The maddening, depressing, frustrating, infuriating, torturous tendencies of September reappeared in Saturday’s game against the Angels. Most particularly, the inability to score on starting pitchers, no matter how crappy. In 15 games in September, the Blue Jays have scored three runs or more on a starter only twice: Thursday’s three off nondescript Daniel Wright, and six off of Boston’s Clay Buchholz on 9/11. In the month of September, starters not named Buchholz had a collective 2.48 ERA against the Jays coming into today’s game. After managing just two hits against Alex Meyer today, that figure fell to 2.34.
Another troubling aspect of this ongoing spiral is defensive sloppiness. That showed up early when a catcher interference error (the team’s 16th error in the last 14 games) was charged to Navarro in the second contributed to the Angels’ first run of the day.
In the following inning, after the Angels put two runners on with one out for Albert Pujols, the game was delayed for 13 minutes while a swarm of bees did what bees do. It turned out to have no real impact though, as Marcus Stroman pitched out of the mini-jam when play resumed. Stroman actually did his job well enough overall despite not having his strikeout stuff working. Seven hits and two runs over six innings is a successful outing.
But with the once formidable offense continuing to be completely impotent, it wasn’t nearly enough. Toronto is left to wear a humiliating shutout as the board the plane for the completion of the road trip.
Top Play of the Game by WPA
With Mike Trout at second base and one out in the top of the fifth, Albert Pujols laced an RBI liner to RF to score Trout for the Angels’ second run of the game, which would be more than enough. That play increased their chances of winning by 10.2%.
Bottom Play of the Game by WPA
The Jays saw a baserunner advance to third base only once in the game, when they had a first and third, one out, opportunity in the top of the third. This was followed by a hard smash off the bat of Josh Donaldson right at Yunel Escobar at third and a classic 5-4-3 double play. This dropped their chances of winning 13.9%.
Strikeouts-r-us
Five of the Blue Jays first six at bats ended with a strikeout, that ran their total on the season to 1,252 to establish a new franchise record. Yipee. The Jays would go on to establish a new record seven more times in this game. It’s there 48th game with 10 or more strikeouts in 2016. For comparison, they averaged 28 such games in each of the three previous years.
Up Next
A Jays fan is going to need some top grade pharmaceuticals in order to feel any optimism at this point. Tomorrow they move on to Seattle to face the Mariners who are 9-2 in their last 11 games and, oh by the way, opposing teams have scored more than 3 runs just once in that span. Meanwhile, The division leading Red Sox visit the now second-place Orioles in a series in which Jays fans have no one to feel good about rooting for.
Lead Photo: Gary A. Vasquez – USA Today Sports