Saturday Night MLB Intel
Everything comes down to one game tonight. White Sox and Guardians are tied 2-2 in the ALDS, winner-take-all at Progressive Field, and the board only has two plays worth your attention. Sean Burke takes the ball for Chicago with a chance to pitch his team into the next round, and Jo Adell's bat is the other side of that equation for Cleveland. Two names, one elimination game, and both props point in a direction the model feels good about.
Sean BurkeCWS @ CLE · Progressive Field8:00 PM ET Burke has been excellent over his last five outings, posting a 2.10 ERA with 30 strikeouts in that stretch. That's six strikeouts an outing, and tonight he's announced as the starter for Chicago in a win-or-go-home Game 5. The model projects 4.0 strikeouts against a 3.5 line, and given how he's missed bats his last five times out, clearing that number doesn't require much more than a normal start from him.
Jo AdellCWS @ CLE · Progressive Field8:00 PM ET Adell is hitting .243 over his last 10 games, 9-for-37, but he's got a home run and 7 RBI mixed into that stretch, which tells you the bat still has pop even when the average isn't eye-popping. All he needs here is one single to clear 0.5 total bases, and the power he's shown recently makes extra bases plenty in play too. The model has him projected at 0.8 total bases against this 0.5 line, and in a game with this much on the line, Cleveland needs production from spots like this.
Both of tonight's plays come from the same winner-take-all game, which means every out and every at-bat carries extra weight. Burke's strikeout stuff and Adell's contact ability are the two individual threads the model likes most as this series gets decided tonight.
Elite Picks is a research and analytics platform. We do not accept wagers. All content is for informational and research purposes.