Preview for the May 7th Game

Preview for the May 7^th Game

St. Louis Cardinals at Chicago Cubs

The Chicago Cubs will face their familiar division rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, for the first time this season. The game will begin at 8:05pm eastern time and will be played at Wrigley Field. The Cubbies will look to feed on their lopsided win over the Texas Rangers from last night. The Cubs will be sending the reliable left-handed starting pitcher Travis Wood to the mound. Wood has pitched a quality start in every start of his this season which is shown by his low era of just 2.50 and an excellent whip that is below 1.00 and is at 0.91. Travis Wood is coming off a tough lost against the Padres which gave him a record of 2-2, where Wood went 7.2 innings in that game and allowed 3 earned runs on 4 hits and a walk. Travis Wood has been pitching extremely well this year for the Cubbies and will look to build on his performance in this season by pitching lights out against the tough and hard hitting Cardinals.

The probable pitcher for the Cardinals will be the undefeated right handed pitcher Lance Lynn. Lynn is 5-0 on the season and is the first St. Louis Cardinal to ever start off a year 5-0 and has 39 strikeouts with an era of 2.75. Lynn is coming off an impressive win over the Cincinnati Red, where he went 7 innings allowing one earned run on five hits and 2 walks. Lynn is hard throwing pitcher that throws a four seam fastball in the mid-90s, a two seam fastball that has some sink to it, a curveball that can deadly at times, a slider that has some tricky movement to it and a changeup that he rarely pitches.

If the Cubs hitters want to have success off of Lance Lynn then they need to be patient at the plate, work deep counts and draw some walks because the most hits that Lynn has given up this year is just seven. The Cubs will need to rely on shortstop Starlin Castro’s and outfielder Alfonso Soriano’s bats because both hitters have a batting clip over .300 against Lance Lynn. The Cubs batters match up well against Lynn because he is a fastball pitcher and tends to use his fastball to strikeout batters.

My prediction for the game is that the Cubbies will pull out a tough and low scoring game against the Cardinals and will hand Lynn his first loss of season with a score of 3 to 2. I just believe the Cubs suit up well for Lynn and the Cards hitters struggle against Wood in this game. My predicted player of the game is Starlin Castro because I think Castro will just sit on Lynn’s fastball and will take one yard off Lynn.