Six Stressful Innings: Josh Donaldson Turns a Pitchers' Duel Into a Blowout over the Orioles
The real story of this game was that it was tight until it wasn't. The 7-1 score doesn't show how tense that game was, how the Jays pitching staff held on to a one run lead by their fingernails.
J.A. Happ looked little uneasy both on the mound and in the dugout, but had a good four seam fastball working. He just might look uneasy when he's cold.
Per Shi Davidi, Happ threw his four seamer 62 times out of his 104 total pitches, and generated 15 of his 19 swinging strikes off it. Happ allowed five hits, one homer, nine strikeouts and three walks over six innings.
“Definitely, I wanted to be more aggressive and that’s a good way to do that for me. If I can start locating (the four-seamer), then everything else plays off of that. I felt more comfortable tonight executing with those over the two-seam.
Sometimes if I lose a bit of that aggressiveness, then the life on the ball isn’t quite the same, it seems,” he said. “I’ve really got to compete and be aggressive, and sometimes the ball has a little bit extra life on it that way.”
Orioles starter Dylan Bundy made Josh Donaldson look pretty foolish a few times.
It's relatively easy to do that when a hitter has as hard a swing as Donaldson. Donaldson commits. Bundy had a tight little slider working sporadically, and he got Donaldson on it twice.
Donaldson was just lying in wait and it finally cracked the game open.
This fan, who has been sitting all game in 6 C weather, calling this out is a hero.
My game thought, in tweet form.
For someone I just compared to a T-Rex in the rain, he was rather low-key.
“It’s a sense of relief, especially playing here. I have so many memories of these guys coming back and winning games against us late, so it was nice to score some runs at the end, give (Roberto) Osuna a day, get (John) Axford in there as well. That was a really tough game for both sides, there were a couple of situations where the game could have swung either way, and I’m proud of how our team really stayed in it, stayed in the fight and kept battling and executing and making plays.”
MLB's Youtube channel posts condensed games without any commentary, just game sounds. It's quite soothing.
They looked cold and miserable.
And a lot like Muppets.