Phillies vs. Cubs Weather: How Bettors Should Approach Light Winds at Wrigley

Phillies vs. Cubs Weather: How Bettors Should Approach Light Winds at Wrigley article feature image
Credit:

Jon Durr-USA TODAY Sports. Pictured: Yu Darvish.

  • The wind is blowing in at Wrigley Field tonight for the Phillies-Cubs game (8:05 p.m. ET), but only at a few mph.
  • We break down how the over/under has fared in similar situations using The Action Network's betting tools.

You wake up, check the forecast and see that the wind is blowing in at Wrigley Field. Butyou also see that it's blowing at just a few mph on average. WYD?

I'm going to look at a few different factors to determine how bettors should approach this game.

Let's first get the pertinent details of this game out of the way.

Phillies (Jake Arrieta) at Cubs (Yu Darvish)

8:05 p.m. ET | Over/under: 8.5

As you can see, the wind is coming in, but at no point will it average even 5 mph. Historically, playing the under when the wind blows in at Wrigley has been a great move per Bet Labs, going 103-72-12 (58.9%).

However, when we look at games with average wind speeds of less than 5 mph, that record is just 14-18-4 (43.8%) compared to 89-54-8 (62.2%) for 5 mph or higher.

In games at Wrigley with temps of 50 degrees or less, the under has done fairly well at 17-13-2. Neither trend quite has the sample size I desire, though.

With those two trends essentially negating each other, I decided to go over to FantasyLabs to check the Weather Rating … and it's low AF as the kids would say.

With a Rating of just 6 out of 100, this proprietary formula confirms that the atmospheric conditions in Chicago will be awful for hitting. Since there have been only 16 games with a rating of 10 or less at Wrigley on record dating back to 2014, I manually parsed through each one to see if I could find anything.

To my surprise, the over is 8-6-2, but when I dug deeper, I found that only 6.56 runs have been scored per game. The large majority of the games closed with an over/under between 6.5 and 7.5 and there were a few that either pushed or lost by a slight margin.

Of the 16 games, nine runs were scored in four games and 11 runs were scored in one other. The rest of the 11 affairs sported eight runs or fewer, with six of them having five runs or fewer.

Although all of the sample sizes are small, I believe the under is the stronger choice here. Nearly 80% of bettors have driven the over up from 8 to 8.5 (o-125) since opening, but history suggests it's been quite tough to approach 10 runs at Wrigley on nights like tonight.

My big concern would be the fact that Yu Darvish is walking nearly one batter per inning this year, while Jake Arrieta has been no control artist himself. Cold breezes do jack squat to prevent walks, and while home runs may be at a premium on this unpleasant evening, runs can still be scored up the wazoo via walks and singles.

I have no issues if you prefer the over for that reason, but if you do want to take the under, it may be worth waiting to see if that heavily juiced 8.5 bumps up to 9.

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