Blue Jays lose game and Donaldson

Blue Jays 3 Red Sox 8

That was less that fun in many ways.

Most important, Josh Donaldson came out of the game with ‘left calf tightness’. It will likely be a day or two, or more before we find out whether he ends up on the DL or not. If he goes on the DL, we’ll all be campaigning to have Vlad called up. At best he’ll be out a few days.

Aaron Sanchez had a rough day. Or more a rough inning. The Red Sox scored 5 in the 4th inning. The inning started off with a handful of singles, not particularly well hit balls, finding holes. Ground balls going through and pop up falling between the outfield and the infield. Then a hard hit double and a crushed home run. After the home run, Aaron got 2 quick strikeouts, but it was a little late.

All in, 5 innings, 9 hits, 7 earned, 1 walk and 4 strikeouts for Sanchez.

On offense, we should have scored more, 7 hits, 5 of them extra base hits (two back-to-back triples for Devon Travis and Teoscar Hernandez) and 5 walks should have added up to more than 3 runs.

There was some good news, Teoscar had the triple and a double and was hitting the ball hard. Travis had the triple and a couple of other hard hit balls. Morales had a hard hit single and he crushed one to deep center that Jackie Bradley made a terrific catch on. And Pillar was hitting the ball hard.

On the other hand, Solarte was 0 for 3 and hit into a double play when we needed better.

Our defense wasn’t great. We had 2 double play balls that weren’t turned into double plays. Solarte isn’t a shortstop and Travis’ arm isn’t great at second. Maile threw a ball into center field on a stolen base attempt and was given a passed ball on a pitch were he was crossed up.

Martin did ok in left, he did have a ball bounce past him on a fly that hit the wall in left and then bounced over him, but that’s happened to many left fielders.

Jay of the Day: Pillar had the number (.105).

Suckager: Sanchez (-.339), Solarte (-.119) and Maile (-.112, 0 for 4, plus the error and the passed ball).

We had 722 comments in the GameThread, a good total for a weekday day game. AlanF led us to crushing defeat. Good work sir.