Jays lose, but, more importantly, Donaldson couldn’t throw

Yankees 5 Blue Jays 1

The story of the game, at least for us Jays fans, is Josh Donaldson’s throwing arm. He had four throws and not one of them was a good throw with some speed on it. He was saved an error on one of them, by a very nice play from Justin Smoak, but every throw was soft. It is a worry.

At the plate, he had 1 walk, but didn’t make any hard contact. I didn’t see have a hard hit ball this spring either.

If he can’t throw better than what we saw today, he shouldn’t be playing defense, and he hasn’t shown me that he should be batting either. I know it is tough to pull him out of the lineup, but maybe 10 days on the DL would be a good thing. Yangervis Solarte can play third, I’d rather get Josh right and able to help the team than see him play like this.

Other than that...well it wasn’t great.

J.A. Happ wasn’t bad, but he was hurt by a Curtis Granderson error on a fly ball in the first, that was followed by a Giancarlo Stanton homer. He gave up 4 hits, 3 runs, 2 earned (one that scored after he left the game), 1 walk with 5 strikeouts. As usual, his pitch count was pretty high, he only went 4.2, throwing 96 pitches but he was base bad.

Beyond that, the bullpen was up and down.

• John Axford gave up a couple of hits, an inherited run and a earned run, trying to finish off the 5th.
• Aaron Loup pitched an inning giving up a walk, but getting a nice double play ball, before giving up a double, then he got out of the inning.
• Danny Barnes gave up the weakless home run you’ll see this season to Brett Gardner. Randal Grichuk first move was in on the ball, but it just cleared the wall. Stupid juiced balls.
• Tyler Clippard gave up a massive homer, deep deep to dead center, to Stanton, his second of the game.

On offense, we had a lot of trouble with Luis Severino (we won’t be the only ones having trouble with him). He went 5.2 giving up just 1 hit, a Granderson single, 3 walks and 7 strikeouts.

We didn’t have much more luck with the Yankees bullpen, getting just 1 hit in 3.1 innings, a Kevin Pillar home run. That was a nice swing.

No Jays of the Day today.

Suckage goes to Axford (-.148 WPA) and Morales (-.100). Kendrys did hit one to the track, the opposite way, but he needed 10 more feet or a slower left fielder.

We had 1066 comments in the GameThread. Nice to talk to everyone again. DangYouToHeck led the way. Good job sir.

I would be remiss not to mention how good the tribute was to Roy Halladay. Brandi Halladay was wiping tears from her eyes, and she wasn’t the only one.