Inside the Box Score - April 9th 2007

What a long...long game it was tonight. First thing to look at on that boxscore is the time of play: 3 hours and 8 minutes, although it seemed much longer at times.
As I write this, Orlando Hudson just caused his team a run with his 'great defense' as we sometimes saw with the Blue Jays, check the box score for a sacrifice fly to the hitter by Cody Ross. Hudson backed up to right field to make a routine right fielder's catch, Griffey was on third and saw that Hudson could not cock a throw to home plate in time to get him tagging up.

Back to the Jays game:

• Troy Glaus made his comeback and was fantastic: 2 for 3, with one run and walk.
• Royce Clayton finds ways to impress every game. His second inning walk was a great at-bat totalling 9 pitches including 5 foul balls, he never let a strike go by him, nor did he swing through one. The pitch tracker also shows that all 5 pitches fouled off were in the strike zone. Oh yeh, he also had a basehit and a run.
• Aaron Hill is finding his stroke much faster than last year, his 3 for 3 night gives him a .348 AVG and he also walked. At this time last year he had a .273 AVG but he quickly plumetted and would stay under .200 from April 26th to May 18th. He already has a home run, soemthing he didn't do until May 24 last year. Let's hope for him that he keeps it up
• A. J. Burnett threw 102 pitches, 60 for strikes and found his stride after the first few innings where he could not find the plate. Doing so lowered his ERA under 8 and gave him a 100 pitch game 3 months quicker than last season, although that only covers 3 less starts. He wasn't dominating (5 strikeouts), he wasn't always accurate (40% balls, 3 walks) but he found a way to get things done, somehow it really seems like he allowed more than 3 walks and 3 hits.
• There are still four Blue Jays reliever who have yet to allow a run with Casey Janssen leading the way, not having done so during 5.2 innings. Jeremy Accardo and Scott Downs have 3 innings and 2 thirds of an inning respectively after appearing in this game.

So today's Top Performer Award goes to Aaron Hill for his great performance with the bat and no errors today. The team is a game ahead of the Red Sox for first place in the division. More to come...any thoughts on tonight's game? How different were the anthems? How nice is A.J.'s hair?