Jays can’t come up clutch, fall to Royals
Posted June 9, 2011 7:15 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
KANSAS CITY – The Toronto Blue Jays headed into Thursday’s series finale against the Kansas City Royals tied with the St. Louis Cardinals for the most productive offence in baseball, sporting the sixth-best run differential, but just the 13th best record.
Why the discrepancy?
“We’ve had a number of games where we’ve had the lead, we’ve scored some runs and yet we haven’t completely converted to nail down those wins,” said manager John Farrell. “I’m sure every team can point to that but at the same time what it says is we’ve got clear strengths offensively and we’ve pitched effectively, particularly in the bullpen.
“The area where we can stand to have greater improvement and room for improvement is in our rotation. I feel like that will come.”
Ricky Romero certainly gave the Blue Jays’ starting staff a boost on that front with eight quality innings on a sweltering Thursday afternoon, but his one bad frame was too much for the offence to overcome in a 3-2 loss to the Royals.
Romero (5-6) was undone in a messy third highlighted by Eric Hosmer’s RBI single and Jeff Francoeur’s two-run single, both soft flares that landed just in front of a hard-charging Jose Bautista in right. Bautista’s throwing error on Hosmer’s single allowed the impressive rookie to take second on his single and then score on Francoeur’s hit. But Bautista made up for it by throwing out Francoeur at home on Billy Butler’s single to end the inning.
That left the Blue Jays (32-31) down 3-0 and while they pulled within one on J.P. Arencibia’s two-run triple in the fourth, it was nothing but zeroes from there as the Royals (27-36) earned themselves a four-game split before a Kauffman Stadium crowd of 13,941.
Luke Hochevar (4-6) allowed six hits and three walks over seven strong innings, Aaron Crow struck out Adam Lind and induced Arencibia to ground out with two aboard to escape in the eighth. Joakim Soria pitched around a pair of singles and a walk in the ninth for his eighth save of the season.
The loss left the Blue Jays just one game over .500 despite having scored 30 more runs than they’ve allowed so far this season. Depending on one’s point of view, that can be interpreted as a sign of a team with a big run coming, or one not good enough to pull out close games.
The Jays are 9-13 in one-run games.
Farrell pointed to the starting pitching as one area that can improve, which may have been an understatement. The Blue Jays began the day ranked 26th in the majors with a starters’ ERA of 4.41, and 27th in innings pitched with 355.
The result has been a heavy toll on the bullpen, with Marc Rzepczynski sitting third in the American League with 29 appearances. On the cusp of the top-10 in appearances are Jason Frasor (27), Shawn Camp and Casey Janssen (26 each) and Jon Rauch (25).
Managing their workload is becoming an increasing focal point.
“Ideally we’d like to not have any reliever in the top 10 in the league,” said Farrell. “That means your starters are going deep and that means you’ve got other guys that are quality you can go to rather than relying on two or three guys.”
That’s in part why Janssen was used to close out Wednesday night’s 9-8 win.
Rauch was dealing with a minor lat muscle issue — he said it was no big deal and that he could pitch if needed — but Farrell also wants to spread the innings around a bit more.
“He’s our closer and we felt like a day would have been more beneficial knowing that we had another quality reliever in Casey to go to,” said Farrell.
Notes: The Blue Jays promoted right-hander Chad Jenkins, their first-round pick in 2009, from single-A Dunedin to double-A New Hampshire. He’ll make his debut with the Fisher Cats on Sunday.
