We have a jampacked Saturday slate around MLB that begins at 2:10 p.m. ET with the Cardinals and Twins and ends whenever the last of the three 10 p.m. ET games concludes. It was a solid Friday night of action across the league and the hope is for the same on Saturday as the summer is pretty much here, we know who these teams are, and the picture of what we can expect the rest of the way is taking shape.

I’ll be posting my daily best bets Monday-Saturday with a Sunday Night Baseball preview on Sunday, as all the day games make it tough to get something out with lead time out here in Las Vegas. All lines are from DraftKings and are current at the time of publish. Please take the initiative to SHOP AROUND for the best odds. It matters. A lot.

One new offering this baseball season is our Opta AI Player Prop Projections. They are for VSiN Pro Subscribers only, so you can check out our current offers here. Zachary Cohen will be using those projections and his own handicapping to write up MLB player props.

Greg Peterson will have his best bets posted the night before and you can also check out his daily lines to see what looks to be off-market. Steve Makinen has also released his updated Bullpen Betting Systems and DraftKings Splits Systems, plus he’ll have a daily analytics report.

Feel free to use my opinions and thoughts, as well as our suite of MLB Betting Tools, including the DraftKings and Circa Betting Splits, Steve Makinen’s Daily Ratings, Greg Peterson’s Daily Lines, the 1st 5 Innings Analyzer, and Umpire Stats. Check out our new MLB tools powered by Ballpark Pal: Strikeout Projections, Park Factors, and YRFI Report.

Here are the MLB best bets today for June 13:

Tigers vs. Guardians Prediction

Pick: Over 7.5 (-118)

Tarik Skubal makes his MLB return for the Tigers, as he was shelved for elbow surgery after his April 29 outing and has come back in arguably record time. He made one rehab start at High-A and faced 17 batters with a couple of hits allowed and six strikeouts. Everything looked good from a velo standpoint and the Tigers felt like he was ready to return to the roster.

Outside of the long layoff, I can’t make a strong case for Cleveland to hit him hard here, other than the fact that they’ve seen a lot of him over the last few seasons and will be able to throw a bunch of right-handed bats at him. What I can say is that Skubal went five innings in that rehab start and I don’t think he’ll be fully stretched out here to the point where he works super deep into this game, which will bring the bullpen into play.

The Guardians have hit lefties better than righties this season, including some key bats like Angel Martinez and Jose Ramirez, so that is a positive. But, what may not be a positive is Joey Cantillo. The southpaw gave up seven runs to the Rangers in his last start and has allowed 15 runs and seven Barrels over his last three starts. He had allowed 23 runs and 11 Barrels in his previous 11 starts before this stretch.

Cantillo also just had his lowest fastball velocity of the season in that climate-controlled outing in Texas. He’s a guy who always has to dance around walk issues and doesn’t have overpowering stuff at all, so it does seem like he’s always kind of teetering. Well, over his last few starts, he’s fallen off.

If the Guardians are expected to be trailing, as this line implies, you can assume that you’re going to get the lesser, lower-leverage arms from Stephen Vogt, who firmly believes in keeping his better arms for when the team has leads. This can push a one or two-run deficit into something much more. That’s always a factor to me and it helps with the Over here on an 85-degree day in Cleveland with the wind blowing out to RF.

Cubs vs. Giants Prediction

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Pick: Under 8 (-115)

We’ve got a very good pitching matchup here between Ben Brown and Trevor McDonald, as the Cubs and Giants keep their weekend set rolling. Brown enters this one with a 1.74 ERA, 2.82 xERA, and a 2.25 FIP over 57 innings of work. As a starter, specifically, which he has been in each of his last six outings dating back to May 8, he has a 1.44 ERA with a 2.81 xERA and a 1.90 FIP.

Brown hasn’t allowed a homer as a starter and has allowed just five runs on 16 hits with a 34/8 K/BB ratio. He has a GB% of 46.6%, so over strikeout per inning and a high ground ball rate, which are two things I love to back in pitchers. The Giants just faced Brown and mustered a single hit and a walk over 5.1 innings. He has allowed a lot of hard-hit grounders, but only six Barrels and none of them came in that last start.

McDonald has been extremely effective himself. He’s fallen on the wrong side of batted ball and sequencing luck at times, which will happen with a 61.8% GB%, but he’s got a 4.15 ERA with a 3.75 xERA, 3.52 FIP, and a 3.23 xFIP over his seven starts covering 39 innings of work. McDonald has just shy of a strikeout per inning and a very high GB% and those are two things that make it tough to score against him in the present-day landscape of baseball.

He allowed seven runs to the White Sox on just three hits back on May 22, accounting for seven of the 19 runs he has allowed, so he’s given up an average of two runs per start otherwise. 

The high leverage arms for both bullpens are intact and, of course, this is a game at Oracle Park, where scoring is suppressed anyway.

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