Blue Jays win a game, lose a starter

Blue Jays 10 White Sox 2

We got to double digit runs for just the second time this season. The first time was back on April 20 against the A’s.

But we lost another starter. Aaron Sanchez pitched 2 perfect innings. He had some troubles in the 3rd, but then he sat for half an hour while the Jays scored a bunch of runs in the top of the inning, so we gave him the excuse. Then in the 4th he hit a batter, walked a batter and Montoyo came out with trainer Nikki Huffman and took him out of the game.

They clearly knew that there was a blister developing, so why send him out for the 4th inning? It doesn’t make any sense at all to me. Why make an injury worse? Hopefully they got him out of there before it got bad.

I don’t know what we would do without Sam Gaviglio. He came in with 2 on and no outs in the 4th and got a double play ball and got us out of the inning. Then he pitched two more scoreless innings. We won big, but those 3 scoreless innings saved us from using more relievers.

Javy Guerra pitched the last 3 innings and did a nice job as well. He gets a rare 3 inning save. And It really is a save because he saved us from using another arm out of the pen, and we are going to need those arms tomorrow (we don’t know who is starting tomorrow, perhaps someone is flying in from Buffalo or New Hampshire right now). Javy gave up a couple of hits in the 9th, but Eric Sogard made a very nice catch on a liner to end the game.

Three pitchers each going three innings.

As soon as I hit post there was this:

And we scored a bunch. We had runs in each of the first 5 innings. And we made a nice pattern. By inning we scored 1 2 4 2 1.

We had 14 hits (Marcus must be grumbling under his breath after he gets just 2 hits of support yesterday). Every player in the lineup had a hit. Billy McKinney had 4 (I guess we can stop worrying that he hurt himself running into the fence yesterday (maybe he loosened some batting ability). Danny Jansen and Randal Grichuk each had 2 hits. Billy’s batting average went from .224 to .248 in a game. Pretty nice.

And Justin Smoak, Jansen and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. each hit home runs. For Jansen it was his first of the season (hoping this shakes his season long slump) and Smoak hit his first homer since April 21. We really could us Smoak getting one of his hot streaks going. Vlad needed a little help from White Sox center fielder Leury Garcia to get his 3rd home run of the season. Vlad’s hit it about a foot short of the center field wall, Garcia jumped to catch it and it went off his glove and over the wall.

Jays of the Day: Jansen (.165 WPA) and Smoak (.135).

No suckage award. Rowdy had the low mark at -.026.

We had 624 comments in the GameThread. DangYouToHeck led the way again. He lapped the field, so the rest of us are going to have to up our games tomorrow.