OOTP Season Sim Game 84: Good start from Ryu, Jays beat Angels

There were a few Jays minor league moves, but only a couple of interesting ones.

• Thomas Pannone was demoted from Buffalo to New Hampshire.
• Jordan Groshans was promoted from Vancouver to Lansing.

Angels 6 Blue Jays 7

We got a good start from Hyun-Jin Ryu. 7 innings, 3 hits, 2 earned, 1 walk and 3 strikeouts. Max Stassi took him deep for his first home run of the season, in the third inning. And he gave up another run in the fourth, Anthony Rendon singled, moved to second on a walk to Shohei Ohtani (Ryu’s only walk of the game). Rendon and Ohtani pulled off a double steal and Rendon scored on a sac fly from Justin Upton.

Ryu left the game with the Jays up 6-2 but our bullpen let the Angels back into the game.

• Rafael Dolis went 1.1, giving up 2 hits, a hit batter (Mike Trout), a walk, and 3 earned. 2 of the runs against came on a Ohtani home run. That got him taken out of the game in favor of
• Ken Giles who gave up a solo homer to Upton before getting the last two outs of the game, getting his 17 save.

On offense we had 9 hits. Everyone in the lineup had a hit, excepting Travis Shaw, who went 0 for 4 and Reese McGuire who had 2 hits. All our runs scored on home runs, 5 of them.

We scored:

2 in the first: On back-to-back homers from Cavan Biggio and Lourdes Gurriel.

3 in the third: A walk to Biggio, and two outs later, back-to-back homers from Bo Bichette and Rowdy Tellez.

1 in the fifth: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. homered.

1 in the eighth: McGuire homered.

You can almost hear sim Buck and sim Pat complaining about our reliance on the home run.

Charlie Montoyo said “If you want to be considered a good team, these are the games you have to win”.

Let’s give Ryu a JoD and all of the home run hitters.

36,149 sim fans showed up at the old sim park, which had the roof open.

The Jays are 50-34. We’ve opened up a 2 game lead at the top of the AL East.

The Jays have tomorrow off. Then they have a 3-game set with the White Sox at home.

I made it to the end of the OOTP season I was playing. We finished in the number 1 Wild Card spot. And we beat the Yankees in the Wild Card game, in extra innings. In the 11th inning, Vlad hit a walk-off homer. Before that Jeter Downs (who was part of a trade for Ken Giles) had tied the game with a home run in the 9th.

But it wasn’t all good news for my team. Nate Pearson was out all season. I was looking forward to having him in the rotation next season, but he had surgery to repair a torn labrum and will be out for a year. I had hoped that, with him in the rotation next year, my team would be that much better and I wouldn’t be playing till game 162 hoping to hold on to a Wild Card spot. The injury changes how I planned the off-season. I was going to be looking for an outfielder, but now I need a good starter or maybe two.