Bautista homers in the 8th, Jays beat Yankees

Yankees 0 Blue Jays 3

Jose Bautista is having one hell of a week. Big time home runs, and he’s gotten on base in 31 straight games.

Tyler Clippard’s decision to pitch around Edwin Encarnacion, in the 8th inning, with Josh Donaldson on second, was a big time mistake. Bautista crushed an 2-0 pitch to give us a 3 run lead.

We got a great start from Marcus Stroman. He went 7 shutout innings. He allowed just 1 hit, with 3 walks and 5 strikeouts. He kept just about everything on the ground, had 2 double plays turned behind him. And almost nothing was hit hard.

Many of us figured he should have been allowed to pitch the 8th, but 97 pitches, this late in the season, with, hopefully, more important starts in front of him, I’m ok with him coming out. But he really deserved a win.

Jason Grilli, pitching the 8th, gave up a 2-out triple to Ronald Torreye, but then struck out pinch hitter Billy Butler to get out of the inning. He had 2 strikeouts on the inning, and showed just the tiniest bit of emotion coming off the mount.

Roberto Osuna gave up a 1-out single, but got out of the inning for his 35th save of the season.

We should have scored more. In the second inning Bautista started things off with a double, and Russell Martin walked, but Troy Tulowitzki hit into a double play to end the threat. And we had 2 singles in the 4th. But we couldn’t score off CC Sabathia. CC went 7 innings, allowed 4 hits and 3 walks, and spent the first few innings pissed off at the plate umpire.

We would get 6 hits on the day. 2 each for Donaldson and Bautista.

We did get some good defense, not that we needed a lot of it, but Edwin started a very nice 3-5-3 double play (with the shift, Donaldson was pretty much in the shortstop spot. And Dioner Narvarro made a perfect throw to second to catch Brett Gardner trying to steal.

Jays of the Day: Stroman (.441 WPA) and Bautista (.362).

Suckage: Tulowitzki (-.200). Navarro had the number too...but I’m going to let him off the hook because of the caught stealing, though he had a rough day on the pitch framing side. But we might give him some credit for leading our pitchers to a shutout.

We had a slower GameThread than normal, just 413 comments. I thought I might lead the way but Nelson Liriano led us to victory. Great job.