Dustin McGowan finally got his first win of the season and the Jays’ bats actually made good contact as Toronto beat the visiting Yankees 7-2 last night.
The Good
McGowan proved the worthiness of his given name by going 7 2-3 innings and striking out seven batters en route to a Vernon Wells sexy explosion in his face.
Watching the telecast, McGowan’s pitches were dropping faster than the balls of a testosterone-enhanced twelve year-old boy.
Lyle Overbay continued to hit the ball harder than Brett Myers hits his wife, hitting a solo ding-dong in the third and an RBI double in the fifth.
The Bad
When is it okay to start criticizing Frank Thomas? It’s awesome that you got on base twice tonight without collecting a hit, but believe it or not you’re actually being paid to cash runs in, not leave four runners on base.
You can complain all you want about the bad call you got on that third called strike, but seriously, it was close enough that you should’ve been swinging at it to stay alive. Dude, you’ve got a great eye for location, no doubt about it, but pitchers are starting to realize that you can’t read velocity at all. Please smarten up and swing the bat once and again.
Oh, and I’d also like to chew you out for that ridiculous baserunning mistake you made against the Twins on Sunday when Carlos Silva came up with that ground ball from Aaron Hill. He had you caught between second and third, so why the fuck did you run back to second? If you had run to third you could’ve given Hill a chance to get to second. That nonsense is just basic thinking. And it was awesome to see how seriously you took your mistake when the camera picked you up chuckling in the dugout a minute later.
The Ugly
After the win last night, the Jays sent Adam Lind’s favourite piece of homoerotic body art, Ryan Roberts, back down to Syracuse.
Why? To call up right-handed reliever Ryan Wolfe, who’s 2-0, with a 0.84 ERA in 14 appearances for Syracuse.
Right now the Jays’ pitching staff is comprised of AJ Burnett, Dustin McGowan, Shaun Marcum, Jesse Litsch, Tomo Ohka, Jeremy Accardo, Casey Janssen, Scott Downs, Jason Frasor, Brian Tallet, Josh Towers, Jamie Vermilyea and now Ryan Wolfe.
That’s thirteen pitchers, meaning that the bullpen has eight guys right now. But really only five or six, considering that Gibbons doesn’t use Towers or Vermilyea, and Wolfe is just coming up.
Can a decision please be made on these guys? Either use them or lose them, but don’t let them hold valuable roster spaces while both Troy Glaus and Frank Thomas are in more desperate need of pinch running than those old beer league guys who get a youngster to stand behind the catcher and take off on contact.
It’s complete nonsense to have that many guys in the bullpen.
