He got the next three batters on a flyball to center, a comebacker to the mound and a strikeout.
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Really, Dickey wasn’t excellent. Those plays helped Dickey take a no-hitter into the sixth inning against the Red Sox for the second consecutive start.
Bogaerts went 0 for 3 and walked twice, with the Fenway Park crowd booing when he didn’t see a strike in the eighth inning. He swung at ball four with David Ortiz on deck.
Informed that Joe DiMaggio recorded a hit in the next 16 games after his streak ended in 1941, Bogaerts shook his head in amazement.
Quiet nights have been rare for the Sox offense. “But I battled and I enjoyed every bit of it”. He ran his pitch count up to 114 pitches, matching his season high, leaning heavily on his cutter and fastball. One inning he can’t find the plate, the next he’s unhittable. Encarnacion slapped a 2-run homer on Friday.
The Sox managed to get one of the runs back in the bottom of the inning. Bogaerts, Betts and Pedroia went a combined 2-for-12 on Friday with a pair of runs.
Mookie Betts scored his 53rd run of the season, the highest total for a Red Sox player at this point in the season since 1950. Osuna has thrown 17 straight scoreless innings. A throwing error by third baseman Travis Shaw led to Toronto’s third run scoring on a double play grounder.
A single by Kevin Pillar moved Travis to third, and put Price in a two-on, no-out jam.
Dickey had been 0-4 with a 5.88 ERA in his last six starts against AL East rivals.
The Texas Rangers had Adrian Beltre’s five-RBI showing to thank for their 7-3 win over the Seattle Mariners, while the Houston Astros’ seven-run first inning set them on their way to a 12-2 drubbing of the Oakland Athletics.
Edwin Encarnacion hit a two-run shot off Price in the first inning, and Devon Travis added a two-run homer off Koji Uehara in the eighth. But baseball is a game of inches, and whether a leaping grab from Darwin Barney or a throw from Josh Donaldson that was just in time, the inches were solidly against the Red Sox tonight.
With Odor back, the Rangers will return to a 25-man roster.
Elsewhere, the Chicago Cubs shut-out the Arizona Diamondbacks 6-0, the Philadelphia Phillies were 6-3 winners of the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles won a tight won against the New York Yankees 6-5.
While R.A. Dickey is not Ubaldo Jimenez levels of bad, he has certainly not been very good since joining the Blue Jays, and while there’s an element of “any given night” to the knuckleball, watching the Red Sox fail to get in that hit column until the sixth inning after getting shut down for multiple innings by Ubaldo Jimenez is one of the least encouraging sights this team has produced thus far in 2016.
Jack Donahue, of Worcester, Massachusetts, ran into trouble early on, mixing the melody from a later segment in with the first verse of “O Canada”. Unlike teammate Jackie Bradley Jr.
Bradley left the team Tuesday to be with his wife, Erin, for the birth of the couple’s first child.
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Xander Bogaerts is 4 for 6 with a homer off Stroman this season, and he’ll be looking to start a new hitting streak after having his 26-game run snapped Friday. He batted. 381 in May with eight homers and 24 RBIs.
