With their backs up against the wall, the Minnesota Twins play host to the Houston Astros on Wednesday at supper time, with first pitch at 5:07 p.m. ET. The Astros are looking to win and make it through to the ALCS for an insane sixth straight season, while the Twins will hope to force a decisive Game 5 in Houston on Friday.
The starting pitching matchup is Joe Ryan versus Jose Urquidy, but both bullpens will likely be visited early and often. To help cut down on unknowns from that very likelihood, I have a couple of bets focused early in the game before the game script becomes more unpredictable than a David Fincher thriller.
Astros vs. Twins Game 4 Player Props
I mentioned wanting to focus on the controllables for bettors in this game, and they don't extend far, but they do cover one of the most popular prop bets for MLB bettors: YRFI/NRFI! The home run environment may not be ideal for batters on Wednesday evening, but: A) the earlier in the day, the warmer the weather will be, and B) these are two starters who have looked anything but dominant in 2023.
Joe Ryan finished the season with a 4.51/4.13/3.76 ERA/FIP/xFIP slash line, and even that was slightly inflated from what we actually saw in the second half of the season. After the All-Star break, Ryan posted a 6.09 ERA and 5.43 FIP in 11 starts, really struggling with long balls in particular, but just overall not pitching well. As mentioned, the wind is blowing in at Target Field today, but the Astros showed that only matters so much, as they left the yard four times in a similar environment on Tuesday afternoon.
Jose Urquidy hasn't even been a staple of the Astros rotation, having started only four games since the first month of the season. He did go six shutout innings on September 29 in one last-season start, but that was very much not the norm for Urquidy in 2023. He finished the season with a 5.29/5.38/5.45 ERA/FIP/xFIP line, with a measly 7.3 percent K-BB rate.
Part of that flailing K-BB rate comes from an attempted new approach that Aidan Resnick of Pitcher List laid out excellently in an August article on how Urquidy is moving his attack more outside the zone to try to flip the scouting report on him. That may well burn him against a Twins team with the third-best walk rate against right-handed batters this season, and it also plays into our second, more fun prop for this game.
What is QuickSlip?
QuickSlip is an Action Network feature that allows users to automatically pre-load their bet slip at FanDuel Sportsbook.
Here's your fun quick hitter for Wednesday, a bet that will potentially settle even before the YRFI/NRFI.
Julien has one of the best approaches at the plate in all of baseball. In fact, among all hitters with 100 plate appearances or more in 2023, Julien quite literally had the lowest swing rate on pitches outside of the strike zone, and by a decent margin even.
If Urquidy is going to bring his outside-the-zone approach to this matchup, he couldn't have a worse leadoff hitter to sniff it out. Julien's 15.7% walk rate ranked 12th in all of baseball, so at nearly four-to-one, this is a fun early prop to get things started on Wednesday.
Pick: Julien Walk First Plate Appearance +390
