Dodgers vs Cardinals Pick, Odds, Prediction | MLB Opening Day

The St. Louis Cardinals had their worst season in decades in 2023 and will be hoping that this was just a one-year blip. However, this won’t be an easy task as they begin the 2024 campaign by traveling to Los Angeles to take on the almighty Dodgers.

Los Angeles made headlines once again this offseason by continuing their annual barrage of adding star players. This year, they added big names such as Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow to their roster.

It will be Glasnow who gets the ball in the Dodgers’ home opener, having already started the first game of the season for Los Angeles in South Korea.

Glasnow may be an elite talent, but his prop market seems to be a bit inflated this week for being this early in the season.

Here's my Cardinals vs Dodgers pick and prediction.

Just about everything that could go wrong for the Cardinals last season did. That has extended into this year with the Cardinals dealing with a handful of key injuries to their lineup.

In the month of March, St. Louis lost two starters in Dylan Carlson and Lars Nootbaar to injury while they are still waiting for Tommy Edman to come back from arthroscopic wrist surgery that he had in October.

This leaves the Cardinals with an inexperienced and potentially ineffective bottom of the order. Alex Burleson will likely get the start in left field while Masyn Winn will play at shortstop and Victor Scott II will make his debut in center field.

None of these players project to be overly exciting and if the Cardinals’ veterans aren’t able to get the job done, it may be a rough start to the season for this St. Louis offense.

Miles Mikolas will get the nod as the Opening Day starter after Sonny Gray was injured in spring training. Mikolas is coming off of a season in which he had a 4.78 ERA in 201 1/3 innings. His FIP reflects that he is probably a slightly better pitcher than this but he’s still not exactly the guy you want to roll out on the first day of the season.

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Glasnow is one of the shiny new toys that Dave Roberts will get to deploy this season. In his first start in Dodger blue he went five innings, allowing two earned runs and two hits while striking out just three batters.

Walks were an issue for Glasnow as he issued a free pass to four of the 20 batters he faced.

The Dodgers’ offense should be a force to reckon with once again in 2024. Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman form about as good of a top of the order as you can ask for.

They will need veterans like Max Muncy, Teoscar Hernandez and Jason Heyward to produce lower in the lineup, but this will likely be one of the better offenses in the game regardless.

We all know that the Dodgers should obviously be better than the Cardinals this season, but the market knows this as well. Los Angeles is -230 to win this game, which doesn’t scream that it’s a great value to me.

Instead I like looking at this game by attacking the prop market. Tyler Glasnow is a great pitcher, but he did show his issues with walks in the first game of the year. This organization is known to not extend their starters too far into games, so even though it’s Glasnow, it remains to be seen how much they will let him throw, especially this early in the season.

Despite their youth, Winn and Scott don’t project to be high-strikeout players, with both having a strikeout rate projected under 20% this season. Outside of Nolan Gorman, the Cardinals don’t have many high-strikeout players.

I like looking at Glasnow's strikeout prop here as my favorite pick of the game. You can take Glasnow under 7.5 strikeouts at -154 (60.6% implied probability).  My model believes that there is closer to a 66% chance of this occurring, which would be -194. I would take this up to -170.

Pick: Tyler Glasnow Under 7.5 Strikeouts (-154 at Caesars) | Bet to -170