Road Trip!!! - Report Card

This is a follow-up to this post that I wrote before this road trip, and people seemed to like it, so I decided a little follow up wouldn't hurt.

Basically in that post, I was comparing the previous year's massive road trip (of DOOM) at that point in the season to the current one (of HOPE), which happened to fall more or less in the same slot.

Well things may not have gone as well as they possibly could have, but in the end, we did pretty good. Really.

The 2010 Road Trip (of HOPE) (3 W - 5L)

TOR@SEA - (W - 3-2) - SP: Cecil (LHP) - Fister (RHP)

TOR@SEA - (L - 3-4) - SP: Romero (LHP) - Vargas (LHP)

TOR@ARZ - (L - 6-8) - SP: Morrow (RHP) - Haren (RHP)

TOR@ARZ - (L - 5-8) - SP: Eveland (LHP) - Jackson (RHP)

TOR@ARZ - (W - 12-4) - SP: Marcum (RHP) - Buckner (RHP)

TOR@LAA - (W - 6-0) - SP: Cecil (LHP) - Saunders (LHP)

TOR@LAA - (L - 3-8) - SP: Romero (LHP) - Santana (RHP)

TOR@LAA - (L - 5-6) - SP: Morrow (RHP) - Pineiro (RHP)

Nearly every game was winnable except for the one against Santana (hate that guy). So we could have easily have gone 5-3 or 4-4, but such is baseball.

Let's take a quick look at the points I made in the previous post and see how we did.

3 to keep up

1. Offense needs to keep blasting. Grade: A+++  Man, we did not fail to live up to our reputation as a power team. Edwin Encarnacion hit like a billion HRs himself. 

2. Pitching needs to keep humming and chucking. Grade: B- First the good, Brett Cecil had 2 amazing starts without his glasses, Shaun Marcum had a great start and even hit well. Now the not so good, Ricky Romero had 1 good start that sadly got spoiled by Kevin Gregg blowing up and a really bad start in LA unfortunately in front of his family and friends. I don't think Romero will remember this road trip fondly. Brandon Morrow had 2 bad starts, one of which he kept the walks down, but left a number of pitches up and dripping in juices for the D-Back batters, and then was hurt quite badly by walks in LA, where 3 of the 4 walks he gave out scored. Dana Eveland... well, he was DFA'd, so there's that. We weren't that terrible, but the starter ERA was certainly higher this year (5.86 without that Eveland start, which would balloon it up to over 9000 or something)

3. Bullpen needs to keep shutting the other team down. Grade: B Jason Frasor has continued to come back into form. Rommie Lewis was stylin' over the D-Backs and seemed to really want that 5th starter's job, except that the LA game where he couldn't get an out didn't help his case. And Gregg, well we now know he can't really be used back to back days, right?

3 to improve on

1. Scoring anything with bases loaded. Grade: F (for everyone but Mac) I believe we only scored twice with the bases loaded this trip, one on a HBP and another on an error. Correct me if I'm wrong. EDIT: I'm wrong, Johnny Mac had a bases-clearing double. So everyone sucks with the bases loaded except Johnny Mac.

2. Randy Ruiz and Lyle Overbay. Grade: C Randy Ruiz is free in Japan now, so we'll focus on Lyle. He hit .242/.265/.273/.537 over the trip, and while he did quite well early on, he went hit less against LA. He still needs to find some consistency.

3. Ricky's "Wild Pitches". Grade: A+ Ricky Romero had 0 Wild Pitches on the trip, hurray!

3 to be wary of

1. Pitchers batting and running. Grade: B Marcum was amazingly clutch, and Camp had a base-hit. But like it's already been pointed out, why are relievers hitting in a blow-out if Cito wants to baby them at the plate as much as he can, and would rather they not hit at all?

2. Getting Fisted and ...Vargas'd? Grade: B- Both were really good as I expected and kept the games really close, one close enough for Seattle to win in the end. We barely got by Fister and if we had gotten by Vargas, it would have been nearly as close.

3. Them Angels. Grade: D- Well, at least we weren't swept.

Overall Grade: C Not the best again, but it's better than going 0-8, and we kept most of them close.

And that's that! Now for a new homestand, I'm sure many of the Blue Jays are happy to be back in the Dome, I know I am, as I'm going to tonight's game (Friday). But don't think we have it easy in June. After the O's we have the Rays, Yankees and then Rays again. That may just be our 9 game stretch of DOOM, just delayed a bit...