<\/p>\n
Garion Thorne gives you a preview, prediction and pick for today\u2019s game between the Kansas City Royals and the Tampa Bay Rays.<\/p>\n
The final game of this series gets going at 12:10 p.m. ET, which means there\u2019s no time to drag out this intro.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s simply preview this American League clash between the Royals and the Rays and make a couple picks on the DraftKings Sportsbook.<\/p>\n
The Royals are 13 games below .500. They\u2019re within percentage points of being the worst team in the AL. So, I don\u2019t think any fan or member of the organization would take too kindly to me referring to any aspect of this season as lucky. However, that\u2019s been Seth Lugo\u2019s campaign to a tee. The 36-year-old probably isn\u2019t going anywhere at the trade deadline, anyway, not after inking his extension, but let\u2019s just say I\u2019d be very wary of the veteran\u2019s 3.69 ERA over 85.1 innings. Like, it\u2019s an exceedingly blue Baseball Savant page, if you know what I mean. Lugo owns just a fourth percentile whiff rate (17.9%), which means a lot of batted ball events for opponents. That\u2019s not necessarily a death sentence for a pitcher, but an 11th percentile opponent batting average (.277) and a 19th percentile opponent barrel rate (10.3%) aren\u2019t great, either. This is how you end up with an expected ERA nearly a run-and-a-half higher than your surface numbers (5.21).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not all bad news for Kansas City, though. Even with Vinnie Pasquantino (wrist) and Maikel Garcia (hand) on the IL \u2014 and Bobby Witt Jr. nursing a knee injury \u2014 the offense has been really good over the past two weeks. To wit, the Royals lead MLB in batting average (.292) and expected wOBA (.357) in that span of time, while also sitting eighth in ISO (.194). The big revelation during this recent run of success? 2024 first-round pick Jac Caglianone, who is slashing .354\/.433\/.734 with a 217 wRC+ in the month of June. That includes nine home runs in 90 plate appearances. Obviously it would be quite the ask for Caglianone to keep hitting at this pace, but this is the massive offensive ceiling that Kansas City envisioned when they used the sixth-overall pick on the Florida product.<\/p>\n
Trying to keep Caglianone and the Royals at bay on Thursday afternoon with be a combination of Casey Legumina and Ian Seymour, with the latter having replaced Steven Matz in the Rays\u2019 rotation at the beginning of June. Seymour\u2019s the process of getting stretched out on the fly, as he\u2019s thrown 55, 72 and 81 pitches, respectively, in his past three outings. The most recent of which was a five-inning effort against the Nationals where the 27-year-old southpaw surrendered seven hits and three earned runs. In the 100.1 innings Semour has thrown at the MLB level, he\u2019s struck out 109 batters and he\u2019s maintained a decent 3.82 FIP. There\u2019s some real potential here.<\/p>\n
While I don\u2019t necessarily trust Seth Lugo, I do trust how well the Royals have been hitting across the past 14 days. It\u2019s not like the Rays have been all that good lately, either. Tampa is just 8-13 in the month with a league-low .115 ISO. Take the road dog at plus-money.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source dknetwork.draftkings.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Garion Thorne gives you a preview, prediction and pick for today\u2019s game between the Kansas City Royals and the Tampa Bay Rays. The final game of this series gets going at 12:10 p.m. ET, which means there\u2019s no time to drag out this intro. Let\u2019s simply preview this American League clash between the Royals and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2475157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2475156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Kansas-City-Royals-at-Tampa-Bay-Rays-prediction-pick-for.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2475156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2475158,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475156\/revisions\/2475158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2475157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2475156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2475156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2475156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}