Blue Jays 4 Angels 5: Moises Sierra gets 3 of Jays 4 hits

Angels 5 Blue Jays 4

Generally, you would expect that if you score 3 runs in the first, you really should win. Well, not tonight.

The first inning was good. A one-out walk for Rajai Davis and a two-out walk for Adam Lind. Moises Sierra doubled driving in one. Then Mark DeRosa beat out a ground ball to shortstop Erick Aybar, who threw high to first. The error put the Angels down by 3.

But, R.A. Dickey wasn't great tonight, even with the roof closed. He gave up a 2-run homer to Mark Trumbo, to cut the lead to 1 in the second inning. A Mike Trout lead off walk came around to score in the 4th inning and it was tied.

It didn't stay tied for long, Moises Sierra lead off the 4th with a  triple and scored  when the Angels made their second error of the game. Nice to see other teams can screw up. Unfortunately, that's where our offense ended.

Dickey didn't seem to like pitching with a lead, he gave up a lead off double to Grant Green, a single to J.B. Shuck and a sac fly to Erick Aybar to bring the game back to even in the 5th.

Dickey went 5.1, gave up 7 hits, 4 earned, 2 walks, 1 home runs and struck out 2.

Aaron Loup came in to the 6th with runners on the corners and picked Kole Calhoun off first, then struck out Chris Iannetta. Dustin McGowan pitched a quick, perfect 7th. He only threw 8 pitches, so I thought he would get a chance to go another inning but then we have a lot of guys in the pen, no use pushing anyone.

Steve Delabar came out for the 8th. After Erick Aybar struck out, Mike Trout walked and Josh Hamilton doubled. The Jays decided to intentional walk Mark Trumbo to load the bases. I'm not a fan of the intentional walk, I think it's a bad move to take the pitchers attention off the strike zone and, with it loading the bases, a walk would score the go ahead run. Add in that Delabar walked the RHB Trumbo to face the lefty Calhoun, I wasn't thrilled. Calhoun hit a sac fly to bring in Trout.

For some reason Hamilton took off for third, and got caught in a rundown. When Mark Trumbo moved up to second, the rundown was over.  Stupid move by Hamliton, stupid move by Trumbo. We don't hold the monopoly on bad base running.

Darren Oliver pitched a quick 9th, but we couldn't score so it didn't matter.

Jays of the Day are Sierra (.293 WPA and no stupid base running or fielding mistakes, yay) and Loup (.175).

Suckage goes to Dickey (-.240), Delabar (-.186), Goins (-.155, though he had an amazing play in the field), Gose (-.141) and Lind (-.113).

We are kind of just playing out the string. The infield defense has looked better than it has all year, but there isn't a lot of offense. We only had 4 hits tonight and Moises had 3 of them,  2 doubles and a triple. The only other hit was DeRosa's infield single. In 5 of 9 innings we went 3 up and 3 down.

We had another nice GameThread again tonight, 23 of us put up 401 comments.