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Posted at 10:00 AM EST.

7:10 PM EST. First off, the Angels are playing well. The general consensus is that they are a weak team without Mike Trout but there are several bats in this lineup that are heating up, including Cameron Maybin’s, Kole Calhoun’s and Andrelton Simmons’. With eight wins over their past 14 games, including two of three over Houston and four of six against the Yanks, the Halos will now take their act to Boston to face Rick Porcello. 

When we ran a pre-Opening Day check on Rick Porcello, we pegged him more as a mid-rotation cog than a repeat Cy Young contender. Fast forward three months, and Porcello's 5.05 ERA has fallen short of our pessimistic expectations. Porcello continues to give up more fly balls at the expense of a once-elite groundball rate. He's throwing more four-seam fastballs (48% fly-balls%, 29% of pitches) than ever before, and the added loft paired with hr/f regression has led to a career-high hr/9. We’ll never see the 2016 version of Rick Porcello again, as that was the luck factor going haywire. That said, he’s still a good starter that every team would like to have. However, when he’s overpriced like he is here, we’re going to pounce. 

Alex Meyer is past the age (he’s 27) where we tend to get excited about prospects but a high-90s fastball and a slider that can hit the upper-80s (it is classified as a curve by most Fx tracking systems) does tend to get people excited regardless of age. The problem with Meyer is the same as it ever was. He doesn’t throw enough strikes. Meyer has abandoned his changeup and is mixing in some four-seam fastballs for the first time, but he is still walking over six batters per nine. That’s the bottom line for Meyer, and if he issues so many free passes he is always going to be a risky play but the risk is worth the reward here because his stuff is so filthy. Meyer has 55 K’s in 46 frames. Using his four-seamer more often, Meyer struck out nine and walked six in his last start. His swinging strike rate in that start was 23%. Meyer also has an elite groundball rate of 51% so all the ingredients are in place for him to dominate. 

Lastly, and this is the main reason for this choice, there is an angle in play here that we’re always looking out for.  You see, there’s a big ceremony happening in Boston tonight. The Red Sox were off yesterday but not really, as other obligations interfered. Tonight, Big Papi’s jersey will be retired and that ceremony figures to be one of the biggest (and loudest) in Red Sox history. You would be hard-pressed to find a more popular Red Sox player than David Ortiz was. Involved in a ceremony of this magnitude is a lot of preparation from lunches and dinners (yesterday and today) to speeches to presentations and to everything else. The players then press a little too hard because they all want to win one for the hometown hero. What usually happens in these big ceremony games is that the host doesn’t win because they are focused on so many other things besides baseball, which is why this angle has been so strong in every sport for so long.

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