BLUE JAYS 4, ROYALS 3: Devon Travis hit his second homer of the game in the ninth inning to lift the Toronto to the win at Kansas City, Missouri.
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Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Francisco Liriano delivers to a Kansas City Royals batter during the first inning of a baseball game at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., Friday, Aug. 5, 2016.
Devon Travis has embraced the month of August with both arms and, in the process, has put the squeeze on the Kansas City Royals.
Eric Hosmer went 2-for-3 with a two-run single and a stolen base in the Royals’ 4-2 win over the Blue Jays on Saturday.
The one and only time this season when Sanchez was tagged with a loss was way back on April 22 when he was dinged for 10 hits and six runs over 4.1 innings by the Oakland Athletics. On Saturday, Duffy pitched 6.2 innings, while allowing 5 hits, 2 walks, and 2 earned runs while striking out 6. Kansas City does still have an outside chance at closing the gap in the American League wild card picture as there is still plenty of baseball left to be played but many are writing them off as they are a shade of where they were previous year and are not as good as the rest of the teams in the mix for those two final playoff spots.
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays offence sputtered against Duffy and the Royals bullpen, managing just three baserunners-a walk, a hit, and an error-after Travis’ single in the fifth.
“It was definitely stressful early on”, Sanchez said. “They took into consideration a lot of things that I said, and in those talks it was never, ‘We’re doing this, we’re doing that.’ It was kind of just bouncing ideas off each other to see what the best thing is”. Them asking me, me giving my input, and figuring out what’s best.
“And I think when it came down to it, we sat down for a while and we came up with something they wanted to do and something I wanted to do”. Something that we felt the team would like to. “And all this is behind”.
Sanchez pitched only 102 innings a year ago, including 9 2-3 in the minors on a rehab assignment after a shoulder injury.
Outside of the one disastrous inning, Sanchez actually pitched quite well in this game as he induced 9 ground ball outs (while not up to his usual norms, not bad numbers) and only walked one batter.
Duffy (8-1) won his seventh straight decision. In his last start, he struck out a team-record 16 and permitted just one hit over eight innings at Tampa Bay. He held the Blue Jays to two runs and five hits over 6 2-3 innings.
Travis’ ninth home run off Kelvin Herrera with two out in the ninth was the decisive blow. On a night in which his home country opened the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Orlando hit his third home run of the season just over the left centerfield fence. He also had an RBI single in the fifth after Kevin Pillar doubled.
Kendrys Morales and Salvador Perez singled with two out in the fourth, but the Royals failed to score as Gordon flied out to Saunders in left-field foul territory.
“They did a really good job of playing small ball”, said Sanchez. He also drove in the Jays’ second run with a fifth-inning single that scored Kevin Pillar.
The Royals added a run in the sixth on Mondesi’s two-out, RBI-triple to deep right field, scoring Orlando. The Royals loaded the bases with none out despite only hitting one ball out of the infield, and then pushed across a run on a hard grounder to the left side that neither Josh Donaldson nor Troy Tulowitzki could corral in time.
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RHP Aaron Sanchez, who has already thrown a career high 139 1/3 innings, will be part of a six-man rotation moving forward as the Blue Jays want to give him more rest to keep him fresh.
