"You just.. you did... you just...I just don't know:" Blue Jays 7, Phillies 2

I have two Scott Franzke quotes and a tweet with which I can convey how this game pretty much went:

"Warming up for the Phillies, Colton Murray."

"Here’s Freddy Galvis... he’s trying to get something going."

Hopes should not have been high, since a quick check of the calendar will reveal that, s***, it’s still June, a month in which Phillies pitchers have allowed opponents a .858 OPS and a month in which the Phillies have gone 4-9. Also, they do not have a pinch hit home run this year. That’s may seem like a random fun little fart noise now, but we’ll get back to that later! [winks, upsettingly].

Jeremy Hellickson wasn’t immediately owned by Edwin Encarnacion, but to be fair, Encarcion didn’t bat until the second inning. It was just that long before he hit a home run tonight, giving the Jays an early 1-0 lead. But Cody Asche tagged Toronto starter Marco Estrada an inning later to even the score.

Take that, Blue Jays! Unfortunately, when the Blue Jays reached the end of their lineup, instead of the game just ending, they cycled back through it. This led to multiple at-bats for some of the roster’s terrifying hitters, after Jeremy Hellickson turned a Russell Martin fly-out into a sacrifice fly by walking the two previous hitters. The Jays smelled blood in the water and got another single and double before they could be contained, and the score was 4-1.

Again, it was Cody Asche who answered, driving in Andres Blanco from first with a double. With the deficit halved, things seemed hopeful just as insurmountable as before. This became even more true when the Blue Jays were for some reason permitted to score even more runs,

Josh Donaldson cracked a sobering moonshot to make it 5-2 in the top of the eighth, and was doing stuff like this out there all night.

Tommy Joseph is just trying to break an 0-for-16 streak, he puts the bat on the ball, and then he's got to watch Donaldson throw him out from the Naval Hospital parking lot. Why in god’s name is this even allowed. Ban excellent defense, it provides a serious obstacle for the Phillies to function as a baseball team.

Hector Neris, still in the middle of the same meltdown that has ruined him over his last few appearances, melted down from the bullpen to the mound and proceeded to melt down by allowing the Donaldson dagger, as well as two more earned runs, in most of an entire inning. In his last eight games he’s given up 8 R, 11 H, and 8 BB in 6.1 IP for an ERA of 11.76. Elvis Araujo came out, threw a pitch, and ended the inning.

In the seventh inning, Cesar Hernandez snuck a two-out single past the baseball gods and Pete Mackanin shoved Ryan Howard out there to hit a home run. He struck out. Had he have hit a home run, it would have been the first from a pinch hitter all year for the Phillies. There were boos; it really surprised me that everyone seemed to know enough about the Phillies' pinch hitting stats to react like that.

Cody Asche used the bottom of the ninth to peg his third extra base hit - half of the Phillies' total for the evening. Then, Maikel Franco, the young star it feels like we haven't seen in weeks, was given an at-bat, and struck out to end the game.

The Phillies lost.

Let's finish with a Larry Andersen quote.

"You just.. you did... you just...I just don't know."