New day, same outcome, Jays lose

Blue Jays 1 Cleveland 3

The bats still haven’t arrived from Dunedin or where ever they were at the end of spring training.

Before the game the Jays pitchers led the AL in strikeouts with 110 and our batters led the league in strikeouts at 95. Now it is 119 and 111, still both leading the league

Most games, up until today, you could say that they got unlucky on balls in play. Today? None of that. We didn’t have much for hard hit balls. And we struck out 16 times.

We had a really tough time against Mike Clevinger. He went 5 innings allowing 1 hit and 1 walk with 10 strikeouts. Apparently he left with some kind of injury, but likely nothing serious.

We had one chance to score against him. In the fourth inning, Socrates Brito walked and Freddy Galvis doubled, to give us players on second and third and no outs. One of those spots you really have to score. But Randal Grichuk struck out, Rowdy Tellez struck out (swinging at a pitch at head level) and Teoscar Hernandez struck out. That was very frustrating.

There could be an argument that Brito should have been send home on the double (he was at third before the throw to the cut off man, but with no outs, no reason to take the chance.

We did finally score in the 8th inning. Billy McKinney led off with a double. After Alen Hanson struck out, Richard Urena walked. And then Danny Jansen singled home McKinney. Lourdes Gurriel came in to pinch hit for Brito. I didn’t really like the move cause Brito’s had some decent at bats, while Gurriel has been totally lost, but ok. Lourdes swung at the first pitch and hit into a double play.

Giving a slight excuse for the bad at bats, the strike zone has pretty bad all series long but it seems like everyone is trying to crush the ball, when just making contact would be nice.

Marcus Stroman had a decent start. 6 innings, 6 hits, 3 earned, 1 walk and 6 strikeouts. He had some bad luck on some two out hits and he was pitching up in the zone early in the game, but he did ok.

Tim Mayza and Ken Giles pitched a scoreless inning each. Mayza looked the best I’ve seen him this season.

Jay of the Day? Let’s give one to Jansen (.083 WPA). We should all get one for watching that mess.

Suckage: Gurriel (-.182, all on that one pinch hit double play ball), Grichuk (-.128, 0 for 4, 2 k, all he had to do was make contact in the 4th and we could have had a run), Tellez (-.112, 0 for 2, k, ditto the Grichuk line), Hernandez (-.096, 0 for 3, k) and Hanson (-.091).

Tomorrow is an off-day. Might be good for the team to get away from baseball for a day, go to a museum or something.

We had 672 comments in the GameThread. I led us to a dismal defeat.