MLB Picks: Detroit Tigers vs. Kansas City Royals Prediction
MLB Picks: Twins vs. Royals Prediction
Date: Friday, July 23
Time: 8:10pm ET
Where: Kauffman Stadium
Tigers vs. Royals Probable Pitchers:
- Tigers: Wily Peralta (3-1, 1.64 ERA)
- Royals: Kris Bubic (2-4, 5.03 ERA)
Detroit Tigers vs. Kansas City Royals Prediction
The Tigers are just four games away from .500 at 47-51 thanks to a ridiculous and current seven-game winning streak. The Tigers aren’t contenders but are surely playing like it right now.
They’ll send out Wily Peralta to the mound who has a 1.64 ERA in 33 innings this season. Peralta is getting more ground balls than fly balls and has allowed just six earned runs in those 33 innings. He’s gone five innings or more in each of his last four starts and has given up no more than one run in those five games combined.
Meanwhile, the Tigers offense is lighting it up and they’ve crushed lefties as of late. They’ll get to see Kris Bubic of the Royals, who has a 2-4 record with an ERA above 5, at 5.03.
Bubic has a 5.46 XFIP on the season and is striking out under 20 percent of batters while walking 12.2 percent. The ground balls are solid at 44.6 percent and his BABIP is also solid at .268. However, Bubic is allowing a 37.3 percent hard hit percentage and is giving up a high wOBA and ISO to both lefties and righties in the last 30 days.
Lefties are hitting a .384 wOBA with an ISO of .357. Meanwhile, righties are hitting a .353 wOBA with an ISO of .222.
As of late, things have been much worse. In the last 30 days, he’s watched his XFIP elevate to 7.38. His strikeout rate is 16.9 percent and he’s walking 15.5 percent. Now, his BABIP is .310 in the last 30 days and ground balls are lower while his hard contact percentage is way higher.
The Tigers projected lineup has a wOBA of .417 against lefties in the last 30 days. This is going off each player having an average of 25 at-bats, which is a strong enough sample size to prove that the Tigers are able to hit lefties.
This team also has an ISO of .240 and strikes out just 20.5 percent of the time while walking nearly 10 percent of the time. This used to be a lineup that struck out regardless of the pitcher but now they’re actually making contact with the ball and have a BABIP iof .378 against lefties with just 41.1 percent ground balls in the expected lineup.
Bubic is coming off a solid performance against the Orioles in his last start where he went six innings and allowed just two hits and one run. In that game, he still allowed 11 fly balls to four ground balls and walked three batters.
Before that game, Bubic hadn’t seen the 6th inning since May. That one game could be an outlier. And despite his performance, the Orioles went on to win that game 8-4 and scored seven runs through the 7th to 9th innings.
With that, let’s ride the Tigers hot streak. They’ve been tearing it up offensively and match up very well against Bubic and lefties this year. I’ll give it the full game with how bad the Royals bullpen has performed recently.
Twins vs. Royals Prediction: Tigers TT Over 4.5 @ -125
Article Author
Jason grew up an avid sports fan. His passion for sports writing grew in high school and he developed a blog that was strictly for New York Sports. From his work, you will quickly realize that he loves looking at games from an analytical and numbers perspective and hopes to provide you with that same perspective in his articles.