Vlad Homers, Jays Win

Giants 1 Blue Jays 2

That was an interesting start for Chris Bassitt. He didn’t look totally sharp. He missed with a lot of pitches. And yet went 6 innings, getting 12 strikeouts. A 48% strikeout rate. He gave up just 3 hits, 3 walks and hit a batter.

I thought Alejandro Kirk did a terrific job behind the play, calling most of the pitches (Chris shook him off some and did use the pitch com to call some of his pitchers).and doing a great job of framing. I don’t know that we got a lot of strike calls that were balls, but Kirk did a terrific job of catching a lot of borderline pitches.

Once again, we couldn’t hit with runners in scoring position, but that was mostly because we never had anyone in scoring position. I was wrong, we had one RISP. Matt Chapman made it to second on a Joc Pederson throwing error.

Our two runs came on a Vladimir Guerrero home run (crushed 413 feet, 111 mph). Baseball Savant had it at a .950 expected batting average, which had me wondering about the 1 in 20 times that it wasn’t a hit.

We only had 3 hits on the day. We were snake-bit a fair bit. We had 8 balls hit at 100+ mph, but only 2 were hits, a Chapman single and Vlad’s homer. We just hit them where they were.

The bullpen did the job:

• Erik Swanson pitched a perfect seventh.
• Tim Mayza did the same in the eighth.
• On the other hand, Jordan Romano got our pulse rates up in the ninth. Patrick Bailey started the inning with a double off the right-field wall. It was just a couple of feet off a home run. A Blake Sabol single made it a 1-run game. But the Sabol tried to steal, Kirks throw wasn’t dead on line, but it was strong enough, and Santiago Espinal did an amazing job of grabbing it and making a tag. That was huge. After a strikeout for out number two, Luis Matos bounced one down the third base line. It looks like Chapman didn’t properly have it in his hand on the throw, and bounced past Belt. I thought Belt should have made the play, but it was tough. Thankfully Brandon Crawford popped one up to end the game. Jordan was also robbed on a call that would have been strike three in the Crawford at bat.

That’s save #24 for Jordan against 3 blown.

We didn’t really need a lot of great defense. Whit Merrifield made a terrific catch going back to the track to grab one.

On the Giants' side, Joc Pederson made 3 great catches in left field in his first game in the field this season. He also made a throwing error.

The Giants also had a couple of moments with the plate umpire. J.D. Davis was upset with a third-strike call and brought it up very respectfully with the umpire, suggesting that his inability to see had something to do with something in his family history. He was thrown, then manager Gabe Kapler was also thrown after discussing said family history.

The Giants also thought Bassitt balked a couple of times, and umpire John Tumpane came over to the dugout to discuss it.

Jays of the Day: Bassitt (.348 WPA), Vlad (.289) and I’m giving one to Kirk, despite the 0 for 2 with a hit batter, because he looked so good behind the plate. And let’s give an honourable mention to Swanson and Mayza.

No one gets the ‘Other Award’. Bo had the low mark, at -.073, for an 0 for 4, ending his hit streak at 13.

Tomorrow we start a three-game series with the Red Sox. James Paxton (3-1, 3.19) and Jose Berrios (8-5, 3.60) are the starters.