3 home runs and good work from the bullpen help Jays beat Orioles

Blue Jays 7 Orioles 2

When Marcus Stroman came out of the game, in the second inning, after a hard line drive hit him in the right arm, I didn’t think it was going to be our night. Our bullpen has been pretty crappy of late, and we had 7.1 innings of baseball to go.

But.....

Matt Dermody came in and gave us 2.1 innings of 1 hit shutout ball. It might be his best performance as a Blue Jay.

Luis Santos, after just being called up today, gave us 3 innings of 1 hit shut out ball. He looked great. The 4th inning didn’t go as well, he gave up a home run to start the 8th, that just cleared the wall. He would get one more out, before coming out of the game. 3.1 innings, 2 hits, 1 earned.

Dominic Leone came in with 1 out and gave up a walk and a single before getting Adam Jones to hit into a double play.

The O’s got 1 in the 9th off Tim Mayza

And offensively, we actually scored some run, after being shutout for 13 innings yesterday.

We scored:

• 1 in the 5th. A Kevin Pillar solo homer, his first home run since August 23rd (which was his only home in August).
• 1 in the 6th. Steve Pearce walked and Josh Donaldson and Justin Smoak had back-to-back singles, to load the bases, with no outs. Unfortunately, we would only score 1 run, on a Kendrys Morales sac fly.
• 3 in the 7th. Darwin Barney doubled and Luke Maile was hit by pitch, before Donaldson hit a homer. Suddenly it was 5-0.
• 2 in the 8th. Jose Bautista hit a hard ground ball single to right (his second single of the day, but the other was soft hit infield single) and Darwin Barney hit one out. That made it 7-0.

We had 9 hits, 2 walks and 1 hit batter, on the day. Scoring 7 runs off 11 base runners is much much better than we’ve been doing this year.

Josh had 3 hits, Barney and Jose had 2 each. 0 fors go to Pearce, Morales, Goins and Maile (whose batting average has dropped to .115).

Jays of the Day: Santos (.173 WPA, pretty good for your first MLB game), Dermody (.162), Josh (.177) and I’m giving one to Barney even though his WPA is just .017, because he doesn’t often hit a double and a homer in a game.

No one gets a Suckage award. Weirdly, Jose had the low mark at -.061. He was 2 for 3, but he struck out with the bases loaded in the 6th.

The Jays are saying there is no fracture in Stroman’s arm. That’s good news, though I’ll give it a day or two before I’ll believe. Sometimes these things hide from x-rays at first. He’s going to be day-to-day. I’m thinking his next start might be pushed back a bit.

We had 235 comments in the GameThread. I led us to victory.