Best to lay off this one, in my opinion.
No. 1, and I've been saying this for years now, the worst over/unders to take are in Yankee Stadium. Why? Anything can happen, either mentally or physically. There's no other variable in the WORLD that quite matches what it's like for a road pitcher being assigned to pitch at Yankee Stadium - especially in the postseason and especially for the first time - and while Hammel has already thrown in this series, this is his first career postseason start at Yankee Stadium, which brings about a whole monster to deal with from a betting perspective. Then again, the Yankees have the one of the strangest tendencies in sports of making unspectacular pitchers look amazing (See: Corey Kluber, Esmerling Vasquez, Dylan Axelrod, Sean O'Sullivan... the list of scrub pitchers goes on over the years that have inexplicably shut down the Yankees over a full start. Jason Hammel, however, is NOT a scrub, but the Yankees easily have the potential of making him look better than he is)
No. 2, the Yankees have one of the most inconsistent offenses in recent memory. You'd think with how expensive and potentially explosive their guys are, they should be scoring in bunches, but seemingly every October, they just inexplicably disappear. It's incredible. My friend, who's always been a diehard Yankee fan, loves to refer to them as "Dead Bat Yankees" because they all try swinging for the home run in the playoffs, and instead, end up with nothing, as evident in pretty much every game of this series. It's embarrassing and laughable (I hear it every year from Yankee fans, as I live in NY).
To sum it all up, the over/under in this game should absolutely be avoided - especially at 7.5. Nothing makes sense at Yankee Stadium. In addition, you couldd be 100-percent right about an under here, yet still lose because of one harmless mistake... by that, I mean one of these pitchers could be throwing a gem, and then all of a sudden, surrender an innocent-looking 310-foot flyball, which somehow could end up over the fence as a three-run bomb because it's in laughable Yankee Stadium. From there, the start snowballs and you'd lose said under late in the game of a brilliant outing from something that wasn't even the pitcher's fault.
The only steady variable concerning this game is CC Sabathia. You can't trust Hammel. You can't trust either offense at this point. Both bullpens are a bit overrated. Most, if not all of Baltimore, is in wildly unfamiliar territory (Playoff Elimination Game) so you don't really know how they're going to react. This whole over/under is the definition of a gamble because there's no real precedent, so you can't really predict most of the factors going into this game. No reason to bet it at all
