Red Sox Leave 13 as Blue Jays Steal 3-0 Shutout
Boston spent the night collecting baserunners like souvenirs while Toronto built a shutout out of seven pitchers and loose change.
The Red Sox left 13 men on base on Wednesday.
Thirteen.
That is not a box-score note.
That is a Victorian curse.
The Blue Jays won 3-0 in Boston while using seven pitchers, which sounds like a prank the schedule plays on you when it wants to see if your eyelid will twitch in Morse code.
Boston had seven hits.
Toronto had eight.
Neither team made an error.
And somehow the final score was Blue Jays 3, Red Sox 0, with Fenway left staring at its own receipts like a confused diner after brunch.
This was not clean dominance.
This was a baseball escape room where the Jays solved the final clue by accidentally leaning on a bookcase.
The number 13 wore spikes
The Red Sox leaving 13 on base is the whole emotional thesis.
They kept getting people aboard.
They kept not scoring.
This is usually the Blue Jays brand of performance art, so seeing it happen to someone else felt like borrowing a neighbour’s leaf blower and discovering it plays jazz.
Useful.
A little unsettling.
But useful.
Toronto’s pitchers combined for six strikeouts and no earned runs.
That does not fully explain how a team allows seven hits, uses seven pitchers, watches Boston leave 13 on base, and exits with a shutout.
Nothing fully explains it.
Science has limits.
Baseball has a fake moustache.
Every Boston inning on the linescore sat at zero, all the way from the first through the ninth.
The Red Sox did not score early.
They did not score late.
They did not score in the middle, which was rude of them to themselves but very considerate to the rest of us.
Toronto’s offence submitted a minimalist painting
The Blue Jays scored in two innings.
That was the entire production.
The top of the third did most of the work against Jake Bennett.
Andrés Giménez singled on a line drive to right fielder Wilyer Abreu, and Davis Schneider scored.
A run.
A real one.
Not a rumour.
Then Vladimir Guerrero Jr. grounded out, third baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa to first baseman Willson Contreras, and Giménez scored.
Two runs in the third.
In a normal sport, you might call that modest.
In this sport, on this night, it was apparently a luxury condo.
The third run came in the top of the eighth against Greg Weissert.
Guerrero singled on a fly ball to center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela, deflected by second baseman Andruw Monasterio, and Giménez scored.
The deflection detail is important because this game needed at least one run to arrive wearing a fake nose and glasses.
Giménez finished 2-for-4 with one RBI.
Guerrero finished 2-for-4 with two RBI.
That is the scoring department.
Small office.
Good lighting.
Seven pitchers formed one trench coat
The pitching list looked like the credits at the end of a very anxious independent film.
Spencer Miles: 1.1 innings, no earned runs, one strikeout.
Louis Varland: 1.0 inning, no earned runs, three strikeouts.
Simeon Woods Richardson: 3.0 innings, no earned runs, one strikeout.
Jeff Hoffman: 1.0 inning, no earned runs.
Mason Fluharty: 0.1 innings, no earned runs, one strikeout.
Braydon Fisher: 1.1 innings, no earned runs.
Tyler Rogers: 1.0 inning, no earned runs.
That is a shutout assembled from parts, like a bookshelf that arrives with an Allen key, no words, and a diagram of a goat.
The best part is that nobody has to pretend this was normal.
It was not.
It was seven pitchers passing a live ferret and somehow never dropping it into the punch bowl.
A standard 3-0 win can feel sturdy.
This one felt like the Blue Jays taped several umbrellas together and called it a roof.
But it held.
It held for nine innings.
The box score does not care if the roof was pretty.
Somehow, this is a winning streak
The Blue Jays are now 36-38 with a .486 winning percentage.
They are third in the division.
They are 6-4 over their last ten.
The streak says W2.
Please be respectful around W2.
It is small and easily frightened.
Toronto beat Boston 6-1 on Tuesday, then followed it with this 3-0 oddity on Wednesday.
That is winning 2 of 2 against the Red Sox in the recent series, which feels like finding money in an old jacket and then discovering the jacket also has snacks.
The overall team profile is still sitting there: 74 games played, 302 runs, 4.08 runs per game, a .249 batting average, a .702 OPS, and 72 home runs.
Nothing about this season has become simple because the Jays won a weird one.
But a weird one counts the same.
Today is another game in Boston, with Trey Yesavage listed for Toronto and Sonny Gray listed for the Red Sox.
So the circus tent remains open.
For one night, though, the Blue Jays turned 13 Boston left on base into a punchline instead of a funeral march.
That is progress.
Absurd progress.
But progress.
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