Stroman is great, Jays win

Tigers 2 Blue Jays 3

A terrific start for Marcus Stroman, it is nice to have the real Stroman back. He went 7 innings, allowed just 5 hits, 2 earned (I thought the first run should have been unearned, I don’t know how that wasn’t an error on Solarte), no walks, with 4 strikeouts (including his 500th career strikeout). He was great. It looked to me like he tired a bit in the 7th, he gave up a homer to Jeimer Candelario in the inning, but he seemed to be in control all evening long.

Seunghwan Oh pitched an excellent 8th inning, striking out the side. And Tyler Clippard allowed a leadoff single, but then got 2 strikeouts and a pop out to earn his 5th save of the season.

Offensively, we didn’t do a heck of a lot. We got all 3 runs in the 5th inning. Yangervis Solarte singled, followed by a Kendrys Morales single. Solarte was thrown out trying to get to 3rd base. I thought it was a bad move, getting thrown out at third with no outs isn’t smart.

Then Justin Smoak homered, his 10th of the season.

But it didn’t kill the rally. Kevin Pillar single, and we had back to back walks from Russell Martin and Aledmys Diaz. Pillar hit into a force out at home, but Randal Grichuk hit an infield single to score our 3rd run.

We had 8 hits and 6 walks on the day, so we should have scored more than 3 runs. Amazingly enough Pillar had his first walk of June and Diaz had his first walk since June 13th. Everyone reached base at least once except for Devon Travis.

Jays of the Day: Srroman (.201 WPA), Clippard (.170) Oh (.125) and Smoak (.221).

Suckage: Travis (-.116, 0 for 3) and Morales (-.119, 1 for 4, 2 strikeouts).

We had 352 comments in the GameThread. BlueJayEMT led us to victory. Great job.