The fiercely agressive Toronto offense - anybody remember when we had ourselves one of those? - kept charging against Angel pitching, catching up with a tie in the bottom of the 9th with Jordan Walden's MLB leading 8th blown save of the season. This granted us the rare privilege of watching Fernando Rodney pitching to Jose Bautista with the winning run on base and a rookie ump behind the plate suffering an incredbly erratic strike zone. So we get:
Walk, putting winning run on second.
Pitching change, putting Hisanori Takahashi on the mound.
Base hit by Edward Encarnacion, putting Yunel Escobar across the plate the for the loss.
The Angels got out to a jumpstart lead on the backs of the few bats bothering to show up in August. Torii Hunter (hitting .475 for August coming into the game) jacked his 15th of the year in the first inning to stake Dan Haren to a 2-0 lead. Peter Bourjos (.286 for August) tripled and scored on a sac fly by Alberto Callaspo (.310 for August). Those three would amount to all 4 RBI's for the game.
Meanwhile Mark Trumbo (.270 and falling), then Vernon Wells (.167), then Howie Kendrick (.200), then Erick Aybar (.071 and plummeting) and Abreu (.118) brought an august Winter of Suck to late summer.
Meanwhile, the fastball loving Toronto Blue Jays kept swinging away and feasting on Angels pitching. Dan Haren cruised through the Toronto order the first time, but then yielded back to back homers in the 4th. Bourjos doubled home Bobby Wilson in the 5th to puch the lead out to 4 - 2, but that would be it for the day. Haren surrendered the third Blue Jay run in te 6th after a leadoff double. Downs burned through a very tough 8th with Aybar turning an interesting defensive play by going to third base on a grounder and converting what could easily have been runners at the corners with 1 out into a single runner at first with 2 outs.
Just when we all thought that we were about to win the game and take the series, in the top of the 9th we were reintroduced to the 2011 LAA LAA Follies. Abreu and his aging wheels did a fine job to get himself on base and over to third with only 1 out, as a much-needed insurance run. But somebody then decided that "go on contact" would be fun, and a soft grounder to 3B by Trumbo caught Bobby in no man's land and an easy out in the ensuing rundown. Too easy, it turned out, as Trumbo was thinking about stretching his luck over to 2B while Abreu was in the pickle that he was actually no longer in. This allowed Toronto to catch HIM in a run-down and end the Halo threat with a very rare dual-run-down end-of-at-bat double-play hypenated holiday of stupidity.
This set us all up for Walden in the 9th.