Jays win big in game one of doubleheader

Royals 3 Blue Jays 11

The middle innings were big for us.

We scored 3 in a 5th inning that was started off by a Randal Grichuk double, which was followed by a bunch of seeing eye singles. We earned the BABIP luck. We were crushing balls into gloves for the first 4 innings.

Then we scored 6 in the 6 inning. The big hit was a 3-run homer from Grichuk. That was great to see. Maybe things will start turning around for him. As well as the homer and the double, he lined one to the track in the 2nd inning. We had 5 hits, 2 walks and Kevin Pillar reached on an error in the inning.

Yangervis Solarte had a 2-run homer in the first, to get us an early lead.

Everyone in the starting lineup had at least one hit, except Russell Martin, who took 2 walks. Steve Pearce, Teoscar Hernandez, Solarte, Aledmys Díaz and Grichuk all had two hits each.

We didn’t get the innings we would have liked out of Jaime Garcia, He only went five, and he was having some trouble locating his pitches (but then the plate umpire was having a hard time locating pitches too. He gave up 8 hits, 1 walk with 5 strikeouts. He got a bit of help with two Royals’ base stealers being thrown out. He seemed to get in trouble almost every inning but worked his way out of it. He really only got hurt in the 3rd on back-to-back homers from Mike Moustakas and Lucas Duda, which put us down by a run for a few minutes.

The bullpen did the job:

• Seung Hwan Oh pitched a scoreless inning when it was still a game.
• Aaron Loup had a scoreless inning, giving up a hard hit double and a infield single.
• John Axford pitched a quick 8th and 9th.

Ryan Goins came into the game late and got a nice ovation from the Jays fans.

Jays of the Day: Solarte (.174 WPA), Grichuk (.145), Smoak (.141) and Pearce (.089).

No Suckage Jays.

We had 690 comments in the GameThread. Pretty decent for a day game, and the first of two. I led us to victory. I guess I was missing baseball.