Blue Hot and Red
The Blue Jays certainly had their Wheaties, or, as they call it in Canada, Wheaties. The exchange rate for runs was far in favor with our northern neighbors.
The bludgeoning by the Blue Jays was made worse with visits to the booth by Bill O’Reilly and Mitt Romney. They were part of a parade of celebrities who were there to raise money for the Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon, a great cause of course, but less polarizing people should have been selected. Perhaps the right-wingers were brought in to stem the red tide that dominates Friday games.
The interview with Hyde Park native Maura Tierney was less coherent than a Julian Tavarez conversation. She had a charming moment when she refused to say the name of that team from the Bronx, calling their home field “You Know What Stadium.”
Meredith Viera visited in the bottom of the fifth and jinxed a bases loaded, one-out situation with Victor Martinez in the box. The backstop tapped into a 5-3 inning-ending double play.
Tierney and Viera threw out the first pitches half-way between the mound and home plate and their respective catchers were a yard or so from home plate. Yet their flimsy efforts were more respectable than Jon Lester’s worst start of his career: 2 innings pitched, 8 hits, 9 earned runs, 3 walks, and 1 strikeout.
A bright spot was infielder Yamaico Navarro’s major league debut. The international free agent rose through the ranks based on his defensive wizardry but tallied his first major league hit in the fifth inning, a ground ball single to left field.
When Dusty Brown is one team’s leading RBI man and Lyle Overbay has a career night for the other squad chances are it’s a terrible game.
| Game 123: August 20, 2010 | ||
 Blue Jays64-57 | 16 | W: Brett Cecil (10-6) |
| 2B: John McDonald (7), Fred Lewis (31), Yunel Escobar (17) HR: Lyle Overbay – 2 (15), John McDonald (3), Jose Bautista (38) | ||
| Red Sox 69-54 | 2 | L: Jon Lester (13-8) |
| 2B: David Ortiz (27), Dusty Brown (1) | ||
