Blue Jays: The Vladdy & Bo Show Falls Short in Tampa

[Box Score]
[Toronto Star]

In the end, the better team wore down the young squad. I put a nice bet on the Blue Jays in this one. I lost on the Jays, I lost on the under nine runs. But I watched nine innings of this one. Trent Thornton and company battled.

The biggest blow of this game was Austin Meadows’ 27th home run of the season off a guy who had one job; lefty Buddy Boshers. On one hand – Meadows is on his way up in baseball – and Boshers shouldn’t be in the bigs anymore.

Bo Bichette is a player, boys

Look at the damn at-bat that Dante Bichette’s kid had to lead off the game. Furthermore, he had about three of these in the game. He’s an absolute grinder, while not a beauty on the surface he can play.

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Bichette homered twice, but it wasn’t enough. He’s up to 10 taters on the season.

Vladdy Jr. gets in on the act

Vladito had two hits in this one and a walk. His second triple of the game had an incredible slide (see headline image).

I gotta say, YouTube MLB does the job. The quality is better than MLB.tv, and I look forward to MLB doing this a lot more often next season hopefully. It’s just a better interface. For all Manfred’s bad ideas, here’s credit for one decent one.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s nice to showcase a team like the young Blue Jays and get people to watch them for some reason.

Vladdy Jr. also added an RBI single later in the game to score Cavan Biggio.

Trent Thornton, Big League Pitcher

Thornton really competes his ass off. Seriously, I feel like that gets said about a lot of big league pitchers. He has okay stuff. He struck out the side in an early inning and froze one of the hitters on an 82 MPH change-up on the inside corner. He has stuff that can be deceiving good – and he should stick in the Toronto rotation next year. I don’t expect him to hulk up and ever be a 20-game winner or anything, but he can win in the league as a fourth starter or fifth starter.

Catcher Reese McGuire had three hits for the Jays in the losing effort as a notable.