Los Angeles Dodgers, May 11: Two flamethrowers facing off

The Los Angeles Dodgers-Washington Nationals matchup on Saturday should be great for those that love watching pitching duels.

The Los Angeles Dodgers and Washington Nationals have split the first two games of a four-game series with very similar wins in the two games.

To open the series, the Nationals blanked the Dodgers, backed by seven scoreless innings from Patrick Corbin, and walked away with a 6-0 win. On Friday, Kenta Maeda fired six scoreless innings of his own and Julio Urias threw three shutout innings as the Dodgers walked away with a  5-0 victory.

There is a fairly decent chance that we will see another goose egg out of one of the teams on Saturday night as the pitching matchup, Walker Buehler vs. Max Scherzer, pins two elite-level flamethrowers against each other.

Neither Scherzer nor Beuhler has been as good as anticipated to start the year but when both guys are on they are two of the hardest pitchers to hit in baseball. Just look at Scherzer’s long list of accolades and Buehler’s tremendous end to last season as the examples of this.

While the two teams could surprise everyone with an offensive slugfest, chances are that hits are going to be somewhat hard to come by in this contest. Because of that, we have to be smart with who we select as our hitter in our Los Angeles Dodgers Beat the Streak series.

Here is who we think will get a base knock on Saturday, likely against Scherzer.

Jason’s pick (Current streak: 2): Max Muncy

The Los Angeles Dodgers are not good at all against Max Scherzer. It is hard to blame the Dodgers, though, as nobody is really that great against Scherzer.

Collectively, the Dodgers have 72 at-bats logged against Scherzer with a .154 batting average, 29 strikeouts and just five RBIs. That is about as poor as you can get and you bet Scherzer is anticipating a potentially huge day in a pitcher-friendly ballpark like Dodger Stadium.

I cannot really use these numbers to my advantage as I normally do since everyone is poor against Scherzer. Thus, it becomes a gut thing and my guy is that Max Muncy will get a hit off of his fellow Max and it will be an extra-base hit to the opposite field.

Muncy does have two hits in six at-bats against Scherzer with a home run, so his stats are as good as anyone. Those are obviously minuscule, though, and won’t play greatly into this matchup.

Muncy is starting to heat up and has been pretty good both offensively and defensively over the last week or two. While we don’t expect a huge game out of Muncy, he is a safe pick to get a base hit.