Still in the heat of the battle for the top of the AL East, the Toronto Blue Jays needed a solid start from righty Max Scherzer against the Boston Red Sox.
That wasn’t in the cards on Wednesday night.
Scherzer managed to last five innings but struggled mightily in the first, giving up three runs and digging the Blue Jays into a hole right off the bat.
He wound up exiting the game with apitching line of four earned runs on 10 hits with one home run and five strikeouts on 86 pitches.
It marks the second consecutive trying outing for the 41-year-old after notching only two outs and giving up seven runs in a 20-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals last Friday.
The three-time Cy Young winner has struggled mightily in the first inning this season. He has a 12.96 ERA in the opening frame — the fourth-highest first-inning ERA over the past 50 MLB seasons among pitchers who have made 15 or more starts.
Though he started off well, striking out leadoff batter Jarren Duran, he gave up two straight singles to Trevor Story and Alex Bregman before a double from Masataka Yoshida drove in the first run of the game.
Then, another single from five-hole batter Romy Gonzalez scored Bregman and Yoshida. After giving up another single to Ceddanne Rafaela, the Jays nearly turned a double play to end the inning on a Nathaniel Lowe groundout, but Scherzer was unable to step on the first-base bag for the second out.
Scherzer got back in a groove in the second, allowing only a single to Story to escape the inning with ease. He did the same in the third and fourth, allowing one baserunner in the third and two in the fourth, but ultimately kept the Red Sox off the board.
He gave up a home run to Yoshida in the top of the fifth, but finished out the inning before being pulled for reliever Brendon Little to start the sixth.
Scherzer, who signed a one-year, $15.5-million contract with the Jays ahead of the season, came into Wednesday’s outing with a career-high 5.06 ERA with a 5-4 record and 77 strikeouts in 80 innings pitched.
The Blue Jays entered play on Wednesday sitting at 90-67 and atop the AL East. Their magic number to clinch the division and a first-round bye is four, but the New York Yankees are hot on their tail, only one game back.
