Friday night, Hunter Greene struck out 12 and the Reds blanked the Cubs 4-0 at Great American Ball Park. Chicago has now lost two straight. And our model woke up Saturday morning and still made the Cubs the favorite — on the road, in the building where they just got embarrassed.
That’s the mayhem: a rating system with no memory of last night’s scoreboard versus a home crowd that remembers everything.
What The Call sees
The Call has the Cubs at 53% — a road lean built almost entirely on the season-long gap between these teams. Chicago is 52-42 and seventh in our Elo ratings at 1521; Cincinnati is 43-50 and 24th at 1476. A 45-point Elo edge is enough to swallow home field whole.
What this pick is not built on: the pitching. Our card lists Nick Lodolo (4.68 ERA, 5.04 FIP) for Cincinnati against Javier Assad (4.15 ERA, 5.10 FIP) for Chicago — two nearly identical FIPs — and the model applied a 0.5-point adjustment, a rounding error. This is a pure ratings call. Form doesn’t move it either: Cubs 6-4 over their last ten, Reds 4-6.
What could break the pick
The weather, for one. Our sheet shows 91% humidity, near-total cloud cover, and a real rain chance in Cincinnati on Saturday night — the kind of thick Ohio Valley air that turns a fly-ball pitcher’s night sideways. Neither Lodolo nor Assad misses enough bats to pitch around traffic.
The bigger wrinkle is which Reds team shows up. This franchise has lived two seasons in one: Cincinnati opened 20-11 and led the NL Central, then went 22-39 to fall to the bottom of the division. Friday’s shutout looked a lot like the April version. If Lodolo rides that wave, a 53% lean evaporates fast — that’s a coin flip with a thumb on it, not a lock.
If you’re making the trip
Great American Ball Park is one of the friendliest road trips in the league — riverfront park, The Banks bar district at the gates, downtown hotels in walking range, and Covington across the bridge when downtown prices spike for a Cubs invasion. Our Great American Ball Park guide has the full where-to-sleep breakdown.
