TORONTO – More often than not it takes a clean, crisp game to beat the Tampa Bay Rays. And after a couple of days with relative breathing room against their longtime nemesis, the Toronto Blue Jays once again found an all-too-familiar frustration when things got tight in the margins.
The chance to make a good series a great one with a sweep disappeared in the sixth inning of a 5-1 loss, when Teoscar Hernandez misjudged an Austin Meadows line drive that allowed the go-ahead run to score. That came two batters after wunderkind Wander Franco got just enough of a down-and-away slider to send it over the right-centre-field wall and tie things up, marring yet another brilliant-but-hard-luck outing for Robbie Ray against the Rays.
In three starts against Tampa Bay, the left-hander has allowed just six runs in 20 innings with 22 strikeouts, but the Blue Jays have lost all three times. Sunday, he gave up just the two runs over seven dominant innings in which he erased a pair of early jams to position his team for a sweep.
Instead, the Blue Jays couldn’t overcome their costly hiccup as Collin McHugh took over from the always crafty Ryan Yarbrough in the sixth and retired eight straight after a Bo Bichette leadoff single, promptly erased on a pickoff by the right-hander.
He kept the game at 2-1 until the ninth, when Bichette threw the ball away after ranging left to scoop up Yandy Diaz’s infield single and Meadows followed with a run-scoring double off Rafael Dolis. The right-hander, just activated off the injured list, couldn’t keep the inning from unravelling after that, as Taylor Walls added an RBI double to end his afternoon and Tayler Saucedo gave up a Mike Brosseau sacrifice fly before escaping the frame.
The close-‘til-end finale came after the Blue Jays took the opener 11-1 on Friday and clinched the series with a 6-3 victory on Saturday, a solid rebound after the Rays swept four games in Dunedin, Fla., during their last meeting May 21-24. Three of those games were decided in the last at-bat and the Blue Jays blew leads in two of them.
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A win Sunday would have pushed them back to a season-high six games for the first time since May 18, before a series of bullpen implosions sent them all the way down to 33-35. They’ve won 10 of 14 since to undo that damage, and have three games at Baltimore starting Tuesday and then three more at Tampa Bay to gain further ground before the all-star break.
Yarbrough gave them precious little to work with on Sunday, as aside from Randal Grichuk’s solo shot in the second inning, only one batter reached second base in his five innings – Vladimir Guerrero Jr., on a two-out double. George Springer then struck out to end the inning and Yarbrough allowed just two singles after the Grichuk homer, the Blue Jays never getting the chance to build a big inning.
