Donaldson injury not ‘too serious’
The last 20 hours of the season’s first road trip yielded nothing but bad news for the Blue Jays. You know things aren’t going well when the best thing that happened was that your star player is injured.
Just not as badly injured as you had feared.
In the final two games of this four-game series, the Tampa Bay Rays twice came through with game-winning home runs in the eighth inning, including Wednesday’s dramatic three-run bomb by Steve Souza, Jr., that vaulted Tampa to a 5-3 victory.
The night before, infielder Logan Forsythe belted a two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth to overcome a 2-1 Toronto lead.
That game ended in bizarre fashion when Jose Bautista’s slide into second base was ruled illegal and resulted in a game-ending doubleplay, in a sequence where Toronto thought it had scored the tying and go-ahead runs in the top of the ninth.
“Not a good 24 hours, we’ll put it that way,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons.
Gibbons was able to report that Josh Donaldson had to leave the game with a mild-calf strain in his right leg, but the injury is not believed to be serious.
Donaldson has been something of an iron man the past three seasons, playing 158 games in each of those seasons.
Donaldson’s calf had been acting up slightly the last few days, but he really began to notice it in the third inning Wednesday when he belted a three-run home run, his second round-tripper of the season, to give Toronto and starting pitcher J.A. Happ a 3-0 lead.
“That’s when I first started feeling it, just as I came out of the box after hitting the home run,” he said. “I felt it acting up a little bit.”
“My calf just started locking up and I tried to go three or four innings more. It was just a situation where, one, I didn’t think I was able to play defence the way I want to, and two, if I had to try to run it was pretty difficult.”
After he hit a slow bouncer to the shortstop to make the last out of the seventh inning, Donaldson didn’t even try to run to first base and immediately came out of the game.
“We don’t think it’s too serious and hopefully I’ll be back for our next game,” he said.
Happ tossed six innings in his season debut for Toronto, allowing seven hits, a walk and two runs.
“I feel pretty well about the way it went,” said Happ. “That’s a good team over there.”
Gavin Floyd got his first taste of action as a reliever and worked 1.1 innings.
When he got into a two-on, oneout jam in the eighth, Arnold Leon came on with two-on and one out and Souza smashed his fourth hit and second homer, of the day into the seats in left-centre.