Colorado at Washington

Jake Irvin takes the mound for Washington this afternoon in the middle of the ugliest stretch of his season, three losses in a row with at least four earned runs allowed in two of them. Gabriel Hughes counters for Colorado with a 6.54 ERA and a 1.359 WHIP through eight big-league starts, numbers that make the case against the UNDER look real enough on paper. Washington's bullpen ranks 28th in baseball; Colorado's sits 27th, so nobody is walking in from the pen to bail this one out either. What actually decides this total is what happens to Colorado's offense once it leaves altitude. The Rockies are scoring 5.03 runs a game at Coors Field and only 4.54 on the road, a half-run drop that shows up every time this lineup plays outside the thin air that inflates its numbers all season. This is a Thursday getaway-day finale to the series, the kind of spot where lineups get shuffled, and at-bats get shorter, not longer. Take the UNDER this afternoon.