Blue Jays takeaways: Buffalo boo birds chirp Astros on miserable night for the home side

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2021 (1624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 13-1 loss to Houston in Buffalo:

Hyun-Jin Ryu has been one of the best pitchers in the major leagues since coming to Toronto (in name only, he’s never actually pitched at the Rogers Centre as a Blue Jay), but he got good and roughed up on Friday night.

After breezing through the first three innings, allowing only an infield single, the lefty gave up a booming RBI double off the base of the wall in dead centre to Yordan Alvarez in the fourth, and Carlos Correa took him deep in the fifth.

The wheels really fell off in the sixth inning, though, as Ryu issued a couple of walks and then gave up a two-out grand slam to the nine-hitter, Martin Maldonado, who dragged a .153 batting average into that at-bat.

Ryu wasn’t helped nearly enough by the defence behind him, but he also had his issues with the bottom of the lineup.

One of the walks that preceded Maldonado’s slam went to rookie Chas McCormick, hitting seventh and batting .194. Myles Straw, who hit eighth, had a couple of hits off Ryu and scored a run.

Even though they’re probably not banging on garbage cans anymore, the Astros still have some pretty good hitters, and if a pitcher doesn’t take advantage of the outs at the bottom of the order it’s going to be a long night.

Ryu didn’t put those weaker hitters away, and he paid for it.

• Too many cracks: The Jays were full measure for getting blown out in their series opener against Houston. Playing an awfully sloppy game while facing a potential Hall of Fame pitcher doesn’t usually add up to a happy night.

Zack Greinke set the tone early with a four-pitch first inning, and mesmerized Jays hitters with a fastball that barely broke 90 all night, curveballs that ranged from 69 to 73 miles per hour and a slider in the low 80s.

If a team is having a hard time getting to a pitcher, the thing to do is play as crisp a game as possible, in order to minimize the other team’s chances. The Jays didn’t do that at all.

The first crack in the foundation, in the third inning, didn’t amount to anything.

Bo Bichette fielded a Straw ground ball far to his left, spun and fired well wide of first base. It’s not that Bichette made a bad throw. It’s that he threw it at all. Straw might be the fastest runner on the Astros, and he was just about at first base by the time Bichette let go of the ball. There was no reason at all to even make that throw. The runner was stranded at second, so there was no penalty for that mistake.

In the fourth, former Blue Jay Aledmys Diaz singled to left and, as he rounded first, saw that no one was covering second base, so he just kept on going. He wound up scoring on the Alvarez double.

An inning later, Straw hit a grounder wide of short that ticked off Bichette’s glove as he moved to his right. Bichette jogged after the ball as it slowly rolled to shallow left, and as he did Straw hustled into second base. A ground ball got Straw to third, and he scored on a sacrifice fly.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Dan Lett | Not for Attribution

Tuesdays

A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world.

Sign up for Dan Lett | Not for Attribution

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

The sloppiness wasn’t just on defence, either. Danny Jansen led off the sixth with a pop-up to shallow centre that fell into no man’s land between the incoming centre-fielder Straw and outgoing second baseman Jose Altuve.

Jansen jogged out of the batter’s box and all the way to first. He was only a few steps beyond the bag when he saw the ball drop and so, even though he started sprinting once it did, he was thrown out at second.

• Buffalo boo birds: It was the first time that the Houston Asterisks played a road game against the Jays since the scandal that stole them the 2017 World Series championship became public, and the fans at Sahlen Field made their distaste for the dirty, dirty cheaters known rather full-throatedly.

Altuve was the target of most of the booing, as the crowd of 5,510 let him have it every time he came to the plate. Correa — who was unrepentant in the playoffs last season, screaming “What are they going to say now?” after a wild-card series victory — heard a few, too.

The sting of the boos, if there was any at all for players who issued a pretty empty apology, was definitely blunted by the fact that Houston ran away with the game.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness