Good Blue Jays pitching not good enough with bats silent again

Melky Cabrera homered, Todd Frazier drove in the go-ahead run with a single in the seventh, and the Chicago White Sox beat the Toronto Blue Jays 3-2.

CHICAGO – The offence that had been so plentiful for most of this month is suddenly scarce once more, and that means being very good isn’t good enough once again for the Toronto Blue Jays pitching staff.

Such was certainly the case in a tortuously plodding, three-hour 22-minute 3-2 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Friday night, when the bats produced precious little, a bases-loaded, one-out rally in the ninth was wasted, while Aaron Sanchez and crew worked to bend but not break.

“I thought we had a good shot tonight,” lamented manager John Gibbons. “Those are games you need to win.”

They very well might have, as Darwin Barney worked a one-out walk ninth – coming after a controversial overturned non-foul call on a potential strike three that led to manager John Gibbons’ ejection – off David Robertson that was followed by singles from Ezequiel Carrera and Josh Donaldson.

But Robertson rallied to strikeout Encarnacion before Michael Saunders hit a weak flare to short for the final out. The Blue Jays went 3-for-11 with runners in scoring position, Kevin Pillar delivering two of those hits and collecting the team’s only RBI.

“As much as we need the off-days you kind of get out of rhythm a little bit, that’s possibly part of the reason,” said Pillar. “You tell me we had bases loaded in the ninth inning with Eddie up, I like our chances. He just didn’t seem like himself today, part of that is the off-day, part of that is baseball, but that’s the guy we want up there.”

The White Sox, on the other hand, got the hit they needed in the seventh. A weak Tim Anderson chopper down the third-base line that squirted just under Donaldson’s glove for a leadoff double set the stage, and after a tremendous play by Encarnacion on a Melky Cabrera chopper set up a possible escape for Jesse Chavez, Todd Frazier delivered a solid RBI single to left that broke a 2-2 deadlock.

Up to that point the White Sox had been 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position, Sanchez wiggling out of jams with aplomb on a night he basically pitched with his fastball only because his curveball was meh.

It didn’t matter as the Blue Jays mustered very little against Carlos Rodon, who very slowly spread 115 pitches over 5.2 innings but allowed only a pair of RBI singles to Pillar, the second coming in the sixth when he dive into a first ahead of the left-hander to tie things up 2-2.

The Chicago bullpen held from there before a crowd 27,196 that included Mark Buehrle, sending the Blue Jays to a fourth loss in five games, a span in which they’ve managed only 17 runs. Coincidentally or not, that stretch started the game after Jose Bautista was placed on the disabled list with turf toe, and there’s no doubt he’s missed in ways subtle and overt.

“Jose’s a perennial all-star, he’s a big part of this team and we miss having him,” said Pillar. “But we’ve been able to get by without him for some short periods of time and through his struggles this year we’ve been able to pick him up.

“[Rodon] was good today, we faced a good pitcher, we faced some good pitchers in Baltimore, there’s going to be an adjustment period, he’s a guy look to for big hits and we look forward to his at-bats and his ability to get on base, other guys just have to step up.”

Also missed was Justin Smoak, whose left knee swelled up badly from a foul tip in Wednesday’s 5-2 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks and was unavailable to pinch-hit. X-rays on the area were negative.

Saunders scored both Blue Jays runs, as his double in the second set the stage for Pillar’s RBI single and then he was hit by a pitch in the sixth before eventually coming around on Pillar’s impressive hustle play.

“I saw the first baseman leave his feet and I knew it was going to be a close play and I feel like if a pitcher runs over there and can’t find the base like he did, the next thing they’re taught to do is to try and tag the guy so going low makes that a bit more challenging for him,” said Pillar. “I was just doing whatever it took.”

Sanchez had a runner on in each of his six innings but emerged largely unscathed despite eight hits and a walk. The White Sox scratched one out in the fourth when Alex Avila walked, advanced to second when Brett Lawrie delivered the second of his three hits, J.B. Shuck moved up both runners on a weak grounder to first and Avisail Garcia’s groundout tied the game 1-1.

Then in the fifth, Cabrera ripped a two-out, 2-2 curveball over the wall in right to give the White Sox a 2-1 lead that was short-lived.

“Early on it was coming out good, later in the game it just felt like it was rolling off my fingertips, not really doing that extra bite at the end,” Sanchez said of his curveball. “That’s something I’ve recognized and something that I’ll work on in between starts. It was just an unfortunate night for us, one-run games like that, you want to come out on top. Exciting, but not the outcome we wanted.”

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