Well, this is why he got $210M. Photo via sportingnews.com
Here it is. Its Wild Card Tuesday.
The red-hot Brewers (winners of 22 of their last 30) couldn’t quite catch the Cardinals and thus travel to DC. Meanwhile, the suddenly hot Nationals (winners of 9 of their last 10) finished the season in destruction mode and should be fired up for the game.
Pitching Match-up: Max Scherzer; 11-7, 2.92 ERA vs Brandon Woodruff, 11-3, 3.62 ERA.
Season Series: 4-2 in favor of Milwaukee, but with a caveat. The Nats got swept in Milwaukee in early May, when they were awful. Woodruff pitched the series finale and dominated the Nats lineup of the day, throwing 6 innings of 4-hit, one-run, 9-K ball. We threw Jeremy Hellickson, he got shelled, and a rare error from Anthony Rendon accounted for 3 unearned runs on the night.
When Milwaukee came to Washingotn, it was in mid August and they faced a different team: Washington took 2 of 3 at home, one game of which was the amazingly odd 15-14 game on August 17th where a tired Sean Doolittle blew a 3-run 9th inning lead and the beleagured bullpen forced the offense to extend the game three different times. (Woodruff didn’t pitch in this series because he missed two months with an oblique injury starting in July 2019).
Scherzer hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire since his return from the D/L: in his 5 starts in September his seasonal ERA has risen half a point.
Looking at the Brewer’s splits; they walk a lot (2nd most in league), but as a team don’t actually have that great of an wRC+ figure … and that’s playing most of the season with Christian Yelich. They hit lefties and righties about the same, so no real advantage/disadvantage there. Their bullpen is supposedly a strength, but their bullpen macro stats (ERA/FIP/fWAR) are all middle of the pack.
Prediction: two weeks ago I would have been more pessimistic about this team. But with Yelich out and finishing as strong as they did and basically being at full strength, I like the Nats here. I think they put a couple runs on Woodruff early, they let Max settle in and he goes 7 innings (he’s going to be fired up, lets be honest). Then you go 8th/9th guys w/o screwing up the LAD rotation. That’s the hope anyway.