I hate Tropicana Field. And Jays lose

Blue Jays 2 Rays 8

Man I gate that park. I know it wasn’t the park’s fault that we played badly, but it is such an ugly place to play baseball.

Mistakes were made.

I know a rebuilding team is going to make mistakes but some of them are irritating.

• The major one (ones): 4th inning, already a run in and a runner on second. Ji-Man Choi singles to left, Lourdes Gurriel comes up throwing to the plate. Not the right thing to do, because he had no shot at getting the out there. But Lourdes throws it low, it should have been cut off, but Vladimir Guerrero lets it go by. Now someone, everyone (Luke Maile especially) should have been yelling at him to cut it off. I didn’t hear anyone yelling (and there wasn’t such a big crowd that we wouldn’t have been able to hear). Anyway, runner scores and Maile, catching the throw, spins and fires towards, but well wide, of second and the ball goes up the gap, giving the batter a little league home run. Maile is in their for his glove. I expect better. Multiple mistakes in one play. I don’t blame Lourdes too much for the throw, he kept it low like they are taught. A throw into second would have been smarter, but if his throw was cut it wouldn’t have cost us. What gets me is the infielders have to communicate.
• Before that, same inning Tommy Pham hit a single to center and Jonathan Davis didn’t exactly rush to make the play, Pham turned it into a double.
• In the 3rd inning, a bouncing ball to Rowdy Tellez at first is booted. Tellez does make a nice play to throw out the runner trying to go first to third. A very good throw, but still, make the easy play.

Aaron Sanchez wasn’t sharp. He gave up 6 hits and 2 walks, in 3 innings, but only allowed one run to score.

There might have been a reason he wasn’t sharp, he left the game after the 3 innings with a right middle fingernail avulsion. That, apparently, means that he tore part or all his finger nail off. Ouch. He must use the nail on the finger to get the spin he needs, but there must be something they can do about it tearing.

Jacob Waguespack came in and looked very good. He was the victim the Jays inability to make plays, but he pitch 4 innings (when we really needed someone to get us some innings). In 4 innings he got 7 strikeouts. He allowed 3 hits, and a walk, that added up to 3 runs, 2 earned but really he pitched really well. If Aaron can’t make his next start, I’m betting Jacob gets to fill in.

Zac Rosscup started the 8th inning and had bad luck. He got Kevin Kiermaier to hit a ground ball to first, but, as a lefty that falls off to the third base side on his delivery, he couldn’t beat Kiermaier to first. I thought Rowdy should have seen that Zac wasn’t going to be in time and tried to beat Kiermaier to the bag himself. It would have been close, if he moved up on the ball and hustled. Next batter hit one back to Zac, but it deflected off his glove and past the infielders. By the time someone got to it, it was a double.

Sam Gaviglio came in with runners on second and third and well, wasn’t good. Double, homer, ground out, double and we were suddenly down 4 more runs. Sam hasn’t looked good of late. I don’t know if he’s dealing with a tired arm (he has pitched a ton) or if the league has just figured him out, but he has given up a lot of hard hit balls his last few times out.

Offensively, once again, we didn’t do much. Our first hit was leading off the 6th inning, Luke Maile doubled. And we didn’t score until the 7th when Jonathan Davis hit is first MLB home run.

We scored one more in the 9th, Freddy Galvis homered. Gurriel almost followed that with another homer, but it hit the top of the wall for a double.

We had some hard hit balls. Rowdy was robbed by Kiermaier making a catch at the top of the wall in center. Vlad had two hard hit line drives caught.

In total we had 4 hits and 5 walks.

There was an example of how baseball has changed. Rays starter Yonny Chirinos pitched 5 hitless innings, 69 pitches and was pulled. A few years ago a starting pitcher would have fought the manager on the mound to stay in that game, not that a manager would have pulled a guy throwing great after 5 innings.

No JoD today.

Suckage: Tellez (-.154, but he was robbed at the wall and he was robbed on a check swing strike three call that looked, to me, like he held up). Waguespack also had the number (-.171), but that was mostly because of some crappy defense behind him.

We had 333 comments in the GameThread. I led us to defeat.