Lots of offense, Jays beat Red Sox

Red Sox 5 Blue Jays 8

What a difference a day makes. Tonight was much more fun than yesterday. It is always great to beat Boston.

We got plenty of hits tonight, 12. And a couple of them were home runs: Teoscar Hernandez had an opposite field solo homer in the 3rd inning and Randal Grichuk had a 2-run homer in the 5th.

And we scored without homers:

• 2 in the first, Curtis Granderson and Devon Travis started us off with walks, Justin Smoak singled home Granderson (giving Smoak a 13 game hitting streak) and Travis scored on a Grichuk ground out.
• 1 in the second: Russell Martin walked, Aledmys Diaz singled and Martin scored when Red Sox third baseman made a throwing error on a Kevin Pillar ground ball.
• 1 in the fifth, before Grichuk’s 2-run homer, Travis led off with a single and scored on Smoak’s double. Good baserunning by Travis.
• 1 in the sixth: Granderson hit a 2-out double, Travis singled him home, but was thrown out at second trying to go to second on the throw home. He was called safe but it was overturned on review.

Almost everyone hit tonight. Smoak had 3 hits. Travis and Diaz had 2 hits each. The only Jay not to get a hit was Martin, who reached on a walk. Russell needed a hit to get his average up to .200.

Jays starter Ryan Borunki had to work tonight. He gave up 8 hits and 3 walks, but only 4 runs, in 5 innings. He worked himself into and out of trouble just about every inning. But he also gave up his first MLB home run, off the bat of J.D. Martinez. No shame in that.

Borucki gets his 2nd win.

Our bullpen did the job:

• Jaime Garcia gave up a walk but got through a scoreless sixth.
• Tyler Clippard pitched a clean seventh with a strikeout.
• Ryan Tepera had a clean 8.
• And Ken Giles gave up a homer to Mookie Betts (giving Betts the cycle today) but ended the inning with 2 strikeouts. I wasn’t bothered by the homer, he get to a full count and challenged Mookie. With a 4-run lead, make him hit it.

Jays of the Day: Smoak (.228 WPA). He was the only one with the number. Let’s give Grichuk and Hernandez honorable mention.

Suckage: Borucki gets the number, -.152. He gave up a ton of baserunners, but seemed to focus when he needed to.

I wanted to mention that Teoscar Hernandez played well in the outfield. He didn’t have anything too tricky, but he made the catches. He came a long way in to get a popup, when in the past he’d leave it for the infielders. And he made a catch in the left field corner, a catch that a major leaguer should make, but he’d had troubles with those. He also played a ball off the wall perfectly.

Pillar ran into the center field wall hard, attempting to make a catch. He missed and fell to the ground but Teoscar backed him up nicely.

And, for some reason, Buck and Pat were really bugging me tonight. Maybe I’m tired and grumpy, but I needed to use the mute button quite a bit.

We had 625 comments in a very pleasant GameThread. DangYouToHeck led us to victory.