Several star pitchers will crest the hill tonight in the MLB’s 11-game slate, including last season’s AL Cy Young winner, the Detroit Tigers’ Tarik Skubal, and one of the favorites for this season’s award in the NL, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Those pitchers rank 10th (Skubal) and 19th (Yamamoto) in strikeouts this season, respectively, as well as also ranking near the top of the leaderboard in WAR, ERA, FIP, and strikeout to walk ratio.
Every day, you can bet on strikeout prop bets at DraftKings Sportsbook, and here are my two favorites from tonight’s games — which, as you can probably tell from the first paragraph, have to do with Skubal and Yamamoto.
Best Starting Pitcher Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Tarik Skubal 10+ Strikeouts (+205)
Skubal had a rocky first start to the season, coincidentally against Yamamoto and the Dodgers, in which he gave up four runs in five innings. He then followed it up with a 5.2-inning, three-run outing that left his season ERA at 5.91. From his third start on, though, his numbers have been downright mythical: six starts, 37 innings pitched, four earned runs, one walk, and 50 strikeouts. By contrast, the greatest full-season strikeout-to-walk ratio was recorded by Phil Hughes in 2014, when he punched out 11.63 batters for every walk conceded. Even after accounting for his rough first two games, he leads all of the major leagues with a 12-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and has recorded double-digit strikeouts in two of his last three games.
Skubal couldn’t ask for a kinder matchup tonight. He’ll be taking the mound today against the Boston Red Sox, who, despite sitting second in the AL East with a respectable 22-22 record, have struck out 402 times this season, the third-most in the MLB. To be fair, they’ve also played the most games, but they’ve still posted the league’s sixth-highest strikeout rate. They’ve been even worse on the road, averaging nearly 10 strikeouts per game in road contests. The only question is whether Skubal will last long enough into the game to reach double-digit punchouts, but the fact that Boston swings at pitches at the league’s second-highest rate while making contact at its fourth-lowest is a good combination.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto 7+ Strikeouts (+125)
Yamamoto had a rare blow-up start in his last outing against the Arizona Diamondbacks, when he gave up a fourth-inning grand slam to Gabriel Moreno and another solo shot an inning later to Ketel Marte in a five-inning, five-run outing that doubled his ERA from 0.90 to 1.80. It was his second loss in three starts, after he gave up three runs (one earned) in five innings on April 25 in an early battle for the NL Cy Young Award against the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Paul Skenes. After his first rocky outing, he bounced back in convincing fashion, with a six-inning, one-hit masterpiece against a fairly solid offense in the Atlanta Braves.
Some signs are pointing against Yamamoto here. He hasn’t thrown more than seven strikeouts in any of his last three outings, including that Braves game, and the Athletics have struck out the fourth-fewest times this season. But the underlying metrics are still good: he still ranks in the 86th percentile in whiff percentage and 88th in strikeout percentage. His splitter and curveball have tended to generate the most whiffs, and he has generally started to throw his curve more and more as the season has gone on. The velocity and spin rates on both his four-seam fastball and splitter have remained relatively constant throughout the season, and he simply got somewhat unlucky with a lower-than-usual in-zone whiff percentage last game. The Athletics swing at pitches the league’s fourth-highest rate and only make contact at a league-average rate. They also have the shortest average plate appearance by pitch count, so Yamamoto should be able to go deeper into the game.
