TORONTO, Ont. — The Toronto Blue Jays beat back the brooms of the Seattle Mariners on Sunday, picking up a big win in which pretty much everything went right, finally.
Here are three things that jumped out to me about the victory:
SCORE EARLY AND OFTEN
The Blue Jays jumped on Mariners starter Joe Saunders and never let up. Rajai Davis — in the top spot because Brett Lawrie had the day off — led off the bottom of the first with a loud double into the left field corner and, with the Jays’ offence having been deplorable to the tune of three total runs in the last four games, John Gibbons decided to small ball it up. Melky Cabrera bunted Davis to third, and he scored on a pop-up by Jose Bautista that was placed beautifully in short-enough right field that Seattle second baseman Dustin Ackley had to both fight the sun and catch it with his back to the plate, allowing Davis to fly home.
In the second inning, J.P. Arencibia led off with a single and Mark DeRosa — in the lineup because of Lawrie’s day off — doubled him to third, his first of three extra-base hits on the day. Maicer Izturis followed with an RBI single and Munenori Kawasaki’s grounder scored DeRosa a couple of batters later.
The Blue Jays continued to press Saunders, putting runners on and stealing bases in each of the third and fourth before exploding for the four-run fifth that put the game away.
PICK UP YOUR PITCHER
Brandon Morrow dominated his former team for the first four innings, allowing just one hit and one walk, setting down 10 in a row at one point, but it almost all fell apart in the fifth.
Morrow opened that inning with back-to-back four-pitch walks, and wound up walking another pair of hitters in the frame. The Mariners only managed one infield single, but still scored a couple of runs thanks to all the free passes. In an unusual turn of events, Morrow actually finished the inning with the lead because his teammates had given him that early breathing room.
They gave him even more breathing room as soon as that inning ended.
With Morrow in the dugout gasping for air and wondering why he had almost completely lost the strike zone, Cabrera went out and led off the bottom of the fifth with his first home run as a Blue Jay. Bautista then drew a walk and Edwin Encarnacion crushed a ball to the warning track in left that Jason Bay ran down. Arencibia kept the line moving with a base hit, though, setting the stage for DeRosa, who blasted a three-run homer off the batters’ eye in dead centre to turn a two-run game into a rout.
Instead of shoulders slumping and that “here we go again” feeling turning into another loss, the Blue Jays went out and got to work, more than erasing the two runs Seattle scored in the top of the inning. With the wind back in his sails, Morrow forgot about the one ugly inning and went out and dominated the Mariners the rest of the way, retiring nine of 10 hitters before giving way to Steve Delabar to finish things up in the ninth. In so doing, Morrow became not only the first Blue Jays starter to complete eight innings, but the first to even throw a pitch beyond the seventh.
MR. GOLDEN SUN
In a season in which every possible break has seemingly gone against the Blue Jays, things turned around Sunday as the sun wreaked havoc on the Mariners’ defence on a gorgeous, cloudless afternoon.
There were three different plays on which the sun factored in the Blue Jays’ favour, starting in the very first inning. With Davis on third and one out, Ackley had to fight the sun on that Bautista pop-up, and he got turned around and fell down as he caught it, allowing Davis to score on what would otherwise have been a harmless pop fly.
In the fourth, the sun got in Ackley’s eyes again as he and centrefielder Michael Saunders got tied up trying to haul in Maicer Izturis’s single, and a DeRosa blooper leading off the seventh fell in between Ackley and Saunders as Ackley once again couldn’t pick the ball out of the sun.
It was great to see the opposition finally have some issues — with anything, really — and that fed the surge of energy in the ballpark, as well as adding to the feeling that things might finally be turning around.
The breaks, and the big hits that followed them, meant that when the Blue Jays had a break go against them, it didn’t hurt. They already had an eight-run lead when Kendrys Morales hit a sky-high pop-up on the infield and Encarnacion tripped on the pitchers’ mound trying to catch it, falling flat on his face as Morales trucked into second base with one out in the eighth. That was the only baserunner the Mariners got after the fifth.