Morales homers and Happ was great, Blue Jays win

Angels 3 Blue Jays 5

Another terrific start from J.A. Happ. 7 innings, just 3 hits, 3 walks, 5 strikeouts and 2 earned. It was kind of unfortunate that 2 of those hits, and 1 of the walk were grouped together in the 4th inning (and even that inning would have gone better if Josh Donaldson had gone for the double play instead of trying to tag the runner going past him, he still got an out but we might have had 2).

Happ didn’t have the huge strikeout numbers he was getting, earlier in the season, but he was pretty economical with his pitches, finishing 7 innings at 99 pitches.

Ryan Tepera pitched the 8th, giving up a leadoff double to Kole Calhoun, who scored on a sac fly.

Tyler Clippard pitched the 9th. He got a strikeout, fly out, and pop out for his second save.

Offensively we did all the damage in the first inning, for a change. In the first:

• Josh Donaldson hit a 1-out double (his first of two today, he looked much better at the plate).
• Justin Smoak walked.
• Teoscar Hernandez singled home Josh.
• Russell Martin hit a fly to fairly deep right, and it went off the glove of Chris Young for a 2-base error. Smoak and Hernandez scored.
• Then Kendrys Morales crushed a 2-run homer. We should all throw out our glasses.

That would be all the scoring we’d get. We threatened a couple of times. We only had 6 hits and 3 walks on the day. Josh and Kendrys had 2 hits each and all 3 of our extra base hits.

We had 0 fors from Granderson (0 for 4), Pillar (0 for 4), Martin (0 for 2, walk and he reached on the error), Urshela (0 for 3, 1 k) and Travis (0 for 3, 2 k).

We held Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani to 1 single and 1 walk in 8 PA. If we can keep doing that, it will be a good series.

Jays of the Day: Happ (.196 WPA), Morales (.133) and Donaldson (.101). Martin has the number at .162 but that’s for the error so I’m not giving him one.

No one gets the Suckage number, Pillar was the closest at -.073.

We had 656 comments in the thread. DangYouToHeck and I tied, leading us to victory as a tandem.