MLB Baseball Betting: Oakland Athletics at Toronto Blue Jays

More Canadian baseball on Thursday, this time in the daytime as the scorching hot Toronto Blue Jays host the disappointing Oakland A’s. The Jays have taken command of the AL East and now lead the division by 1/2 game over the NY Yankees, 4.5 games over Tampa Bay and 5 games over Baltimore. That’ll happen when you don’t lose games and the Blue Jays have now won ten straight and 13 of their last 14. Most impressively, they haven’t had an easy schedule–in addition to the Oakland A’s they swept the NY Yankees at Yankee Stadium, swept a 4 game series from Minnesota at home and took 3 of 4 from the Kansas City Royals who are considered by many to be the best team in baseball.

The A’s, meanwhile, are 51-64 and in last place in the AL West. Their preferred ‘small ball’ style has a profound downside risk and they’ve experienced that this season. The pitching hasn’t been there and when you’re not getting pitching you can’t win games by ‘manufacturing’ runs. The Blue Jays don’t have to worry about that since their offense has been humming–during their ten game winning streak they’ve averaged 5.1 runs per game and with that type of offensive output even mediocre pitching will get it done.

Making matters worse for Oakland is the starting assignment in this game–they’ll face lefthander Mark Buehrle and they’ve been awful against lefthanders this season. Oakland is 10-20 -12.4 units against southpaws this year. Buehrle might not be Sandy Koufax but he really doesn’t have to be to dominate the A’s. The Jays have been dominating at the Rogers Centre all season long and have a record of 38-21 +9.5 units at home. Sonny Gray gets the start for Oakland and he’s been profoundly disappointing this season.

The biggest risk for Toronto is the old ‘lookahead situation’–they welcome the New York Yankees into the Rogers Centre for three games this weekend that could be very important to the ultimate outcome of this divisional race. But that doesn’t give us any reason to get in front of the Blue Jays steamroller at this point and particularly with a struggling Oakland team in one of their worst matchup situations–against lefthanded pitching. We’ll roll the dice once again with Canada’s team.

BET TORONTO BLUE JAYS -160 OVER OAKLAND ATHLETICS