Game Recap: Blue Jays fall against red-hot Masahiro Tanaka

Welcome to the Blue Jays Game Recap for Tuesday evening’s game against the New York Yankees.

Toronto Blue Jays- 1 vs New York Yankees-3

W: Masahiro Tanaka (11-1, 1.99 ERA) L: Marcus Stroman (3-2, 5.14 ERA) SV: David Robertson (16)

The Jays started came out of the gate hot with Jose Reyes hitting a lead-off home run, the 20th lead-off jack of Reyes’ career and only the 10th long-ball allowed by Tanaka in his 14 starts this season.

However, from there the Jays fell victim to a combination of Tanaka’s wipe-out splitter and well spotted fastball. Tanaka ended up pitching six innings, giving up one run on five hits while striking out 10 batters and walking two. This marked Tanaka’s second consecutive start with at least 10 K’s and his fourth of the 2014 campaign.

His counterpart, rookie Marcus Stroman, was a much different pitcher than we had seen in his first two starts since coming out of the bullpen earlier on this year. Despite Stroman throwing a good portion of his 98 pitches for strikes (59), Stroman was unable to pitch efficiently as he lasted only 3.2 innings, allowing two runs on a Brett Gardner home run while walking two and striking out one.

The main reason behind Stroman’s short stint Tuesday night can be attributed to the Yankees ability to spoil pitches they were not able to square up for base hits. Brett Gardner’s first at-bat of the game resulted in ground out to first base after a grueling 12 pitches, eight of which were fouled off by Gardner. By the end of Stroman’s night he had 25 of his pitches fouled off by Yankees’ batters.

The Yankees bullpen continued Tanaka’s excellence, tossing three scoreless innings after Mark Teixeira added an insurance run in the fifth on a single of his own.

Despite the bullpen holding the Yankees to one run, using a combination Aaron Loup, Todd Redmond and Sergio Santos, the Jays were unable to ignite their bats, losing the game and dropping their record to 41-31.

Tomorrow’s game is huge for the Jays as they look to force the rubber match with Mark Buehrle (10-3, 2.28 ERA) taking the hill against Chase Whitley (2-0, 2.41 ERA).