Typically as the baseball betting season draws to a close we narrow our focus on games involving teams in the hunt for postseason play.  There’s a logical reason for this–obviously the individual games will ‘mean more’ to these teams and the teams that are out of contention often use the month of September as an opportunity to get prospects into the lineup.  This matchup is a bit of an anomaly for this reason as it involves a pair of teams in the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals that are way out of playoff contention.

Houston Astros (Rodriguez) at Washington Nationals (Marquis)
September 22, 2010  4:05 PM Pacific

Houston lost on Tuesday, taking down our play on the Astros in the process, but the fundamental dynamic of this series remains the same.  Houston deserves a ton of credit for continuing to play hard down the stretch, and really all season long despite digging a huge hole for themselves early on with the worst start to the season in franchise history.  Despite Tuesday’s loss, they’ve still got a realistic shot of catching St. Louis for 2nd place in the NL Central with the Cardinals not playing particularly well and leading Houston by just 4.5 games.  As we noted yesterday, the fact that they actually still care on a daily basis is enough reason to make a play on them against a Washington team that looks more and more like they’ve called it a year.  Astros are 12-7 +4.5 units in September compared to the Nationals’ record of 6-12 -5.6 units so far this month.

The public ran away from Houston after their sluggish start, but their gutsy play since then combined with value prices have made them a very profitable team.  YTD, Houston is 73-78 +15.4  units and on the road they’ve gone 32-41 +11 units.  They’ll definitely not have a problem hitting Jason Marquis today–he’s had some decent games here and there but over the course of the season betting against him has been money in the bank.  Washington has lost 9 of his 11 starts this season including all 5 at home.  His YTD ERA of 7.72 (8.86 at home) doesn’t bode particularly well for him in this matchup.  As was the case yesterday, we like the competitive fire this Houston team has shown late in the season and we’ll gladly back them here.

Bet Houston Astros (Rodriguez) -120 over Washington Nationals (Marquis)

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