Nationals picks

Overcast and 67 degrees at Nationals Park with a 16 mph wind howling in from left field — a day game after a night game — and the books can't split these two, both sides sitting right at -108. I'm on the home Nationals, and the thing that carries this pick is the two-sided platoon squeeze. Connelly Early is a left-hander whose reverse platoon holds left-handed hitters to a .194 average and .589 OPS, and the Mets roll out a lefty-heavy order — Juan Soto, Carson Benge, Brett Baty, A.J. Ewing, plus switch-hitters. That puts Soto, New York's one .900-plus OPS bat, on the side of the plate he's worse from, against a lefty built to smother that side. On the other side of the ball, right-hander Jonah Tong is platoon-neutral, so Washington's best left-handed thumpers, James Wood (.942 OPS vs RHP) and CJ Abrams (.898 vs RHP), get the favorable side of the matchup. Washington also brings the better offense — 5.1 runs per game against the Mets' 4.3 — and has converted better with runners in scoring position lately (.288 over the last 10 versus the Mets' .239, with New York stranding 77 runners in that stretch). The Nats are 7-3 over their last ten; the Mets are 4-6. The honest case against me is real: Early is being activated off the 60-day IL today after 87 days without a big-league pitch, so he's likely capped and short, which turns the middle of this game into a bullpen fight — and New York's pen (a 3.02 tracked relief ERA) is clearly better than Washington's, with Devin Williams and Kodai Senga rested. I accept all of that. But the four Washington arms that worked last night aren't the entire pen — Tolman, Dion, Lord and Lovelady all sat two days — and at even money I'll take the better lineup, the platoon edge on both sides of the ball, and home field over a superior bullpen in a coin-flip game. The Mets' best path is the late innings; my side's path is the other seven.