Jays Lose in Extras

Blue Jays 3 Cardinals 7 (10 innings)

I had the ‘stop playing around with the ball every year’ rant early today. This game was exhibit A for that rant.

It was another in the ‘frustrating game’ set, collect them all. Balls hit hard don’t fly quite far enough. Balls hit softly stay in the air just long enough to be caught.

Jose Berrios had a nice start. He gave up a run in the second and then things went well until the seventh when he seemed to tire in the seventh. He gave up a one-out home run to Juan Yepez. And then back-to-back singles. That was the end of Jose’s night.

Adam Cimber came in with runners on the corners, and gave up a single to allow the Cards to tie the game, then got a nice double-play ball.

So 6.1 innings for Berrios, 7 hits (3 in that seventh inning), no walks and 7 strikeouts. 3 earned runs, one that came in after he left the game.

Trevor Richards pitched a nice eighth. Julian Merryweather gave up a hard-hit double off the left-field wall, to start the ninth, which Lourdes Gurriel got to but then jumped when he didn’t have to, and the ball went under his glove, and off the wall, for a double. Tough play, but he got there. If you are going to run that far, make the catch. But Merryweather got a popout, and a double play, after an intentional walk.

After the Jays didn’t score in the top of the tenth, David Phelps came in to try to hold serve. A wild pitch moved the runner from second to third with no outs. But two strikeouts (Harrison Bader and Albert Pujols). After a walk, Charlie decided to bring in Ryan Borucki to face lefty batter, Nolan Gorman.

But then the Cards pitch hit righty Edmundo Sosa, who Ryan walked. Paul Goldsmith against Borucki didn’t seem the optimum.

It wasn’t. Ryan got to 1-2 before Goldsmith walked it off with a home run.

Fair question about taking Phelps out with the lefty coming up. Phelps pitched yesterday and threw more pitches tonight than they would have liked.

Blaming Charlie for the loss is guessing at a lot of things. We couldn’t score in the tenth with a runner on second. Would we be in the eleventh? And would Phelps have been able to get us there?

But man, can we blame the offense.

We had all of 4 hits today. On the plus side, 3 runs on 4 hits is a pretty good ratio. But sooner or later, we have to get hitting.

We scored:

• One in the sixth: A Springer home run.
• Two in the seventh: With one out, Alejandro Kirk singled, and Matt Chapman walked. An out later, Bradley Zimmer was hit by pitch. Then bases-loaded walks for Springer, and Santiago Espinal brought in the runs. Vlad came up next and ground one to the third baseman.

It has been tough to understand. Vlad, Bo and Teoscar were 0 for 13 (Vlad had 2 walks).

We definitely were ripped off by the mushy ball and bad luck in several spots:

• Kirk had hits with .840, .560 and .420 expected BA, all hit over 100 MPH.
• Chapman had a lined out, .430 EBA and a fly out to the track that I was sure was a home run, .660 EBA. He had three outs hit at over 100 MPH
• Teoscar finally had some hard-hit balls. Two ground outs (106.8 and 102.6 MPH) with .670 and .610 EBA. Also, a fly-out with a .480 EBA.

Jays of the Day: Springer (.238) WPA), Phelps (.172), Merryweather (.127), Richards (.100) and Zimmer (.092).

Suckage: Borucki (-.370), Bo (-.225), Teoscar (-.243). Berrios had the number too, -.125, but I thought he had a pretty good game. If he came out after 6 innings, it would have seemed a great start.

Tomorrow, assuming there is a tomorrow, we have Kevin Gausman (3-3, 2.52) vs. Jordan Hicks (1-3, 4.21).