Jays score 10, get an easy win

Blue Jays 10 Athletics 1

It’s nice to win an easy one.

It would have been even nicer if Matt Shoemaker hadn’t left the game with an injury. They are saying a left knee strain, and he’ll have an MRI tomorrow. A strain is about the best we could hope.

Shoemaker went 3 innings, allowed 3 hits and had one strikeouts. He got the tag out in a rundown with Matt Chapman, to end the 3rd inning, when he was injured. It was a bit of a mess of a rundown. You really don’t like to get your pitcher involved in a rundown.

Sam Gaviglio came in in the fourth inning. Sam was terrific. He went 4 innings, allowed no base runners and had 5 strikeouts. I’m thinking Sam might get the call when we need a fifth starter. He gets the W.

Elvis Luciano pitched the last 2 innings. He had a pretty good 8th inning, but gave up a couple of hits and a run in the 9th. In all he went 2 innings, allowed 3 hits, 1 earned, 2 walks with 1 k.

The bats have finally arrived. We had a season high 15 hits.

Rowdy Tellez and Brandon Drury had 3 hits each. Rowdy and Brandon hit their homers back-to-back in our 5 run fourth inning. Brandon homered yesterday as well. Good to see him hitting finally.

Eric Sogard, Freddy Galvis, Justin Smoak and Billy McKinney had 2 hits each. Smoak hit his 4th home run of the season.

The only starters not to get in on the fun were Randal Grichuk (0 for 5, 2 k) and Luke Maile (0 for 3, walk and sac bunt). The bunt came with runners on first and second, with no outs in the 4th inning. Luke didn’t have the classic bunting style but got it down and we scored on Eric (see how it is supposed to be spelled Erik?) Sogard’s sac fly, to get our first run of the game. I’m not a fan of bunts in the fourth inning, but it worked.

Freddy Galvis catching a popup with his bare hand was the play of the day:

There was some fun at the end of the game. Kendrys Morales pitched for the A’s in the 9th inning. He pitched against the A’s last year. Kendrys gave up 2 walks, a hit batter and a single for an earned run.

The Jays are now 10-12 and have won 4 of their last 5 games. It looks like we jumped the gun with the early season doom and gloom. I mean, we are still going to lose a bunch of games this year, but we should know by now not to overreact to the first few games.

Tomorrow we go for the sweep.

Jays of the Day: Shoemaker (.156 WPA), Tellez (.165), Drury (.092) and I’m giving one to Gaviglio for his 4 perfect innings of work.

Suckage: No one had the number. Grichuk had the low mark at -.075.

Tomorrow we go for the sweep with Aaron Sanchez pitching.

We had 756 comments in the GameThread. Belisarius led us to victory. Great job.