Patrick Corbin’s Three Innings Sink Jays vs Phillies
Toronto lost 5-2 at home because the damage arrived early, and the rest of the night could only stand around it.
Monday was not a mystery.
That is almost worse.
The Blue Jays lost 5-2 to the Philadelphia Phillies at home, and the shape of the game was visible early enough that the rest of the evening felt like paperwork.
Philadelphia scored in the second. Philadelphia scored again in the third. Toronto answered twice, but only once at a time, like a team trying to bail out a basement with a coffee mug.
The final line was not grotesque. The Phillies had five runs on seven hits with one error. The Blue Jays had two runs on six hits with one error. Both teams left six on base.
Close enough on the page to be irritating.
Not close enough on the field to feel alive.
Corbin put the night on a slope
Patrick Corbin’s line was the bruise.
Three innings. Five earned runs. Three strikeouts.
The inning-by-inning damage was simple and joyless.
In the top of the second, Adolis García homered off Corbin to left center field, and Bryson Stott scored. That made the first crack wide enough to see through.
In the top of the third, the Phillies stopped needing one swing.
Alec Bohm singled off Corbin to left field, and Trea Turner scored. J.T. Realmuto singled off Corbin to center, and Bryce Harper scored. Then Stott walked, and Brandon Marsh scored.
There are losses where the late innings betray you.
This was not that.
This was a game that arrived damaged and stayed that way.
Corbin did get three strikeouts, and those count. They do not disappear because the scoreboard was cruel. But a three-inning, five-earned-run outing leaves a team living in the narrowest possible hallway.
Every at-bat after that has to matter.
Every missed chance gets heavier.
Every zero feels less like a quiet inning and more like a door closing.
The rest of the pitching did its sad little job
The miserable thing is that the rest of the pitching lines were fine.
Simeon Woods Richardson worked 4.0 innings with no earned runs and three strikeouts. Tommy Nance had 1.0 inning with no earned runs and one strikeout. Adam Macko had 1.0 inning with no earned runs and one strikeout.
The Blue Jays finished with eight strikeouts as a staff.
After the third inning, Philadelphia did not score again.
That should mean something.
It does mean something, technically. It means the game was held in place. It means there was no second collapse. It means the Phillies did not keep tearing at the same wound.
But baseball does not award dignity runs for making the last six innings tolerable.
Toronto needed those clean lines to come attached to a comeback. Instead, they became a quiet footnote under the louder fact that the game was already tilted.
Nance had been activated from the 15-day injured list on Monday. He came in and put a clean earned-run line in the box score.
That is good.
It is also very Blue Jays, somehow, to receive a helpful return and still spend the night staring at an early deficit like it was an unpaid hydro bill.
Two replies were not enough
The Blue Jays did answer.
Barely.
In the bottom of the third, Yohendrick Piñango grounded out to Bryce Harper at first, and Myles Straw scored. In the bottom of the fifth, Ernie Clement homered off Cristopher Sánchez to left center field.
That was the scoring.
One productive out. One Clement swing.
Then nothing.
No runs in the sixth. None in the seventh. None in the eighth. None in the ninth.
Clement went 2-for-4 with the homer and an RBI, which is a useful night in a game that had too few of them. Piñango went 1-for-2 with an RBI. Straw went 1-for-2. Andrés Giménez and Nathan Lukes each had a hit.
Then there were the empty lines.
George Springer went 0-for-4. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. went 0-for-4. Kazuma Okamoto went 0-for-4. Brandon Valenzuela went 0-for-2. Tyler Heineman went 0-for-2. Jesús Sánchez went 0-for-1.
Nobody needs a sermon for one line in one June box score.
But the team needed more than six hits and two runs after the way the first three innings went.
It did not get them.
Tuesday is already standing there
The Blue Jays are 32-35, with a .478 winning percentage. They are third in the division, 4-6 over their last ten, and sitting on an L1.
The season totals say there is an offence here: 274 runs in 67 games, 4.09 runs per game, a .249 batting average, a .699 OPS, and 64 home runs.
Monday just did not look like it.
Tuesday brings the Phillies again. Dylan Cease is listed for Toronto. Zack Wheeler is listed for Philadelphia.
There is no time to sit with the loss, which is one of baseball’s crueller mercies.
The next game arrives before the last one has finished souring.
Maybe that is for the best.
Because there is only so long a person can look at a 5-2 home loss where the opponent did all its scoring by the third inning and still feel like the night was negotiable.
It was not.
It was just another Blue Jays game that asked the later innings to repair what the early ones had already broken.
React