When you’re the Mets and you make a few moves at the trade deadline that suggest you’re in the pennant race and are really “going for it,” it doesn’t look great when the very next day you put Ariel Jurado on the mound to start an important game in Baltimore. Of course, that’s exactly what the Mets did on Tuesday night before losing their fifth straight game.
I hadn’t heard of Jurado before yesterday afternoon, but he did come with a decent amount of big league experience, making 44 appearances and 26 starts for Texas over the past two seasons. None of that experience was very good, though. Jurado had a 5.85 ERA, 5.07 WHIP, and 1.51 WHIP over that span, so the Rangers knew they weren’t missing much when they dealt him to the pitching-starved Mets early last month.
The Orioles jumped all over Jurado right away. Renato Nunez greeted him with a three-run home run in the first inning, and Baltimore added two more in the second. The Mets’ offense did a great job keeping pace early thanks to Robinson Cano maintaining his nuclear hot streak with a solo shot and Andres Giminez adding his first career home run to tie the score 5-5 in the sixth.
Just went it looked like the tables had turned, Franklyn Kilome walked the lead-off man in the bottom of the frame and then let up an RBI double to Pat Valaika. Three batters later, Anthony Santander hit a two-run laser beam home run to make the score 8-5, and that was pretty much it for the Mets. Baltimore ended up winning 9-5, and Kilome has now allowed multiple runs in all three of his appearances.
The Mets will once again try to right the ship this afternoon with Michael Wacha on the bump opposite John Means. At 15-21, New York is in 11th place in the National League and two games behind eighth-place San Francisco in the loss column.
History was made in the NBA last night when the Denver Nuggets become only the 12th team in league history to overcome a 3-1 playoff series deficit. They defeated the Utah Jazz for the third straight game, this time in an old-school 1990s scrap that saw both team shoot under 40 percent. The Jazz finally clamped down on Jamal Murray, holding him to 17 points and 7-for-21 shooting, but Nikola Jokic stepped up and scored 30 points with 14 rebounds.
Utah was led in scoring by Donovan Mitchell with 22 points, but he also turned the ball over nine times, including once in the closing seconds with his team trailing by two points.
After Denver’s Torrey Craig shockingly missed a layup on the other end, Utah got once more chance at victory, but Mike Conley’s buzzer-beating three-point try bounced off the back rim and out. That brought an end to the summer’s most exciting playoff series and spared Craig from being forever maligned by Nuggets fans.
NBA fans are blessed with another Game 7 tonight as the Houston Rockets try to avoid yet another disappointing playoff exit. James Harden still hasn’t appeared in an NBA Finals since he was the third wheel on Oklahoma City in 2012, and he’ll have to wait at least another year if his team can’t avoid being upset by the present-day Thunder.
Inside Yolk 