Rays 6, Blue Jays 5: An Uncommonly Well-Earned Loss

Hill evades the tag, but the Blue Jays on the whole could not evade a massive self bag-tagging.

I am not going to front as though I suffered through all five Blue Jays errors last night in real time. I joined the proceedings with the score already 6-4 Rays, and figured, well, what can you do? No shame losing a close one to the best team in the American League, thought I. But when the crowd mock-cheered E5 as he scooped up a routine grounder for an easy out, it called my attention to the fact that yeah, woah, there were five errors on the board, and two of them had been committed by E5, who, with Jayson Nix manning third, spent the night at first. That's two E3s for E5, breaking new ground! 


His first of the night was particularly egregious, a bad toss to Hill covering first on a would-be sacrifice bunt. We all know Edwin has a devil of a time with the throw from third, but this was like ten feet, and underhand. Also he booted one in the eighth. Add to that a bad Jesse Litsch pickoff attempt in the third and a pretty spectacular sequence in the second where both Litsch and Jose Bautista committed throwing errors, and you've got yourself a five-error game, mister. Or missus. It's worth noting that the Bautista error was really just bad luck, a ball that hit the base itself and ricocheted, which I don't think I've ever seen happen before quite like that (also I have never before now spelled "ricocheted" correctly on the first try so huzzah for me, basically). Litsch scooped up the ball and hurriedly winged it to second, where he really had no play, and the ball rolled into centre. Not awesome! 


Despite all of those shenanigans, the Blue Jays kept it close, and after Rajai Davis doubled, stole third, and scooted home on a Yunel Escobar groundout in the ninth, the Blue Jays brought the tying run to the plate, only for Corey Patterson to be caught looking with Jose Bautista on deck. But so it goes. Patterson had a great night before that, with a double, triple, and two runs scored, so far be it from me to even consider the doing of a thing.


Also, remember how I got all worked up a little while ago about too much reckless baserunning, and it poisoned my enjoyment of a two-game sweep of the Red Sox, and then the universe punished me for that nonsense by causing a massive Blogger outage that permanently deleted those two posts? It was quite an amazing turn of events. Well it turns out I was being even dumber than I'd since realized , in that David Schoenfield points out that the Blue Jays are among the best baserunning teams in baseball according to Baseball Prospectus, a place where math is both employed and enjoyed, so I will totally get off that point for good.  In the same piece, Schoenfield notes that offense is down yet again this year, which makes something like Cliff Lee's totally-respectable-at-first-glance 3.83 ERA completely league average, and makes the performance of Jose Bautista -- who went 1-2 with two walks last night, so that's .372 with a .522 OBP now -- almost unbelievably epic, which is an argument I can get behind.


KS