends, maybe once or twice during the week. Beyond that, he will send me notes, some ideas, thoughts, suggestions, etc., and I will pass those along when I give my take. So he will still be a part of it. It just might not be as much verbally and as much every day. And I know that's terrible because it adds a lot to have his young voice on the pod. So we'll try to get him on as often as possible, but it just won't be every day. Also, there may be some days where we can't put out a podcast for a couple reasons. One, which is a good reason, is that on Wednesday, the day games, I'm going to a lot of those day games. And because I work at night, when I get off, I have to car catch the ferry to get across the bay to get over to the game, and I barely have much time to do that. So unless I have time to get the recording done the night before or very early, there might be some Wednesday day games, the ones that I attend that I won't have time to do a podcast for. Also, I've been doing a little bit of traveling to go see my folks on some weekends. And if I can't take the computer on those trips, there may be some weekend days where I won't be able to do the podcast because I won't have access to my equipment. I think that's about everything off of my list for the review. Just a simple overview, some details to get out of the way, so that we can move on to something more important, which is today's game. Obviously, as it's the first game, there is not going to be a lot to say about numbers or stats or metrics, except for maybe a little bit of past performance and some spring training numbers, which we'll talk about briefly later. In case you don't know the game tonight, it's streamed on Netflix, which should be interesting because I saw some of the personalities involved. One, you've got the Giants, great Barry Bonds makes perfect sense. You've got CeCe Sabathia, the Yankees, great pitcher, makes perfect sense. And Jameis Winston, the football, football quarterback personality. I'm not quite sure what he's on there for. Should be interesting to see how that gets handled. Anyway, as usual, because it's a new season, we have a lot of new players, new coaches, new topics to talk about, that kind of stuff. I mean, Tony Vitello, obviously, right off the bat comes to mind. The making history and being the first college coach to move up to professional ranks. So just how he does is going to be interesting. He did surround himself, or they surrounded him with Dusty Baker and Bochi and Ron Washington and some old timers, so hopefully that'll help. But the combination of the young and the old with all of his energy and all that, that's going to be interesting to watch. We got a full year of Rafi Devers, which I think is going to be great. I just have high expectations for him. I think he's going to do well here. Second year of Adam is he got more comfortable as the year went on last year, seemed to make himself at home. Numbers got better. The arrival of Luis Arries with his hitting, even though it's a little controversial, I'm excited about it. Robbie Ray has been great during spring training. We do have some pitching questions that are going to come up, bullpen questions. So, anyway, a lot of new stuff to talk about this year. That's always exciting. I'm sure we'll cover a lot of those topics as the year goes on. We know how good he is. He's been the opening day pitcher for the last couple years. Anyway, we don't have all that much to say. Last year he was 15-11, got no help. He should have been his record, should have been a lot better. His ERA was 3-2-2, which is very respectable. He was in the running for Cy Young for a little while there. And uh anyway, you guys all know about him. He had a great year last year. He's been great for the Giants for years now. He did pitch in the World Baseball Classic, so I think he should be stretched out, ready to go. Although he didn't pitch all that well, it didn't pitch all that well, but he should be stretched out, ready to go. Anyway, I don't really, I'm not gonna spend too much time on Webb or Freed, to be honest with you, because like I said, it's the first game of the year. But Max Fried, opposite of Webb, as opposed to Webb, who went to the World Baseball Classic, Freed declined his invitation to pitch for Team USA because he wanted to stay on his schedule and be ready for opening day. And I saw that he did express a little bit of disappointment that he didn't go. He kind of wished he was there, he saw the vibe, and just said he felt like he missed out a little bit. Now, I don't know if that'll affect how he pitches tonight or not. But he his the Yankees ace, he has had a great career if you followed him at all. He had a great year last year. He was 19-5 with a 2.86 ERA. So, you know, even better than Logan Webb's. It's hard to find anything wrong with Max Fried, it's hard to find anything wrong with his numbers, it's hard to bet against him. His numbers seem to show he's actually got an edge on Webb in a lot of categories. So we do have two aces going. Now, you would think that with two aces on the mount, two aces on the mound, and you combine that with uh the fact that hitters are usually behind pitchers at the beginning of the year just because it takes them a little bit more time to get their timing down, to just get back up to snuff. It just seems like they're a little behind pitchers usually at the beginning of a season. Also, the game is at Oracle Park. The bullpins should be fresh, the line is juiced to the under. The book is trying to get you to take