World Series Game 7 open thread

Seven months of baseball games have all come down to this. 28 teams and their fans will be watching from home while the Nationals and Astros settle the 2019 World Series in a decisive Game 7 in Houston tonight. One team will taste the ultimate victory while the other drinks from the bitter draft of defeat. Maybe, eventually, the loser will be able to feel better about it. Making it to the World Series is still a great achievement. But the loser won’t get to hoist the trophy.

By now we all know the strangest and most prominent storyline of this series. The home team has yet to win a game. This is not far off from a coin landing on heads six times in a row. It’s an unlikely surprise, though it’s also not some miniscule chance either: That happens once every 64 times, on average. Adding a seventh heads in a row would make it one out of every 128 times running such an experiment.

This is the 115th World Series. So there you go. And by the way, the road team has won three straight Game 7s before this, including just two years ago when the Astros knocked off the Dodgers.

The other big storyline for this game in particular is Max Scherzer, who was unable to pitch in Game 5 but now is ready to go. Is he really all the way healthy? If not, things become more fraught for the Nationals. If Scherzer is ready to pitch like Scherzer, and the fact that the Nationals bullpen sucks does not need to be relevan in the game, that’s good news for them instead.

Scherzer pitching for one team and Zack Greinke pitching for the other is still quite a marquee matchup. It is, in fact, the first time that two former Cy Young winners have squared off in Game 7 of a World Series.This series hasn’t delivered a ton of late drama yet and perhaps tonight it won’t either, but the ingredients are there for what could be a tense pitcher’s duel.

Walgreens lineup

1. Trea Turner - SS
2. Adam Eaton - RF
3. Anthony Rendon - 3B
4. Juan Soto - LF
5. Howie Kendrick - DH
6. Asdrubal Cabrera - 2B
7. Ryan Zimmerman - 1B
8. Yan Gomes - C
9. Victor Robles - CF

The original Nationals starting lineup had Kurt Suzuki in it for the first time since Game 3. Suzuki had missed time with a hip injury. He was later scratched and replaced with Gomes, so he must not be all the way better.

Astros lineup

1. George Springer - CF
2. Jose Altuve - 2B
3. Michael Brantley - LF
4. Alex Bregman - 3B
5. Yuli Gurriel - 1B
6. Yordan Alvarez - DH
7. Carlos Correa - SS
8. Robinson Chirinos - C
9. Josh Reddick - RF

It’s the same Houston lineup as yesterday. Maybe they will score more runs than they did yesterday, and maybe Greinke will pitch well enough for that to matter.