At 110 miles per hour off the bat, the ball traveled 408 feet to deep center, where it bounced off the outfield wall as Bo Bichette easily raced home from second base. And with that, a loud cheer went up from the 44,318 blue rows of the Rogers Center on a beautiful summer Sunday as the local baseball team had scored a run. It was Toronto’s first since Thursday, when Cavan Biggio slid into home plate under Kevin Plawecki’s tag with a Game 10 winner at Fenway Park. It’s his first in 20 innings. It’s the first in almost 64 hours. And the only time Toronto’s offense gave fans much to cheer about all weekend. After being shut out by the Los Angeles Angels on Friday and Saturday, the Blue Jays whistled, kicked and fired again offensively in Sunday’s matinee, falling 8-3 and getting swept at home by a 55-73 team in the process. It was about as anticlimactic a weekend as one could imagine after Toronto’s trip to the Bronx and Back Bay the week before, taking six of seven to the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. And it was about as opposite as the club could play. Toronto starter Ross Stripling coughed up a pair of home runs in the third and fourth after allowing just six over 97 innings before. His defense, rated top 10 in MLB no matter which defensive metric you prefer, was sloppy and unapproachable, extending innings and gifting the Angels runs. His bullpen, a quiet force the past two months, surrendered runs in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings. And his offense, one of MLB’s best with eight qualified hitters with a wRC+ league average or higher, was completely harmless. Chapman’s fourth inning and George Springer’s relief solo homer in the ninth produced Toronto’s only runs of the weekend that could reasonably be called game-winning. Another came in the seventh on an Angels defensive error, giving Toronto an average of one per game during this weekend series. The Blue Jays averaged 5.4 per contest during the ensuing seven-game road trip. Of course, there were other opportunities. Two runners were stranded in the second as Whit Merrifield flied out on a 1-2 Davidson slider. Another left in the third as Wladimir Guerrero Jr. grounded into a groundout double play. and two more were erased in the fifth when Lourdes Gurriel Jr. grounded a full-count heater directly into a 6-3 double play at the end of a long battle off Angels reliever Andrew Wantz. And yet, the missed opportunity that most will remember came in the sixth, after Bichette and Teoscar Hernandez reached on one-out singles. A pitch after Chapman flew out, Merrifield ripped a grounder up the middle that Angels shortstop Andrew Velazquez had to slide past second base into the bullpen. But because Hernandez wasn’t running at full speed from first and didn’t slide aggressively into second, Velazquez had time to regroup and fight for an inning-ending out that probably shouldn’t have been there. Now, the context. Hernandez left one game eight days ago after fouling a ball off his left foot (X-rays came back negative) and then left another on Friday after again fouling a ball from the same area (the x-rays also negative). Hernandez was out of the lineup Saturday because of discomfort from the resulting fractures, but he clearly wasn’t moving as well as when he was healthy when he went from first to third on Chapman’s double in the fourth. That happened again on Merrifield’s turf in the sixth. But this time, he cost his team a chance. That’s the boost of the gamble the Blue Jays took by playing Hernandez Sunday at a time when it’s desperate for an offensive spark. He was a threat at the plate as he reached base in three of his four plate appearances. But once he touched first, his lack of mobility became a disadvantage. It took some charity for the Blue Jays to finally break through again in the seventh, as Jo Adell misplayed a Gurriel looper into left field, allowing Guerrero to go home to first. He scored a triple because Adell never touched the ball, not the most run scored by the Blue Jays. But it was one they would take. Still, Alejandro Kirk singled to center a few minutes later to make Gurriel Toronto’s eighth shutout base runner of the day and push his hit with runners in scoring position to 1-for-8. In the end, they raised those totals to 11 latents and 1 to 10. Stripling, meanwhile, gave the Blue Jays a quality start, allowing three earned runs on seven hits in his six innings. The results were perhaps a little disappointing considering Stripling’s typical set for himself of late, allowing two runs or fewer in 11 of 12 starts since joining the Blue Jays’ rotation in early June. But it should be good enough for his club to win on the days his offense isn’t out of the office for the weekend. Stripling went seven pitches in his first inning and nine in his second. But with two outs in his third, Shohei Ohtani launched a 96.2 mph pitch to the right side that went over and over Bo Bichette’s glove in the inning. That extended the inning for Luis Rengifo, who made it 2-1 before Stripling fouled out on a changeup across the plate that failed to return. Coughing up a two-run homer on your best pitching miscue after a ball that should have ended the inning is hard to stomach. But even tougher is throwing another one an inning later in a 1-2 count against the opposition’s 38-year-old back-up catcher who has a .277 slugging percentage on the season, and seeing that guy do it 364 feet over left field field wall. Kurt Suzuki has had a good career, but the pregame odds of him hitting his 10th homer in the last two years Sunday off Stripling, who had only allowed six on the year entering the day, would be long. And they would have thought even more about how effectively Stripling has been using his changeup against right-handers this season, holding them to a .264 wOBA against the pitch at a 26 percent rate. But this was the day for a Blue Jays team that played against type. Toronto’s bullpen, which had pitched to a 2.47 ERA over the club’s last 15 games and entered Sunday ranked second in the AL in ERA (2.86) and batting average against (.216). But the Angels scored three runs off Adam Cimber and Tim Mayza in the seventh, the big hit coming via Ohtani’s 28th home run of the season. Trout then took David Phelps deep in the ninth, the first homer the Blue Jays right-hander had allowed in over 50 innings pitched this season. Toronto’s defense has been strong all year, as the Blue Jays entered the day sixth in MLB in saves (43) and eighth in strikeouts above average (9). But you wouldn’t have known it from Sunday’s game, as Springer let a trout liner fall from his hands as he was about to catch in the seventh, before Bisset and Merrifield walked the wires on Adell’s groundout in the eighth that passed secretly. the inner field. Two batters later, Trevor Richards hit what should have been a groundout, but Guerrero let Bichette’s throw bounce in and out of his glove at first as Los Angeles’ seventh run came home. And then there’s the Blue Jays offense. They are elite any way you cut it. Top five in MLB in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, hard-hit percentage, weighted runs created plus. But this weekend against one of the worst performing teams in the American League, it was anything but.
