What happened?

Things that were good:

• Not much!
• Both Francisco Liriano and Marco Estrada had excellent starts. J.A. Happ surely would have been in this category too if he wasn’t forced to leave Sunday’s game with injury. This team was expected to compete based on it’s dominant rotation, and for the most part, the starters have lived up to expectation so far.
• Kevin Pillar went 6-for-17 over the series with a home run, Troy Tulowitzki went 6-for-15, and Darwin Barney, Ryan Goins, Justin Smoak, and Zeke Carrera all chipped in offensively, too.
• Kendrys Morales’ walk-off homer on Saturday was great. If not for Kendrys and his two big home runs this season, we could be 0-12! Holy shit!
• Blah. Maybe I’m just grouchy from watching that hideous game today, but I can’t think of many other positives to draw from this series. There’s still 150 games left to go, I guess? I’m starting to wonder if that’s actually a good thing though.

Things that weren’t good:

• Oh boy, where to begin?
• Let’s start with the injuries. On Thursday, Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson hit back-to-back doubles off of Kevin Gausman in the bottom of the sixth inning. It looked like it could have been the start of something good. But as quickly as baseball gives, baseball takes away. Donaldson aggravated his leg rounding first, the same leg that kept him out of the lineup earlier in the season and throughout most of spring. He left the game, and has since been placed on the 10-day disabled list.
• Aaron Sanchez had a pretty forgettable start on Friday night. He was cruising through the first four inning, but in the fifth and sixth, the Orioles tagged Sanchez for four runs on three homers and a double. On Sunday, it was announced that Sanchez would be placed on the 10-day DL due to a blister on his middle finger, something he’s been struggling with on and off for two years. That would explain the issues he had Friday, as apparently he was altering his grips and delivery to compensate for it, which ins’t good.
• And finally, J.A. Happ left Sunday’s game in the fifth inning with elbow soreness. He was rolling really nicely, then, all of a sudden, the trainer came to the mound and he was out. We don’t know yet if Happ is going to miss any time, but fuck, elbow soreness is never a good thing. Pray for Estrada, Liriano, and Stroman. It seems the baseball gods are out to punish the Jays pitchers after perfectly healthy seasons in 2015 and 2016.
• And pretty much everything else! The bats, they were awful. Jose Bautista went 2-for-15. Russell Martin went 2-for-10. Steve Pearce went 1-for-10. There are a lot of key cogs in the lineup that simply aren’t firing right now. Say what you want about Ryan Goins, Zeke Carrera, Darwin Barney, and Justin Smoak in the lineup, but if Bautista, Pearce, Martin, and others who are expected to hit aren’t hitting, the team isn’t going to win games.
• The issue is that the team isn’t stringing hits together or hitting for much power. I hate using this kind of language because I feel like it’s massively overstated, but nobody is coming up with a big, clutch hit. Like, on Thursday, the Jays had Zach Britton on the ropes with runners on second and third down by one, and Pillar and Pearce couldn’t drive them in.

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