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Now that ladies and gentleman is how baseball should be played every night. With Mark Buehrle on the mound it's expected that the games will move along at a pretty good clip, but this was one of the quickest games I've ever seen. With a total of seven hits and two walks, the Blue Jays and Mariners combined to complete nine innings of baseball in a tidy 119 minutes. The contest was the fastest of the season for the Blue Jays by far as the next quickest game this year came on June 1st against the Kansas City Royals and was finished in 134 minutes.
In fact, tonight's game was the quickest nine inning game of the year across the entire major leagues:
That was the quickest 9 inning game of the year (119) http://t.co/Rr1vkYPU1V
— Noah Sherman (@noah_sherman) September 25, 2014
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Tonight's <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/bluejays?src=hash">#bluejays</a> win was the quickest 9-inning game in MLB since June 27, 2012, and the quickest <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/jays?src=hash">#jays</a> game since Sept. 15, 2010.</p>— Brendan Kennedy (@BKennedyStar) <a href="https://twitter.com/BKennedyStar/status/514951696959537153">September 25, 2014</a></blockquote>
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The contest was a pretty serious pitcher's duel until the eighth inning with both starters in Buehrle and Taijuan Walker pounding the strike zone and racking up the strikeouts. In fact, there was nary a hint that either team was going to be able to get a run on the board until Walker started tiring in the eighth inning and got some bad luck to boot.
In the aforementioned eighth Munenori Kawasaki got on with a walk and Ryan Goins followed it up with a well-placed bloop into short right field with two outs to score the loveable Japanese third baseman. Luckily as there were two outs Kawasaki was running hard on contact and rounded the bases easily as the ball had a huge bounce off the Rogers Centre turf.
In the ninth inning, Buehrle allowed a single to the leadoff batter and was promptly removed from the game in favour of Aaron Sanchez. The young righty quickly threw out pinch runner James Jones (on his birthday!) before striking out Austin Jackson and getting Dustin Ackley to ground out. With the victory, the Blue Jays have won the first three games of this series with Seattle and have all but spoiled the Mariners slim chances at grabbing a Wild Card berth.
Mark Buehrle's final line was 8.0+ innings with three hits and ten strikeouts, while Taijuan Walker went 8.0 innings allowing four hits and recording six strikeouts. It should be noted that after the sixth inning Buehrle broke through the 200 inning mark for the 14th consecutive year, which is pretty remarkable in this day and age. Bravo Mark!
Jays of the Day obviously include Mark Buehrle (.449 WPA), Aaron Sanchez (.284), and Ryan Goins (.321), while Jose Reyes (-.101), Dalton Pompey (-.108), and Anthony Gose (-.118) get the Suckage numbers.
Source: FanGraphs
The series finale goes tomorrow at 4:07 pm as Daniel Norris makes his first major league start against Tom Wilhelmsen. It's still early so now go enjoy the rest of your night!