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The Red Sox (59-26) face down the likely best pitcher in baseball tonight when they battle Max Scherzer (10-2, 2.04) and the Nationals (42-40) tonight in D.C. (7:05 p.m., NESN, ESPN). Read Matt’s series preview here if you’re nasty.
About tonight’s game: Scherzer, a three-time Cy Young Award winner and the easy favorite in the National League so far this year, a surefire Hall of Famer and almost certainly the best pitcher in history with heterochromia, will face Rick Porcello (9-3, 3.60 ERA), a man with one Cy Young Award win, wonderful hair and eyes that are the same color.
In an extremely unwelcome development, J.D. Martinez gets the night off in the dumb and cursed National League park, which bumps Xander Bogaerts into the third spot in the order. Brock Holt’s at second base and Sandy Leon is behind the plate. The bigger story is the weird Nationals lineup, one with All-Star-caliber players up and down the order who can’t hit (Bryce Harper), can’t stay healthy (Adam Eaton, Daniel Murphy) or are Trea Turner (Trea Turner). They are all being outshined by 19-year-old Juan Soto, who bats third and is going to rock the shit for years to come. All this and they’re two games over .500, and while that ought to improve, who knows? Baseball is weird. Speaking of...
About last night’s game: Never happened, strangely. Matt has more details on this troubling development, but it doesn’t look like anything to me.
Forecast: About 95 degrees! That’s too many!
Today’s reading: Jake is very mad at David Price right now for reasons I can’t figure out (as there was no game yesterday), but before he was, he wrote about the evolution of the offense under Tim Hyers and Alex Cora.
A good tweet about the Nationals:
Juan Soto has played in less than half as many games as Bryce Harper and has already passed him in WAR—which would've been ridiculous to imagine back in the spring, but now it's kinda tempered by the fact that Wilmer Difo has also passed Bryce Harper in WAR.
— Emma Baccellieri (@emmabaccellieri) July 2, 2018
LINEUPS
Game 86 at Nationals
| Lineup Spot | Red Sox | Nationals |
|---|---|---|
| Lineup Spot | Red Sox | Nationals |
| 1 | Mookie Betts, RF | Adam Eaton, CF |
| 2 | Andrew Benintendi, LF | Trea Turner, SS |
| 3 | Xander Bogaerts, SS | Juan Soto, LF |
| 4 | Mitch Moreland, 1B | Anthony Rendon, 3B |
| 5 | Rafael Devers, 3B | Bryce Harper, RF |
| 6 | Brock Holt, 2B | Daniel Murphy, 1B |
| 7 | Sandy León, C | Wilmer Difo, 2B |
| 8 | Jackie Bradley Jr., CF | Pedro Severino, C |
| 9 | Rick Porcello, P | Max Scherzer, P |
| SP | Rick Porcello, RHP | Max Scherzer, RHP |