Blue Jays takeaways: Boston can’t get the third out in Toronto rout

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This article was published 18/05/2021 (1641 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 8-0 win over Boston on Tuesday:

It would be too easy to once again rave about the dominance of Hyun-Jin Ryu, who threw seven shutout innings at the first-place team in the American League East in the series opener, so I found some other stuff:

• Everything happens with two out: The Blue Jays were hitting .222 as a team with two out going into Tuesday’s game, and had scored 61 of their 192 runs (31.8 per cent) in that situation. The average major-leaguer is hitting .225 with two out this season, so the Jays are a little worse, and the average big-league team has scored 37.3 per cent of its runs with two out, leaving the Jays well behind on that front.

They caught up a little in the opener against Boston, scoring seven of their eight runs with two-out hits. It started in the second inning, when Danny Jansen singled to bring home Randal Grichuk. The lead was still just one run with two out in the fourth, when Marcus Semien singled to drive in two runs and Bo Bichette followed with an RBI double. The Jays put together a rally with two out and nobody on in the sixth when Bichette drew a walk and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Teoscar Hernandez singled. And they added two more runs on a Grichuk homer in the eighth.

The only run the Jays scored with less than two out came in the fifth, when Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s one-out RBI single drove in Hernandez. Gurriel wound up with three hits, giving him four consecutive multi-hit games, seven away from the club record he established in 2018.

• Going the other way: When Boston left-hander Eduardo Rodriguez faced the Jays back in April, he worked into the seventh inning and held them to just three hits. He wasn’t nearly as effective a second time around, allowing five runs on 11 hits and lasting just five innings.

The Jays reversed their fortunes against him by reversing their approach. The often pull-happy Jays made it a point to take Rodriguez to the opposite field, and it worked.

Jansen, a notorious pull hitter, singled to right field to drive in the game’s first run in the second inning. With two on and two out in the fourth, Semien reached out and dropped a flare into short right field to drive in both runners. Bichette’s double that followed was a shot to the gap in right-centre. Gurriel’s fifth-inning single was a line drive to right, scoring Hernandez, who had doubled to right-centre.

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It was a clinic on hitting the ball where it is pitched, something a lot of the Jays don’t tend to do very often, and it got them six early runs without once hitting the ball out of the park.

That Grichuk homer in the eighth? Opposite field.

• Battle of 99s: With apologies to old-time Maple Leafs forward Wilf Paiement, it was Wayne Gretzky who made the number 99 an iconic one, and it’s a number that you don’t see all that often in the other major sports.

It’s unusual to see a pair of 99s squaring off in a big-league baseball game, but that happened three times Tuesday night when Ryu faced Red Sox left-fielder Alex Verdugo.

The two were former teammates with the Los Angeles Dodgers, where Verdugo first wore 61 and later changed to 27, and they met in the first, fourth and sixth innings. Ryu gave up just four hits in his seven innings of work, but half of them were to the other 99. Verdugo singled to centre in his first trip and doubled into the right-field corner next time up. In their final meeting, Ryu struck him out, the first of six straight batters retired by the big lefty to finish his outing.

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