Canada 5 USA 6

That was one great baseball game. It ended with us having the tying run on second and Jason Bay up. Bay flied out on the 8th pitch of the at bat. There were lots of home runs today; for Canada Joey Votto and Russell Martin each hit solo homers. For the US Kevin Youkilis had a sole shot and Brian McCann and JP's friend Adam Dunn had two run homers.

Mike Johnson started for Canada and pitched pretty good for the first 3 innings but gave up three runs in the 4th. Chris Begg came after him and gave up 2 runs in 1.1 innings. Chris Leroux, Phillippe Aumont and David Davidson pitched the last 2.2 without giving up a run. Aumont had an interesting inning, he gave up a double to Dustin Pedroia, a single to Jimmy Rollins and then walked Chipper Jones to load the bases, but he got out of it with a lineout from David Wright and strikeouts from Youkilis and Curtis Granderson.

Our offensive heroes were Votto who went 4 for 5 with the homer and Martin 2 for 3 and a walk, 3 runs and a homer. Jason Bay took 3 walks too. Less good were Matt Stairs 0 for 3 with 2 k's, Pete Orr was 0 for 4 (it rhymes) and Chris Barnwell 0 for 4.

All in all a good effort by Team Canada. We play the loser of tonight's Italy-Venezuela game on Monday. Scott Richmond will likely start that game. Great crowd at Skydome by the way, over 42,000 loud fans.

The big upset today was the Netherlands beat the Dominican Republic 3-2 early today.

Reds 2  Jays 7

Once again we got good pitching. I'm trying not to read too much into spring games, but does anyone else get the feeling our pitching isn't going to be so bad after all? Today, Jesse Litsch pitched the first 3 innings, gave up 3 hits, a walk, a run and struckout 2. Ricky Romero also went 3, gave up 3 hits, 2 walks, a run and struckout 5(!). Much beter than his first two times out there this spring. Dirk Hayhurst pitched 2 perfect innings striking out 4. Dirk still hasn't given up a run this spring. In 5 innings he's given up 3 hits and has struck out 8. If he keeps this up the rest of us are going to have jump on the band wagan with Hugo. Brian Wolfe pitched a perfect 9th.

Offensively, Jason Lane went 3 for 3 and is now hitting .500 this spring. Hugo would want me to mention, in the interest of fairness, that Kevin Millar hit a home run. I'd prefer to mention that he was 0 for 2 in his other at bats. Actually Millar has been good this spring too, hitting .364 so far. At least Lane is going to make it hard for the Jays to send him down.

Another favorite of ours, Scott Campbell was 2 for 4 with a 3 run triple. Travis Snider went 2 for 3 and has had a good spring so far with a .462 BA. Joe Inglett played short today and was 2 for 5. Since we didn't see the game I have no idea how he looked at short but he was part of a 1-6-3 double-play.

On the bad side our two catchers who played today each went 0 for 2, JP Arencibia still doesn't have a hit this spring and Curtis Thigpen is hitting .091 so far. Other posibles for the backup catcher spot Michael Barrett and Carlo Ruiz haven't had a good spring, so far, either. I'm not sure who is winnnig the battle at this point.

Jays play the Reds again tomorrow, David Purcey and Brett Cecil are to throw.