Toronto Blue Jays Thoughts, April 28th Edition: In Which Brandon Morrow Stops Pitching To Contact
We’ve won a game! I wouldn’t think beating the Mariners would necessarily be the most exciting thing to happen over a weekend, but after watching the Toronto Blue Jays get swept by the Orioles (and losing the opener against the M’s), a definitive W is a sight for sore eyes. The 7-0 victory keeps the team over .500 for now, with a 11-10 record that is on pace for 85-77.
- Brandon Morrow had been employing a pitch-to-contract approach over his first few turns with mixed results, but he more or less abandoned that this afternoon vs the M’s en route to a brilliant outing (6 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 9 K). It was a thing of beauty, full of knee-buckling curves, wicked sliders, capped off by this 97-mph heater that blew right by a hapless Jesus Montero to a 2-baserunner threat in the 6th, which was as close as the M’s got to scoring on Morrow. Yeah, it took him 104 pitches to get through 6 innings; but you know, I think I’d rather have this version of Morrow every time out, even if it means he’ll never be an innings-eating horse that we want him to be.
- It was the revenge of the grand slams at the Rogers Centre today. The Blue Jays lost to a Michael Saunders slam last night, and Edwin Encarnacion returned the favour today, plating 4 insurance runs on a 3-0 lead with a knock off reliever Hisashi Iwakuma. Encarnacion’s now homered in back-to-back games for the first time since October, 2010, and has a team-high 6 home runs. Did someone switch his bat with Jose Bautista’s?
- Despite the lopsided the score, the game was actually pretty close most of the time, with M’s starter Kevin Millwood doing a very un-Millwood like job at the Blue Jays bats at bay through 7 inning (7 H, 2 BB, 1 ER). The team did manage to turn an inning-ending double play ball from Bautista into what turned out to be a 3-run inning against Millwood, but it’s somewhat disheartening that the team is still in the habit of making mediocre starting pitchers on opposing teams look pretty damned good.
- I do have to wonder just what John Farrell meant when he declared Encarnacion his clean-up hitter, because Adam Lind and his sub-.700 OPS was back in that spot again today. The move made Farrell look pretty darned smart, though, with Lind going 2-for-3, eventually getting intentionally walked, with the Mariners choosing to face the red-hot Encarnacion instead. Don’t think we’ll be seeing too much of that from opposing teams going forward.
Henderson Alvarez will look to keep the momentum going for the Blue Jays tomorrow against the M’s Jason Vargas, and the team will probably need it, too, because the schedule after that starts to look pretty daunting, with a 3-game series against the Texas Rangers to kick things off in May.
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