Great pitching gets the Jays a win

Blue Jays 2 Marlins 1

I like 2-1 wins.

The Blue Jays were very economical in their offense today.

We scored:

• One in the sixth: Bo Bichette was hit by pitch, with one out, stole second, went to third on a wild pitch, and scored on Vladimir Guerrero’s first hit of the game.
• One in the ninth: With one out, Cavan Biggio doubled down the right-field line, and then Lourdes Gurriel doubled to left field, giving us our first lead of the night, just at the right time.

Our batters had a really tough time with Sandy Alcantara, who allowed 5 hits and 1 run in 8 innings, with just 3 strikeouts. He came out of the game at 86 pitches (thankfully). The lovely NL rules got him pulled from the game for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth.

We had a better time with Yimi Garcia.

We had just 7 hits in total, 2 each for Vlad and Reese, though one of those two for Reese was a swinging bunt that started off foul, but rolled back to the third baseline, and then the Marlins’ catcher picked it up. Just a bad baseball play.

Marcus Semien had a particularly rough day, 0 for 4 with 2 strikeouts. George Springer was also 0 for 4 but made some contact.

Ross Stripling had another very nice start. 6 innings, 2 hits, 1 earned, 1 walk, 7 strikeouts. Unfortunately one of the two hits was a Jesus Sanchez home run. He was terrific.

And so was our bullpen:

• Tyler Chatwood pitched a quick seventh, with a strikeout.
• Tim Mayza may have been even better, with 2 strikeouts in the eighth. Tim gets the win.
• Jordan Romano gave up a single, to Starling Marte, to start the ninth, but Marte was thrown out stealing by Reese McGuire (great throw). Then a popup and a strikeout and Jordan gets save number four on the season.

Of note: Vlad made an error at first, just dropping a very easy throw. Just a moment of inattention. He made a couple of nice plays tonight too.

Jays of the Day: Stripling (.168 WPA), Romano (.139), Mayza (.099), Gurriel (.235). Vlad had a .094, but I’m subtracting points for the error. Let’s give him an honorable mention, along with Chatwood.

Suckage: Hardly fair, but Springer had a -.145, though he looked to be running fine. Let’s give one to Semien (-.113) too.

Tomorrow we go for the sweep of the two-game series.

We had 546 comments in the GameThread (only a few of them the letter e). EMK19 led us to a very nice win.