Blue Jays lose in extras

Twins 12 Blue Jays 6 (11 innings)

For 7 and a half innings, this looked like your typical Blue Jays loss. Coming into the bottom of the 8th, we were down 6-3 and there were no signs of life from the Jays side.

Then came the bottom of the 8th.

Kendrys Morales singled, Randal Grichuk doubled and Teoscar Hernandez walked to load the bases.

Luke Maile singles and it is a 1-run game.

Aledmys Diaz ground out, and the tying runs scores (and Tom deletes his recap).

Before that, we didn’t do a lot on offense. We scored a run in:

• The 1st: Curtis Granderson singled, Justin Smoak walked and Kendrys Morales doubled home Curtis. After that Yangervis Solarte lined to short and, for reasons defying logic, Morales left second and was easily doubled off. This is foreshadowing.
• The 2nd: Grichuck doubled. Dwight Smith was hit by pitch. Maile ground out, moving up the runner. Diaz hits a sac fly.
• The 5th: Gurriel doubled. Smoak singled, but Gurriel misread it and only made it to third, but then he scored on Kendrys sac fly.

We should have walked it off in the 9th. Gurriel lead off with a single. An out later he goes to third on a Morales single. But, Solarte hit a little liner, and, again stupidly, Morales took off from his base and was very easily doubled off. Two stupid baserunning mistakes for Kendrys.

Sam Gaviglio started and pitched 5 innings, allowed 6 hits, 3 earned, 3 walks and 4 strikeouts. He was sort of ok.

We used a bunch of relievers:

• Aaron Loup gave up a solo homer in his inning.
• Tyler Clippard gave up a hit and walk but got out of his inning.
• Joe Biagini had a terrible time of it. He gave up a single, double and single, scoring 1 and ending his night without recording an out.
• Ryan Tepera came in and gave up a double, allowing one more to score, but got out of the inning from there.
• Jaime Garcia pitched 2 perfect innings, with 2 strikeouts.
• Jake Petricka came into the 11th, and had all sorts of trouble with the home plate ump. He got 2 outs, then gave up a double, two walks (Jake was not happy) and hit a batter to put us behind again. Gibby got tossed complaining about the zone.
• Bases still loaded and Luis Santos in. with two outs. Santos gives up a double and we are down by 3. Another double and we are down by 5. Another single and down by 6. Yet another single, but no runs this time. He finally got the last out seemingly an hour and a half later. All the hits and runs (6) came after there were 2 outs. I don’t understand how Santos is in the majors.

We had 16 hits, so not too bad.

We had 3 hits each from Kendrys, Grichuk, Smoak and Maile.

2 hits each from Gurriel (8 multi-hit games in a row) and Granderson.

Kendrys is really the goat of the game, 2 times doubled off a base. Almost impossible to believe a major league player could do that twice. He also hit into a double play to end the game, not exactly flying down the line.

Teoscar Hernandez made a very good catch in left and seemed to be hustling on everything, after he came into the game in the 6th inning as a pinch hitter.

Jays of the Day: Garcia (.289 WPA), Maile (.218) and Grichuk (.158). Morales had the number, .349, but that doesn’t take into account the blockhead baserunning.

Suckage: Solarte (-.539, 0 for 5, leave 7 runners on base. And his number doesn’t even count some bad defense), Petricka (-.341), Biagini (-.188), Santo (-.155), Granderson (-.139), Diaz (-.107) and Loup (-.097). And I’m giving one to Kendrys.

We had 427 comments in the GameThread. Alan and I tied at the top. I spent last few innings writing then rewriting the recap and writing about the possible Oh trade.