Dave Cokin
Bonus Play Friday
No good on the Bonus Play on the NFL game. Today, it appears that I won’t have any personal plays. The game that came closest to making the cut is one of the MLB playoff games.
DODGERS (Kershaw) at NATIONALS (Scherzer) 5:35 PM
Take: DODGERS -145
What a great mound matchup today at Washington as Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer hook up in a classic confrontation in the Dodgers-Nationals series opener.
As great as Kershaw is, I’m not sure anyone should be this much chalk on the road against Scherzer. I’m not really taking the post-season ledger of Kershaw into account here. Scherzer is simply too good to be this much of a dog at home.
But everything else points to the Dodgers and that’s why I like them to take a 1-0 lead in this series. Let’s face it. the Nats are really beat up right now. Wilson Ramos is done for the year, and that’s big. Bryce Harper is struggling and there appears to be little question he’s playing hurt. Daniel Murphy had to sit out several end of the regular season games, and while he’ll be back in the lineup today, he’s certainly not in perfect health. Ryan Zimmerman is a shell of what he used to be and isn’t hitting at all. Jayson Werth will play but he’s nursing a bad back and slumped pretty badly at the end of the season. Danny Espinosa has been all but an automatic out since the All-Star break.
This is simply a Washington lineup that has too many holes in it right now to have a reasonable chance to succeed, and facing a motivated and now healthy Clayton Kershaw seems too arduous a task in my view.
I made the price here Dodgers -160, so it’s just short of the differential I prefer when making a play. I’ll clearly be monitoring the line movement in this game as if some home dog money shows and the line drops a bit, I’ll go ahead and make the play. In any event, I certainly lean to the Dodgers to get the jump on the Nats with the Game One win.
