MLB Odds - St. Louis Cardinals at Pittsburgh Pirates Live Betting Preview

Opening Day has become a bit of a spectacle. Sunday Night Baseball used to be the opening game, but now, there are three games on the first Sunday of the season. All of the action on the diamond kicks off at PNC Park where the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals will meet in a matchup of the teams who had the best records in baseball a year ago.

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PITCHING MATCHUP

Instinctively, live bettors would be forgiven to flocking to Adam Wainwright in this game. Waino has a history of being an elite pitcher for sure, but we have our concerns early in the season.

Our biggest issue is that he hasn't started a game in almost a full calendar year. Sure, Wainwright pitched in relief at the end of last season, but that's because he never had the time to fully build his arm back up to be a starting pitcher after going through arm troubles in April.

We also don't like the fact that Wainwright, in spite of his 11-6 record, has just a 4.29 ERA in his career against the Pirates. These Buccos can hit the ball, and it isn't a mistake that they're batting .275 against him in his career.

As this game goes on, the case for Francisco Liriano gets greater and greater. He didn't pitch extremely deep into games last year all the time, but when his pitch count got up there, he seemed to get stronger, not weaker. The first time around the order, Liriano allowed men to bat .244. The second time through, they were just .198.

Sure, when Liriano got up to 90+ pitches, batters teed off on him to the tune of a .268 average, but Clint Hurdle did a nice job of not letting him get into excess trouble late in games. That's why love bettors have to at least consider backing Pittsburgh in the middle innings of this game.

ADVANCED STATS

The St. Louis offense has to be watched this season for sure. This wasn't a great offense in the first place last year, and the loss of Jason Heyward and his +21.6 offensive rating per FanGraphs certainly won't help that any. Jhonny Peralta is also out for the first few months of the season injured, and he won't have a legitimate replacement.

Yadier Molina has turned into a complete offensive liability, and his stats are only bound to go down when his BABIP of .295 from last year regulates itself.

So where are the runs coming from for a team which averaged just 3.99 runs per game last year, No. 24 in the league? That's why we're not sure St. Louis truly is worth live betting upon on Opening Day.

TALKING BULLPENS

The two top dogs in the Pittsburgh bullpen, Mark Melancon and Tony Watson don't have the best stuff on the face of the earth, but they keep the ball down, strand runners at an incredibly high rate and ultimately get the job done.

Melancon closed out 51 games last season, tops in the bigs, and we know he's ready to get back to it against a St. Louis team which he dominated. He and Watson both had HR/9 averages under 0.5 last year, and both did a fantastic job of creating ground balls. In both have ground ball percentages in the high-50s again this year, the Pirates are going to close out a lot of close games, and they'll be worthy of backing in live betting throughout the campaign.

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Don't miss out on getting paid because you couldn't bet. Click here, and deposit at BookMaker now! The game pitting the St. Louis Cardinals versus the Pittsburgh Pirates will commence Sunday, April 3, 2016 at 1:05 p.m. ET at PNC Park. You can watch the contest live on ESPN.