Blue Jays takeaways: It’s not Robbie Ray’s day despite 13 Ks

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This article was published 08/06/2021 (1621 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 6-1 loss to the White Sox on Tuesday:

Robbie Ray was brilliant in the Blue Jays’ series opener in Chicago, taking a four-hit shutout into the seventh inning, but he left with nothing to show for it.

The left-hander struck out 13 batters in his 6 1/3 innings of work — a season-high and one off his career best — but his team couldn’t get him more than one run, so the last batter he faced made sure Ray would leave the game with a no-decision.

The resurgent Ray allowed just four singles, without issuing a walk, over six the first six innings, and only twice did a runner make it past first base.

But after Ray struck out the leadoff man in the seventh, White Sox rookie Andrew Vaughn turned around a 97-mph fastball — Ray’s 102nd pitch of the night — and hit it 390 feet to right field for a game-tying home run.

It was a phenomenal outing that far more often than not will get Ray a win, but this time his teammates didn’t get it done for him. The White Sox then scored five runs off Jays relievers Trent Thornton and Carl Edwards Jr. in the eighth.

• Missed opportunities: The Jays had Chicago starter Carlos Rodon on the ropes many times but couldn’t get a big hit when they needed it.

Rodon allowed six hits and issued a pair of walks in five innings, with the Jays grinding him into throwing 106 pitches. A dozen hitters came to the plate against him with a runner or runners in scoring position, and they combined to get just one hit — which didn’t even drive in a run.

The hit helped, though. After Lourdes Gurriel Jr. led off the second with a double, Santiago Espinal singled to left, moving Gurriel up 90 feet, and Gurriel scored on Jonathan Davis’s sacrifice fly to deep centre.

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The Jays had several chances to build on that early lead, with seven more at-bats against Rodon with runners in scoring position. Four of those ended in strikeouts.

• Good Bo, bad Bo: Bo Bichette showed what makes him a compelling and sometimes frustrating young star in the making, both at the plate and on the field.

The 23-year-old hit a line single to the opposite field on a 97-mph in the first inning, and shot the gap for a double off a changeup his next time up. But in his third his third at-bat, the free-swinging shortstop got ahead in the count 2-1, then took two big hacks at a pair of 99-mph fastballs up, fouling off balls three and four. He took strike three, a 100-mph fastball that Rodon dotted on the inside black, thigh high. To his credit, Bichette walked in the seventh inning, his career-high 16th of the season.

Defensively, we saw both sides of Bichette on consecutive hitters in the fourth inning. He went high in the air to snag a Jose Abreu rocket — a line drive that was 112.3 miles per hour off the bat, with an expected batting average of .870. But when Yermin Mercedes hit a routine ground ball to short, it went off Bichette’s glove, dropping to his left. And while Bichette recovered and had a shot at getting the slow-footed Mercedes, he airmailed a throw that was nowhere near first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. It was Bichette’s ninth error of the season.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that Bichette has yet to play a full season in the majors. There are kinks to be ironed out, the frustrating parts of his game that still remain, but he’s still been awfully good in the infancy of his career.

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