San Diego at Los Angeles

San Diego is the hottest team in baseball right now, winners of nine of its last ten games and riding a five-game winning streak into tonight's finale. That stretch is real, but it still doesn't erase the gap between these two rosters: Los Angeles is 96-60, outscoring its opponents by 193 runs this season, while the Padres are up 41 runs. Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been one of the league's five-best starters by ERA all season at 2.51, working at least six innings in each of his last five turns, including a scoreless outing in his last start. Michael King has answered with a strong season of his own, a 3.03 ERA and a run of near-scoreless starts to match, but that offensive gap is the difference in a series like this one. I had the Dodgers on the moneyline two nights ago, and they backed it up with a clean 3-1 win over the Giants, and nothing about tonight's pitching matchup changes what kind of team is on the other side of that plate. Los Angeles is the right side.