I know our Atlanta friends are going to hate this, but Yunel Escobar looked pretty decent to me. Lazy? Well if the guy makes the defensive plays like he did tonight all the time, I don't care how lazy he is. He made several nice plays and then one just amazing one in the 9th. On offense he got a bunt single his first at bat as a Jay. Perfectly laid down bunt, with Fred Lewis on second. There wasn't even a throw. His second time up he took an 8 pitch walk, something that our guys aren't good at. He also reached on an error in the 7th.
The rest of the team got into the offense too. We had 10 hits in all. 3 for Aaron Hill, homer, double and single. Lewis had 2. Everyone else had one except Jose Bautista (0 for 5, 2 ks, didn't look good at all at the plate) and Edwin Encarnacion (0 for 4, one hard hit, course right to a glove for a double play and one long fly out).
Ricky Romero had a great start. 7 innings, 5 hits, 1 walk, 5 k, 2 unearned runs. He gave up a couple of runs in the 5th, set up by two bad errors, one for Lewis and one for EE.
Scott Downs and Shawn Camp pitched a scoreless 8th and Kevin Gregg had a 1, 2, 3 9th for his 21st save. I think we can get off his back for a bit. He was helped by that amazing grab of a line drive by Escobar.
Jays of the Day are Romero (.247 WPA), Hill (.140), Gregg (.106) and I'm going to give one to Escobar for his .080 and handful of great defensive plays. Overbay deserves a honorable mention too. Suckage are Bautista (-.142) and Encarnacion (-.104 and the bad error), though he made a couple of nice plays too.
Great to see Hill hitting.
The post title? A suggestion from Torgen. Craig from Calgary said he didn't want to come home to a recap with Kevin Gregg's name in, so his name had to be in. And we were making fun of the hatred for Escobar from Atlanta fans, so on one of Yunel's good defensive plays I mentioned he was hard to dislike. Torgen said that if you watched the play in slow motion you could see he punched a kitten while making the play. At the end of the thread Torgen suggested this as a title.
Maybe you had to be there.