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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Bungling bullpen costs Jays a victory
TORONTO -- Not to suggest that John Farrell was following a flight of whimsy, but you can imagine managers daydreaming about doing this. They just usually lack the resources to do it in ink.
The Toronto Blue Jays manager injected alternating current into his batting order against the Baltimore Orioles: five right-handed batters, each separated by a left-handed batter.
Farrell's notion was to pester Baltimore starter Tommy Hunter with alternating lefties because lefties have hit almost 50 points higher against him than right-handers. The scheme produced some highlights for the home side, but each time it worked, the Orioles seemed to hit another bomb.
On a night filled with very long and very high fly balls, the Blue Jays could have benefited from a few well-timed singles. They had only three among their seven hits, and their bullpen surrendered three runs in the last two innings, setting up a 7-5 Orioles victory at the Rogers Centre.
Toronto lit up Hunter with four homers, two by lefties Kelly Johnson and Colby Rasmus, the others by righties Yunel Escobar and Edwin Encarnacion. All came with the bases empty. Encarnacion's sixth-inning blast gave the Jays a 5-4 lead, which the bullpen blew in the eighth.
Another left-handed batter, Adam Lind, also delivered a critical hit, which was ruled an error, and rightly so, but he sliced it so hard on a line that it appeared to knuckle on outfielder Nolan Reimold, whose awaiting glove came up empty. Lind reached second on the play and Jose Bautista scored on a bit of derring-do in the neighbourhood of home plate.
Running from first, Bautista nearly ran into Matt Wieters' tag three-quarters well up the third-base line. But he pirouetted past the catcher, slid home, missed the plate, then bounced back and touched it just ahead of Wieters' desperate dive.
Baltimore hit three homers, two off starter Brandon Morrow and one off Casey Janssen in the ninth inning.
-- Postmedia News
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 14, 2012 C9
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