Frank Lorenzo
Colorado Rockies (+170) at New York Mets (-180, 7 o/u)
There hasn’t been a more surprising team in Major League Baseball this season than the New York Mets (61-52, 40-18 Home). The surging squad, which has won eight of its last ten, looks to sweep the lowly Colorado Rockies (47-64, 22-35 Away) tonight at Citi Field (7:10 PM Eastern).
The Mets sit 2.5 games above the Washington Nationals in the NL East after taking the first two against the Rockies. During Tuesday’s 4-0 win, ace Matt Harvey dominated Colorado’s lineup (four hits and no earned runs over eight innings) to earn his 11th win of the season.
Harvey has now logged 148 innings on the season, and is approaching the 185-190 regular-season innings limit the club put on him at the start of the year.
“At this point when your innings start getting up that high, the biggest thing is throwing strikes and not putting runners on base,” Harvey said to the Associated Press. “I don’t mind the first-pitch groundouts to shortstop or whatnot, that gets you into the later innings in games.”
The Mets, who boast one of the deepest pitching rotations in all of baseball, will turn the ball over to righty Jacob deGrom (10-6, 2.13 ERA) tonight. DeGrom is looking for his first decision in his last three starts. He was solid last time out, throwing 6.1 innings of six-hit, two-run ball against the Rays, but the Mets couldn’t muster any offense until he’d left the game (ultimately winning 4-3 on the strength of four runs over the final three innings).
The Colorado Rockies, meanwhile, sport one of the worst records in baseball. The rarified air of Denver has helped the team to the dubious honor of the worst team ERA in the majors (4.96) and a league-worst 575 runs against. Their batting order has clubbed the ball all season, sitting fourth in the bigs in runs and third in average, but it hasn’t been enough to overcome the terrible pitching, as the Rockies sit last in the NL West, a full 15 games back of the first-place Dodgers.
Left-hander Jorge De La Rosa (7-4, 4.85 ERA) will be on the bump tonight for Colorado. De La Rosa has been the team’s most effective pitcher for this season and is 1-0 in his last four starts.
However, even if De La Rosa has been a steady starter for the Rockies, the Mets pitchers have been untouchable of late. The way New York is playing, there is no reason to think the struggling Rockies will slow them down tonight.
Pick: Mets (-180).
(Photo Credit: Arturo Pardavila III on Flickr [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
