Blue Jays takeaways: Toronto pays the price for stranding runners in loss to Tigers

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This article was published 20/08/2021 (1527 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 4-1 loss to Detroit Friday night at Rogers Centre:

Usually it’s the Blue Jays’ bullpen that makes you want to tear your hair out, but Friday night it was the offence.

Three times in the first nine innings, the Jays had runners on first and second with nobody out. Two more times they had two on with one out, including having runners on second and third in the fourth inning, after Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s home run had opened the scoring. They did not score a run in those five situations.

The bats are this team’s calling card, though the starting rotation is working its way into that conversation, and they simply didn’t get the job done in the opener against Detroit.

It was a Randal Grichuk double-play ball in the second. Bo Bichette hit into a twin-killing in the third. Guerrero ended the eighth the same way. Grichuk and Kevin Smith popped up to the catcher in the fourth.

The most egregious opportunity lost, though, was in the bottom of the ninth. After Tigers lefty Gregory Soto started the inning with back-to-back walks to Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Breyvic Valera was sent up as a pinch-hitter to bunt the runners over. That call was questionable enough, with Soto struggling to throw strikes and Alejandro Kirk, for whom Valera pinch-hit, batting .308 against left-handed pitchers. With the first baseman crashing, Valera bunted an 0-2 pitch that way. Jonathan Schoop made a nice diving grab and had plenty of time to throw out Hernandez at third. Grichuk then hit into the Jays’ fourth double play of the night to send the game to extra innings.

All those missed opportunities came back to haunt the Jays when the Tigers scored three runs in the 10th, on the first three hits — by either team — with a runner in scoring position.

• Ray days: For all the excitement over Guerrero’s chase for the triple crown, and all the hand-wringing over a subpar bullpen costing them several games, perhaps the biggest story of the Jays’ season so far has been Robbie Ray’s transformation from frustrating walk machine into legitimate Cy Young candidate.

The left-hander’s incredible turnaround continued Friday night as he threw eight brilliant innings, allowing just one run on five hits, with 10 strikeouts.

Ray, who the Jays picked up at last year’s trade deadline and made their first free-agent signing this past off-season, has supplanted Hyun-Jin Ryu as the team’s ace by finally reaching the potential so many people knew he had. All he needed to do was throw strikes.

Ray’s stuff is outstanding, easily seen by the fact that he struck out 904 hitters in just 686 innings over the five seasons leading into this one. What held him back was that he also walked 341.

The control issues peaked last season. When the Jays traded for him, the southpaw had walked 35 batters in 35 innings. He wound up with an exceedingly ugly 7.4 walks per nine innings for the season.

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This year, he’s stopped doing that. It sounds simple, but Ray found his command. He’s throwing more strikes. It seems to defy belief that without any major mechanical changes, he’s just stopped walking people. But he’s just stopped walking people.

In his tour de force performance Friday night — Ray became the first Jays pitcher to throw eight innings since Marcus Stroman did it 28 months prior, he didn’t walk anybody. It was his seventh walk-free start of the season; he’s issued only one free pass in another six.

That means that, in over half of his 24 starts this season, a man who averaged a walk every other inning for the last five years has walked one batter or less.

It’s an astonishing turnaround, and it’s bound to pay off for the free agent-to-be this winter.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness