{"id":16188,"date":"2019-09-30T16:06:57","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T20:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=16188"},"modified":"2019-09-30T16:07:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T20:07:50","slug":"wc-preview-nats-vs-brewers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=16188","title":{"rendered":"WC Preview: Nats vs Brewers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Well,<\/a>

Well, this is why he got $210M. Photo via sportingnews.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Here it is.\u00a0 Its Wild Card Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The red-hot Brewers (winners of 22 of their last 30) couldn’t quite catch the Cardinals and thus travel to DC.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Pitching Match-up<\/a>:\u00a0Max Scherzer<\/strong>; 11-7, 2.92 ERA vs\u00a0Brandon Woodruff<\/strong>, 11-3, 3.62 ERA.<\/p>\n

Season Series: 4-2 in favor of Milwaukee, but with a caveat.\u00a0 The Nats got swept in Milwaukee in early May, when they were awful.\u00a0 Woodruff pitched the series finale and dominated the Nats lineup of the day, throwing 6 innings<\/a> of 4-hit, one-run, 9-K ball.\u00a0 We threw\u00a0Jeremy Hellickson<\/strong>, he got shelled, and a rare error from\u00a0Anthony Rendon<\/strong> accounted for 3 unearned runs on the night.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Sean Doolittle<\/strong> blew a 3-run 9th inning lead and the beleagured bullpen forced the offense to extend the game three different times.\u00a0 (Woodruff didn’t pitch in this series because he missed two months with an oblique injury starting in July 2019).<\/p>\n

Scherzer hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire since his return from the D\/L: in his 5 starts in September<\/a> his seasonal ERA has risen half a point.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Christian Yelich<\/strong>.\u00a0 They hit lefties and righties about the same, so no real advantage\/disadvantage there.\u00a0 Their bullpen is supposedly a strength, but their bullpen macro stats (ERA\/FIP\/fWAR) are all middle of the pack.<\/p>\n

Prediction<\/strong>: two weeks ago I would have been more pessimistic about this team.\u00a0 But with Yelich out and finishing as strong as they did and basically being at full strength, I like the Nats here.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Then you go 8th\/9th guys w\/o screwing up the LAD rotation.\u00a0 That’s the hope anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here it is.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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:\u00a0Max […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2036],"tags":[4276,4275,2374,239,1037,1347],"class_list":["post-16188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natsgeneral","category-post-season","tag-anthony-rendons","tag-brandon-woodruff","tag-christian-yelich","tag-jeremy-hellickson","tag-max-scherzer","tag-sean-doolittle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16188"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16191,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16188\/revisions\/16191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}