The offense takes a day off, Jays lose to Rangers

Blue Jays 1 Rangers 4

That wasn't fun.

Sometimes you are going to lose one. It seemed like one of those games where we just didn't get any luck.

Marco Estrada had a tough first inning. He threw 33 pitches, gave up a walk and 2 singles, but managed to hold the Rangers to one run. After that, he was great. In all he went 6 innings (pretty good considering the pitches thrown in the first), allowed just 4 hits, 3 walks with 6 strikeouts. With our offense, you wouldn't expect that to get you a loss.

It just wasn't our day with the bat. We had chances, just didn't score them. We haven't had many days like that, but they do happen.

We had 8 hits and 5 walks making you think we should have scored more than one run. We hit into 3 double plays.

There were chances:

• In the 6th, Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista walked and then pulled off a double steal with 1 out. A good chance to score and either tie or take the lead. But Edwin Encarnacion and Dioner Navarro struck out.
• In the second inning, Navarro led off with a single, but Kevin Pillar hit into a double play.
• Then Ben Revere singles and Cliff Pennington hit a hard line drive to left, but Will Venable made a great catch, going back on the ball. I thought he didn't have a chance on the play.
• In the 5th, Revere started the inning with a single and, on a 3-1 pitch took off for second, Pennington again lined one,but right at the right fielder and Revere was doubled off.
• And we loaded the bases in the 7th, but Troy Tulowitski's ground ball went straight at the third baseman for an inning ending double play.

About the only good thing that happened was that Edwin doubled to continue his hitting streak. He's at 22 games now.

Ben Revere had 3 hits and Ryan Goins had 2.

O fors go to Troy Tulowitzki (0 for 4, 1 k), Donaldson (0 for 3, walk, 2 k), Pillar (0 for 4, 2 k) and Pennington (0 for 3, walk. though 2 hard hit line drives) had tough games.

Liam Hendriks had a tough luck inning in the 7 (though he could have helped himself with some better pitches with 2 strikes). He gave up 6 singles, most of them soft ground balls and 3 runs. The bad one single to right with two on base. Bautista charged in to set up for a throw home, but he missed the ball, and three runs scored. A  bad moment for his 3rd error of the season. As it turned out, those runs became earned becuase the next batter, Shin-Soo Choo hit a ground ball up the middle that hit that bag and avoided Goins. What would have been ground out became a single. Prince Fielder followed with another single.

We did get an amazing catch from Revere:

And Ryan Goins made a terrific tag on Delino Deshields trying to steal:

We are still in first, 1.5 games up from the Yankees.

Jays of the Day: Estrada (.173 WPA)  and Revere (.195)

Suckage: Hendriks (-.174, though it was mostly bad luck), Tulo (-.373), Pillar (-.177) and Edwin (-.123). I'll give one to Bautista for the error too.

We had 2083 comments in the GameThreads. Pretty good for a Thursday afternoon. T-Ball led the way in a losing cause.