The Arizona Diamondbacks open three games in Washington on Friday night with the two clubs separated by a game and a half in the standings — and, more to the point, by a decision neither has made yet.
Arizona is 54-49 and currently holds the final National League wild-card spot. Washington is 52-51, two games back of it. Five teams sit within four games of that spot. The trade deadline is a week away.
First pitch at Nationals Park is 6:45 p.m. ET.
The pitching matchup is lopsided on paper
Arizona sends out left-hander Eduardo Rodriguez, who has been the best version of himself this year: 8-3 with a 2.63 ERA.
Washington counters with left-hander Carson Palmquist, 0-1 with an 8.74 ERA in limited work.
Those numbers are not close, and the betting market has noticed. The caveat is the sample: Palmquist's ERA is built on a small number of innings, which is the kind of figure that can look completely different after one good start. It is a bad number, not yet a settled verdict.
The real subject is the deadline
For a team in Arizona's position — holding a wild-card spot by the width of a game, with a crowd of teams right behind — a three-game series against one of those teams is worth more than its place on the calendar suggests.
Win the series and the front office is buying. Lose it and Arizona is a .500 club with a week to decide whether to move veterans. Washington's version of the same question is one step further back: two games out with the same deadline pressure and less margin.
This is the part of the season where a front office learns what its team is. The next 72 hours will tell both of these clubs more than the previous three weeks did.
How to watch
Both teams have moved to direct-to-consumer streaming rather than a traditional regional sports network, so the game is on Nationals.TV and Dbacks.TV, with Fubo also carrying it.
That shift is worth noting on its own. The RSN model that carried local baseball for forty years has been collapsing, and clubs like these two selling streaming subscriptions directly is what has replaced it — cheaper for cord-cutters, and one more thing for fans to track down before first pitch.
The scoreboard above updates on its own once the game starts and freezes on the final.
