Gurriel hits two homers, but Jays lose in a walk-off

Blue Jays 7 Yankees 8

I hate dumb manager moves.

Bottom of the 9th, Jays have just tied the game. We have Ken Giles all warmed up, but since it is not a save, we go with Nick Kingham. Managing to the save us just stupid baseball. Kingham only got 1 out, giving up a single, walk and walk-off single.

Charlie is driving me crazy with the bullpen. We have tomorrow off. He pulls Gaviglio after 1.2. Pulls Biagini after 1 inning. Pulls Hudson after 1. And then we are down to Kingham in the 9th inning. Can Charlie not see that the game might go to extra innings? Even if he hasn’t heard that baseball sometimes goes into extra innings, couple he think ‘maybe I shouldn’t use everyone by the 9th’?

Keep running through the relievers, looking for the guy who doesn’t have it. Charlie found him.

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That one had a fun start.

We scored 3 in the first. Back-to-back walks to Cavan Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero, followed by a home run by Lourdes Gurriel gave us a lead before we made our first out.

And we got 2 in the second. Brandon Drury singled and Danny Jansen hit one out over the left field wall. Not a cheapy. We were up by 5 and things looked good.

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Trent Thronton had a tough second inning. He gave up a 1-out homer to Didi Gregorius. Then a walk, single, walk and single scored 2 more. Trent threw a ton of pitches that inning. In fairness to Trent, there was a fly ball to deep right, foul, that Randal Grichuk came just short of catching, Randal look like he was worries about hitting the wall near the right field line. And one of the singles was a fly ball to left that would have been an out if Gurriel wasn’t playing so deep.

He made it through the second inning, despite a leadoff double. For some reason we asked for a review of the tag at second, even though replays seemed to show Luke Voit safe. I’m thinking that Charlie didn’t like all the grief he got for not challenging earlier in the season.

In the fourth inning Trent walked Gleyber Torres, to start the inning, and, an out later, gave up a home run to DJ LeMahieu and that was the end of his day.

Thornton went just 3.1, allowed 7 hits, 5 earned, 2 walks with 4 strikeouts. He threw 88 pitches.

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Sam Gaviglio got the last two outs of the fourth and gave up a run off 2 hits in the 5.

Joe Biagini followed (I thought Sam should go another inning). Joe gave up a run on 3 hits, giving the Yankees their first run of the game.

Tim Mayza pitched a scoreless 7th and faced one batter in the 8th giving up a single.

Daniel Hudson came in and got of the inning.

Any of Gaviglio, Biagini and Hudson could have, should have pitch another inning.

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After the Yankees tied the score in the fourth, Lourdes homered again in the fifth to put us up by a run again.

And, with the Yankees up by 1 going into the 9th, we scored to tie it up. Danny Jansen led off with a single. Cavan Biggio showed bunt, but Zack Britton threw a wild pitch (thank you for saving us from Charlie’s love of the bunt). Biggio would go on to single home Jansen.

But we couldn’t push the go ahead run across. Vlad reached on error, giving us runners on first and second with no outs. But Lourdes hit into a double play and Grichuk ground out.

We had 13 hits on the day. Biggio, Gurriel (with the 2 homers) and Jansen (1 homer and a walk) all had 3 hits. All the other starters had one except for Vlad (0 for 4, 1 walk, 1 k) and Teoscar Hernandez (0 for 4, 2 k).

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It might have been a sweep, but we played some good baseball in the sweep. We lose 3 games by a total of 4 runs. And we scored 18 runs.

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Tim and Sid told us that Charlie wasn’t asked about Ken Giles in the post-game conference. How you could you not ask him about that? It seems to be the obvious question, unless the beat guy just wanted to get out of the building and to the airport.

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Jays of the Day: Jansen (.258, nice to see him have a good game), Biggio (.253) and I’m giving one to Lourdes (.071, he lost a lot of WPA for the double play ball in the ninth, deservedly) for the 2 home runs.

Suckage: Kingham (-.358), Thornton (-.278), Biagini (-.113), Grichuk (-.139, he had a single and a walk, but he made our last out on offense with a runner on third), Galvis (-.130) and Teoscar (-.101). And Charlie for his use of the bullpen.

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There was other good news today:

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We had 341 comments in the GameThread. I led us to defeat.