Ok so I find it near impossible to put a positive spin on Saturday's game, so I'll keep this short. First off we had a decent amount of players getting on base but just like the team was doing last month we had no one capable of bringing in the base runners. The there was our defence, now there is some understandable stuff to this since a few weren't caught by Cabrera, and I expect thats in part due to the hamstring injury. However the main problem we had was that we had 2 errors (unbelievably simple stuff) that just made me want to cry, Izturis throwing the ball a couple feet above Lind's head in a routine double play, and then Lind dropped a a ball that was just dribbling to him (THOSE SHOULD BE EASY TO GET!). Then to put the cherry on the cake Morrow dropped a ball as well. So theres that portion of the team but then there was Bautista in the top of the 1st, we had 2 on and Bautista got picked off at 2nd. First off that should NEVER happen and it was when Lind was at bat, who has been our most productive player this whole year, in terms of hits, taking walks and not swinging at bad pitches. Now Brandon Morrow, for fucks sake! Look at how he pitched closely and he did not pitch well at all, 1 strike out, 7 hit and 5 runs (2 of which were home runs), overall Morrow had a problem with location as the balls that were hit were hit hard and were in bad locations, otherwise those home runs would have been ground balls. Finally one of the people who I've been having a heart attack when they come to the plate J.P Arencibia. Now I recognize that J.P has some decent power potential as a catcher but he has THE WORST plate discipline of any catcher I've seen, in this game and last game I've seen him chase pitches that were 1-2 feet out of the strike zone and we're talking that distance outside the zone away from him (he'd have to lean out of the box to hit some of these), to echo some other fans, J.P is NOT a hitter to put 4th in the batting order. Of course theres the rest of the offence too:
-Brett Lawrie: He needs to calm the hell down at the plate, it's like he is a month behind in the Jays improvement and is just free swinging and not being selective on pitches at all.
-Emilio Bonifacio: He's not been terrible he's just hitting into the wrong places, he's gotten better at picking pitches and not striking out as much but still could use a little improvement on hitting pitches to the right spots or better pitches that will be more directed into infield/outfield holes
-Maicer Izturis: Not much to say here, not sure anyone was expecting anything offensively from him, certainly not me
-Colby Rasmus: Same problem as Lawrie, try to kill the ball and the sad thing is that he has the same potential as him, that being he could be a 20/20 or 20/30 guy easily if he got his shit under control (that being 20 HR/ 20 SB)
-Melky Cabrera: Now this guy is just putting the rest of the teams offence to shame. Why is that? Well it's because he is hitting .354 since the beginning of May WITH A HAMSTRING INJURY! Where as Lawrie who is hitting .171 on the month or Arencibia who is hitting .189 on the month.
So in summary it seems the team took 3 steps forward the a running leap backward. In my mind the time for them to potentially be playoff bound is diminishing by the second, if they aren't at least at .500 or almost at .500 by the end of the month I think their screwed. And in the sense that the best they will likely get is 3rd in the AL East and that may be pushing it if Boston jumps back and chances are some of these players may get traded by the deadline *coughBonifaciocoughIzturiscough*. I'm still going to watch the Dickey v. Sabathia game but it's getting to a point where I don't want to watch the Jays games because of how disappointing it's been as of late.
-Eric
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