Blue Jays bats have a bad day, lose to Orioles

Blue Jays 2 Orioles 5

I wrote, earlier today, when Mark Brown from Camden Chat asked what Jeff Francis was doing in the major leagues, that Francis was being used in mop up roles, that "if you don't want to use a position player to finish off those games, Francis as a good choice as anyone". Which is a little harsh but....to start the bottom of the 6th, when we are only down 2 and still have a 13.7% chance of winning (via fangraphs) Francis shouldn't be coming in. But he did.

Francis loaded the bases, while only getting one out and Gibby brough Steve Delabar is in. I'm ok with the choice of Delabar, because he is supposed to be able to strike guys out, and we needed a strikeout or two. Delabar got out of the inning allowing just 1 of the inherited runners to score, but then he gave up a solo homer the next inning.

Then, of course, in the bottom of the 8th, when we are down to a 2.2% chance to win, Roberto Osuna comes in.

Since we didn't hit, it really didn't matter, but put the better pitchers in the higher leverage spot, please Gibby.

As seems to happen, to us, so often, our starter only had 1 bad inning but that one bad inning was enough to get him the loss. In the first inning, Marco Estrada gave up a leadoff homer to Manny Machado and a 2-run homer to Chris Davis. After that he went 4 scoreless innings, allowing just 3 more hits and a walk. In all, 5 innings, 5 hits, 3 earned, 2 walks and 4 strikeouts. If we could have scored some, that start would have been good enough.

We did have a chance at the end. In the 9th, with 2 outs and 2 on, Jose Bautista came in to pinch hit as the tying run. But, a rare first pitch swing netted a ground out and that was the game.

We just couldn't hit Ubaldo Jimenez. He went 7 innings allowed 6 hits, 2 walks and struck out 9, giving up 2 earned. We only had 3 extra base hits on the day, all doubles, 2 from Ezequiel Carrera (who didn't seem to have any problem hitting Jimenez) and the other from Kevin Pillar.

We had 8 hits in all, 2 each from Chris Colabello, Pillar and Carrera. One each from Ryan Goins and Josh Donaldson. Devon Travis, Russell Martin, Edwin Encarnacion and Justin Smoak all went 0 for and had 12 strikeouts between them.

Carrera gets the Jay of the Day award for his .129 WPA.

Suckage goes to Estrada (-.171), Travis (-.121) and Smoak (-.106).

We had 821 comments in our GameThread. Pikachu had a great night in a losing cause.