the under, under seven, and more money has come in on the under. So you would think that given all that, that today's play would be on the under. But you would be wrong. And that is going to take us to the safe bet of the day. And as you've probably figured out, today's safe bet is going to be on the over seven at minus 110. And here is why. Here's why I think so. One, I think the hitters are going to be more ready than usual because of the world baseball classic. The Giants had Harrison Bader playing for Israel, Jung Hu Lee playing for Korea, Ramos playing, I can't remember who's what we played for. We had who else? Webb was pitching, Luis Horace was playing. He hit great. We had a lot of these players playing for other teams. Anyway, I just think hitters all around, even the Yankees had their players off playing at their for their teams at the World Baseball Classic. And I think that's going to make the hitters a little more ready, a little more in time, a little bit ready to go more than they usually are at the beginning of most seasons. I think the new lineup for the Giants is so much better. I think with Devers, Arias, Adamas, Chapman, Ramos, Bader, and Lee, that is some. I think we're going to get more hits and more runs than we did in the past. And I know this number is probably based partially on the Giants usually not scoring a lot of runs. Also, both teams hit very well in spring training. The Giants actually won the Cactus League. Last year, when they won the Cactus League, they started out 12-4 to start the season. So I think that's a good sign. Teams that start out the Cactus League well start out the season well. Even if it doesn't translate into the whole season, they're at least ready to go when the season begins. And both teams hit well in spring. Also, if you look at the pitchers' first starts last year, they were pretty disappointing. Webb didn't pitch all that well last year, and Freed's first game last year, he gave up, he only went four and two-thirds, gave up two runs, seven hits, two walks at home against Milwaukee. It's one of his least successful outings of the year. And if you look at actually his last spring outing just a few days ago, it wasn't so good either. He went five innings, but gave up three runs on five hits and four walks. So nine batters in the five innings gave up a home run. And that wasn't against the Giants starting lineup, that's against a spring training team's lineup. So I just think all that is gonna help. And also a little contrary or conspiracy theories stuff is I mean, Netflix is gonna want it to be a high-scoring game. MLB is gonna want it to be a high-scoring game. The books are secretly hoping for a high-scoring game because I looked and saw that most of the money from the public is on the under. So they're hoping for it to be the over. So, anyway, you put all that together, and also it's just that time of year at the beginning of the year where lines are gonna be a little less efficient because there aren't numbers out, there's not stats available. So lines get sharper as the season goes on. And so this is the time to try to take advantage of what might be inefficient lines. And I think the seven is a little inefficient based on basically, I guess, all the reasons I've just gone over. The way I think the hitters are going to be ready, the pitchers. I think I don't know that I think they they started off, both of them started off not that great last year. So I could see them struggling a little bit right off the bat till they get sharp. And I guess that's about everything. You put all that together, and I kind of like the over in the game. So my prediction is that the final, I think the Giants are gonna get them, obviously, because I'm gonna be pulling for the Giants, but I think the final is gonna be, say, 5-3, 6-4, 7-3, something like that. I think there's gonna be another number of runs scored in this game. I think that's everything I have for my notes right now. Thank you all for watching. Tonight, Aiden, I mean, for listening tonight, Aiden and I are gonna try to watch the game, see if we can FaceTime it together so we can give our thoughts back and forth. So hopefully on Friday, when I do the next podcast, I'll have some input from Aiden on what he thinks of the Giants thus far. Although it'll be just after the one game. But still, maybe I can get some input from Aiden. Maybe he'll have time to do a little podcast. Maybe I'll have him say a word or two tonight after or during the game or something like that. So, anyway, hopefully you will get to hear Aiden over the weekend. Again, thank you all for listening. Tune in on Friday, where we will be discussing this game, obviously. And I see we have Robbie Ray on the mount. I'm not sure who the Yanks are gonna have, but I love Robbie Ray this year. I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm gonna be taking the Giants in that game because I think at least in the maybe just in the first five, but I will be taking the Giants and I will be betting on Robbie Ray. I love the way he's looking at the end of last year and through spring training and just some of the things he's said so far. Anyway, that will all be on Friday. That will be after tonight's Giants win, right? Right? Hopefully. Hopefully, we'll we'll be talking about that Giants opening day win and how they started the season off on a great looking, you know, they just look good right off the bat. So, anyway, that's what we're looking forward to on Friday. Make sure and tune in. Until then, stay safe and go nice.