Rowdy Tellez hits two home runs, Jays win

Red Sox 1 Blue Jays 9

Yesterday’s game was long and boring. Today’s game was shorter and fun.

See they should have traded for Daniel Vogelbach long ago, it scared Rowdy Tellez into, you know, hitting the ball a long way. Or at least that’s the narrative I’m going to go with.

Let’s start with the pitching:

• Julian Merryweather was terrific. Pitched 2 innings, allowed 1 hit with 3 strikeouts. He just seemed unhittable. Great fastball, and great change up. I think the way Josh Donaldson was traded was stupid, but I can see why they wanted Merryweather. As much as it looked like he could go another inning, I’m glad Charlie was erring on the side of being careful, with Julian’s injury history.
• Shun Yamaguchi showed he deserves a shot at a starting job. He went 4 innings, allowed 2 hits, 1 solo homer (honestly it looked like a medium fly ball, the ball seems to travel well to left field in Buffalo), 2 walks and 2 strikeouts. He seemed to tire at the end of the 4 innings but he was great.
• Rafael Dolis, Anthony Bass and Sean Reid-Foley each pitched a scoreless inning to finish out the game, allowing just 1 walk between them. Reid-Foley did a nice job, helped out by a couple of nice plays by Cavan Biggio.

On offense we scored early and often:

• 1 in the first: Randal Grichuk homered.
• 1 in the second: Rowdy Tellez hit his first homer of the game.
• 2 in the fourth: Vladimir Guerrero doubled and Tellez followed with his second homer of the game.
• 5 in the seventh: Santiago Espinal led off with a single. Biggio and Grichuk followed with singles scoring Espinal. Travis Shaw lined out (he has been having bad luck). Teoscar Hernandez walked to load the bases and Vlad doubled down the left field line to unload the bases. A Tellez single scored Vlad.

We had 11 hits and 4 walks. Tellez had 3 and his home runs were no doubters. I always like the guys that hit long homers, you know Rowdy isn’t getting lucky or getting wind blown homers. He doesn’t get wall scrappers.

Grichuk, Vlad and Espinal had 2 hits each. Espinal is making good contact. He’s hitting .270 now. He seemed to pull something in his leg, running the bases in the seventh, but there was no way he was coming out of the game.

Lourdes Gurriel had 2 walks. That gives him 9 on the season, he had 20 in 84 games last year.

I did want to mention what a good day we had defensively. No mistakes today.

Jays of the Day: Tellez (.198 WPA), Shun (.119) and Merryweather (.104). Let’s give honorable mention to Vlad and Randal.

No Suckage Jays. Reese McGuire had the low mark at -.048 for an 0 for 4 (and he really looks lost at the plate).

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