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A 1-0 night last night. 4-1 during the World Series.
Last night went just about how I imagined it would last night. The Astros proved why they are the best team against lefties in the league as they tagged Patrick Corbin for four runs. While Jose Urquidy pitched a great five innings of shutout ball. That really set up the Astros to protect their lead with the elite portion of their bullpen and that’s exactly what they did… until Alex Bregman hit a grand slam and put this one out of reach. Anyone who has been watching baseball over the past ten years was not surprised at all by that Fernando Rodney performance. He has to be the most feast or famine pitcher I’ve ever watched.
Tonight we are getting a truly special pitching match-up between Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer. Both of them struggled a bit in game one, but this is game five which is now the most important game of the series. These teams both need to win this one, especially the Nationals who won’t have another home game. They’ll be playing in front of the President tonight too and, man, that has to stink for the Nats fans. As if it’s not hard enough to get into a game in 2019, now you have to deal with the Secret Service. Those guys are uptight.
Houston Astros vs. Washington Nationals Betting Tips:
These two pitchers are so evenly matched it’s ridiculous.
Scherzer FIP-: 54
Cole FIP-: 59
Scherzer home FIP: 2.74
Cole away FIP: 2.76
Scherzer looks to be a bit better, but it’s still very close. I’d really like to bet on a big performance from here as the Nationals are a decent sized underdog tonight. The only problem is that I can’t see either of these pitchers going seven innings. That is not the way baseball works in 2019 and these offenses are unlikely to let that happen anyways. They are both good at working counts and getting to that third time through the order. Neither one of these managers is going to let their guys be exposed like that so we have to look beyond that here.
The Nationals bullpen has proved disastrous outside of Sean Doolittle and Daniel Hudson. Their best chance to win tonight is with Scherzer being amazing for seven innings and then those other two taking over. Only problem is, the Astros offense is really, really good and are very unlikely to let that happen.
While the Astros best course of action is a bit more straight forward. If Cole can get to the sixth or even into the fifth, the Astros bullpen can handle a bigger load. They have hardly used Roberto Osuna and Ryan Pressley in this series and Will Harris should be good to go here as well.
As fun as a Nationals win here might be, it’s just too hard to go against the Astros here. They have the better squad up-and-down and barring a huge performance from Scherzer, I just don’t see them taking this one.
I was tempted by the over as it is sent at just 7 runs and three of four games have went over in this series, but I think we are going to get a better performance from the starters here that keeps it closer to the posted total.
Bet Astros -145
