J.P. Crawford saved the Seattle Mariners’ season last night, delivering a walk-off double in the bottom of the ninth to lift Seattle (86-73) past the Texas Rangers (89-70) in the opener of this huge four-game season-ending series. These two teams will be back at it again tonight, with first pitch from T-Mobile Park set for 10:10 p.m. ET. Righty Nathan Eovaldi will go for the Rangers, while rookie Bryan Woo gets the ball for the home team.
Thanks to Crawford’s heroics, Seattle moved to just a game back of the Astros for the third and final AL Wild Card spot — with the head-to-head tiebreaker over Houston should it come to that by the end of the weekend. Of course, the Mariners are still technically alive in the AL West as well, three games back of Texas.
Seattle enters as -118 favorites on the moneyline at DraftKings Sportsbook, with the Rangers as a narrow -102 underdog. The run total is set at 7.5.
Rangers-Mariners picks: Friday, September 29
Injury report
Rangers
Day to day: SP Jon Gray (wrist)
Out: SP Max Scherzer (shoulder)
Mariners
Out: C Tom Murphy (thumb)
Starting pitchers
Nathan Eovaldi vs. Bryan Woo
Eovaldi rushed back from a forearm strain to try and help Texas’ beleaguered rotation this month, but he’s yet to regain the form that made him a Cy Young candidate before he went down. The righty has a 7.41 ERA so far in September, including five runs allowed on six hits and two walks in five innings against these same Mariners last weekend. The good news is that the righty has finally built his pitch count back up, throwing 86 pitches in that most recent outing — he should be able to give the Rangers some length tonight, though unless he suddenly regains his previous fastball velocity (he was down around 93-94 last time out against Seattle) whether he can be effective is another question.
Woo also faced Texas in his last outing, and like Eovaldi, the results weren’t encouraging: The young righty gave up six runs on five hits (including a whopping four homers) over 3.1 innings last weekend. Prior to that, Woo had been on a roll, with just seven hits allowed over 10.2 scoreless innings and 14 Ks across his two previous starts. The big question, especially given that the rookie has set a new career high in innings pitched this season, is whether he’ll still have the oomph on his fastball: Woo’s four-seamer is his best pitch and his bread and butter, thrown nearly half the time with a .219 average against and a 30.1% whiff rate, but he’s gotten into trouble of late with some worryingly diminished velocity.
Over/Under pick
These are two starting pitchers with a ton of question marks, and despite yesterday’s 3-2 final, I’m backing the over — this is a real downgrade from last night’s matchup of Jordan Montgomery and Logan Gilbert. The last time these pitchers locked up, it resulted in 17 total runs, with Texas escaping with a 9-8 victory. These lineups know how to hit these pitchers, and we simply don’t know whether they’ll have their best stuff tonight.
Pick: Over 7.5
Moneyline pick
This is a tough one, but I’m going with Seattle by a hair here for a couple of reasons: First, I trust Woo a bit more than Eovaldi, as he doesn’t have injury concerns hovering over him and we’ve seen him pitch well recently; second, the Mariners’ bullpen is substantially better than the Rangers’, as we saw in Thursday night’s affair. At almost even odds, that’s enough for me to pull the trigger on the M’s, although if this becomes a slugfest, the Rangers probably have the edge.
Pick: Mariners -122