Bad pitching, batting and fielding add up to a Blue Jays loss

Rangers 7 Blue Jays 4

That was a ‘team loss’ if there ever was one. Yesterday you could pin the loss on Stroman, today everyone wearing a Blue Jays jersey had a hand in the loss, or at least that’s the way it seemed. It was just a crappy game. We pitched, hit and fielded poorly.

Jaime Garcia had a terrific first inning. 3 strikeouts, only 2 of his pitches were even fouled off. The second inning wasn’t so good. In the second, after getting his fourth straight strikeout, Garcia walked Joey Gallo, got a fly out and then there were back-to-back homers from Jurickson Profar and Robinson Chirnos. That was followed by yet another bad play by Teoscar Hernandez in the outfield, missing a ball for a 3-base error (whoops, they changed it to a hit, either way it should have been caught). Fortunately Garcia was able to get out of the inning.

Jaime got through a scoreless third, despite a single, walk and two wild pitches.

A couple more runs scored in the fourth. Jaime gave up a leadoff walk and got a fly out. Then he got a grounder tapped out to him, which should have been an easy double play, but his throw to second wasn’t good and they only got the force. The inning should have been over. A walk later, Garcia gives up an easy fly to left-center. Both Curtis Granderson and Kevin Pillar were there, but neither went for the catch and 2 runs score. It’s pretty much baseball 101, call the ball and catch it. It’s possible they both called it, but, it looked like they worried about a collision. That one wasn’t called a error, but it should have been.

Jaime had a nice quick 5th. It needed to be quick, because his pitch count was up, and our bullpen is over worked.

His final line was 5 innings, 4 hits, 5 earned, 4 walks 5 strikeouts, but those last two runs shouldn’t have happened and weren’t really ‘earned’.

Seunghwan Oh (apparently, Jays PR has said that his first name is all one word, I’m sure I’ll forget that soon), pitched the 6th and give up a home run.

Ryan Tepera and John Axford each had a scoreless inning.

Roberto Osuna (who hadn’t pitched in a few days) gave up a run in the 9th, helped along by Hernandez running parallel to a fly ball, instead of running to it to make the catch and then making a flatfooted terrible throw home on the single that followed. His defense has been as bad as his bat has been good.

On offense, we didn’t do near enough. Bartolo Colon didn’t give up his first baserunner until the fourth inning. We ended up getting 6 hits and 3 earned off him in 7 innings. He gave up homers to Pillar and Lourdes Gurriel (the first of his career) and a triple to Teoscar Hernandez, who scored on a Yangervis Solarte ground out.

And we didn’t do much against the Rangers bullpen. Pillar got his second home run of the game in the 9th, but that was about all we did against a pretty crappy Rangers’ pen.

Jays of the Day? I’d give one to Pillar for his 2 homers, but they really just balanced the 2 runs that scored when he didn’t make that catch in the outfield. Gurriel deserves an honorary mention for his first career homer. He also had a couple of other hard hit balls that found gloves and looked good on defense at second.

Suckage: Garcia has the number (-.240). Not all of that was on him, but enough of it was. No on in the lineup has the number, but let’s give one to Hernandez for the crappy defense.

We had 419 comments in the thread. TimmyMax led the way. Good job sir.