The Angels Have Scored 27 Runs In August. Jacob deGrom Is Next.

Last Saturday in Anaheim the Angels were shut out by Miami, seven to nothing. A day later they lost by nine. Eleven games into August this offense has produced 27 runs, fewer than two and a half a night, and it has been held to three runs or fewer in eight of those eleven. Tonight the man waiting for them is Jacob deGrom.

Nine games sit on the Thursday board. The card takes two positions on it, two units in total, and both of them come down to the same conviction held in opposite directions: one lineup in Anaheim that cannot score, and one pitcher in Minneapolis who cannot keep the ball in the park.

Both plays are logged on the BetLegend record at TrustMyRecord, tickets 4228 and 4229, at the prices above. Tuesday's eight-play card finished 3-5 for a loss of 1.11 units, and nothing was played Wednesday. That is the state of the ledger this card walks in with.

Start with the season-long picture, because the August numbers are so ugly they need a control group. Across the full year the Angels score 4.07 runs per game, bottom five in the majors, with a team OPS of .686 that only three clubs sit below. This is not a good offense having a bad stretch. It is a bad offense having a worse one.

Now the stretch. Twenty-seven runs over eleven August games. One run against Milwaukee, one against Baltimore, zero against Miami, one against Texas. Eight of those eleven games landed on three runs or fewer, which means this exact number, under 3.5, has cashed eight times in eleven tries this month before any pitcher adjustment at all.

Jacob deGrom carries a 3.87 ERA and 144 strikeouts across 118.2 innings into Anaheim tonight.

The pitcher adjustment is deGrom. His 2026 line reads 8-7 with a 3.87 ERA, a 1.13 WHIP and 144 strikeouts in 118.2 innings, and opponents are hitting .229 against him. He saw this same Angels lineup on July 7 and gave it two runs over five innings while striking out seven. A .229 opponent average against a lineup hitting .235 for the season is not a fair fight, and the market agrees, which is why this number costs -140 instead of even money.

There is a quieter structural edge here too. The Angels are home. If they lead after the top of the ninth, the bottom half never gets played, and a team total under keeps one potential scoring inning off the board entirely. For a lineup that averages under two and a half runs a game this month, losing an at-bat is no tragedy for the ticket.

The honest case against it starts with the man himself. deGrom's last month has been uneven: Chicago reached him for five earned in four and two-thirds on July 20, and Houston did the same damage in three and a third on August 1. Between those starts he held Seattle and Baltimore to a run apiece over five innings each, so the good version still shows up more often than not, but the floor is lower than the resume suggests. The second problem is the price. At -140 the ticket needs to win 58.3 percent of the time, and the Angels just beat this same Texas club two nights running, scoring three Tuesday and five last night. A team that scored five runs eighteen hours ago is never a sure thing to score three or fewer today. That is why this is 1.5 units and not three.

Aaron Nola has allowed 29 home runs this season. That single number carries most of this play. He has thrown 125 innings, so the ball is leaving the yard on him at better than two per nine, and the rest of the line backs the power problem up: a 5.47 ERA, a 1.45 WHIP, a .279 average against, and a 3-9 record for a team six games over .500. Philadelphia keeps handing him the ball because the strikeouts are still there, 129 of them, but every start has become a race between the whiffs and the damage.

The lineup waiting for him scores 4.68 runs per game, ninth most in baseball. Minnesota's last eleven games have averaged 9.18 total runs, and Phillies games have cleared this exact 8.5 number in seven of their last twelve. When a homer-prone starter meets a top-ten scoring offense in a game priced at 8.5, the argument mostly writes itself.

Taj Bradley is the reason the number is not 9.5. His season line is legitimately good, 9-4 with a 3.76 ERA and 148 strikeouts in 131.2 innings, and opponents hit just .220 against him. The over does not need him to collapse. It needs him to be what he has been lately: eight earned runs across his last seventeen innings, three starts, none of them shorter than five frames but none of them clean either. Add 55 walks on his season and there is traffic in front of whatever the Phillies barrel up.

The counterpoint is real and it is why the stake is half a unit. Philadelphia's offense ranks mid-pack at 4.39 runs per game, and an over needs contributions from both dugouts. Bradley at his July best, six innings of two-run ball with ten strikeouts against Kansas City on July 28, flattens this ticket on his own. Minnesota has also gone over 8.5 in only five of those eleven recent games; the 9.18 average is dragged up by a few slugfests rather than spread evenly. This is a lean with a good engine, not a hammer.

Seven games carry no position, and two of them deserve a paragraph anyway.

Chicago at Washington is the loudest scheduling accident of the night. The Nationals score 5.38 runs per game, the most in baseball. The Cubs score 5.20, second most. The two best offenses in the sport share one field, Kevin Gausman against Cade Cavalli, and the Cubs arrive at 71-51 while Washington sits 60-63 despite all that scoring, which tells you everything about the Nationals' run prevention.

The nightcap in Los Angeles is the marquee: Milwaukee brings the National League's best record at 74-47 into Chavez Ravine against a 73-48 Dodgers club, with Roki Sasaki opposing Shane Drohan. Seattle at 3.84 runs per game, dead last in the majors, visits Max Fried and the Yankees in the Bronx matinee, and Boston sends Payton Tolle into Toronto against Max Scherzer. Deep boards like this one reward patience. Two prices looked wrong today. The other seven did not.

A single Angels three-run inning against the Texas bullpen beats the big ticket, and bullpens decide team totals more often than starters do, because deGrom's 2026 game log is a string of five-inning starts by design. Walbert Urena matters here too, oddly: the Angels' own starter carries a 2.83 ERA, and if he keeps Texas quiet the Angels never need to press, which is the game script the under wants. A cold night in Dyersville, or vintage Bradley, beats the small one. Tonight is MLB's Field of Dreams game at the one-off Iowa park, so there is no season park sample to lean on either way. Both tickets losing costs the full 2.0 units at risk. Both winning returns roughly 1.51. A split leaves the card anywhere between plus 0.57 and minus 1.07 depending on which ticket lands, which is the asymmetry you accept when the stronger conviction carries three times the stake.