Bats Reappear, Shoemaker Dominant In First Win of the Season

Blue Jays 6, Tigers 0

For the first few innings, it looked like history was about to repeat itself. Drury led off the game clubbing a triple off the wall only to be wasted as the Jays struck out the next three at bats. Matt Boyd struck out seven batters in the first three innings, helping the Blue Jays set a new franchise record for scoreless innings to open a season.

In the fourth, the Jays managed to put together four runs, as a walk to Grichuk and back to back singles to Smoak and Hernandez drove in the first run of the season for Toronto. After yet another strike out and a remarkably common pop out from Pillar, McKinney hit a dribbler that Josh Harrison couldn’t come up with, leaving the bases safely loaded. Galvis hit a sharp single into centre that cleared the bases when Mikie Mahtook dropped the ball during the transfer and threw it into the turf for good measure, letting Galvis go all the way to third. The Jays added two more off Blaine Hardy when a Galvis single and a Maile walk were able to advance on a soft grounder by Grichuk. Smoak hit a groundball into left field to score Galvis and Maile.

Matt Shoemaker was tremendous, pitching 7 innings and allowing just 2 hits and two walks, while striking out seven. The only real threat he faced was in the sixth, when Nick Castellanos tripled off the wall with one out. Castellanos was caught too far off third on a Miguel Cabrera groundball and was tagged out in the run down. Javy Guerra pitched a perfect two innings to finish off the game.

Jays of the Day: Matt Shoemaker, Freddy Galvis

Suckage: It’s the first win of the season, so let’s say none for today.

In the game thread, we had 1008 comments and Belisarius led the way with 133 comments! I think it is pretty obvious that we’ve been missing real baseball.