DUNEDIN, Fla. — David Fletcher converted a groundout that ricocheted off the bill of his cap. He hit a double that traveled less than 200 feet. And with two outs in the 11th inning of a tied game Thursday night, he did the most David Fletcher-esque thing yet, looping a soft two-run single into shallow center field to send the Angels to a 7-5 win over the Toronto Blue Jays.
“He hit it hard enough, yet soft enough,” manager Joe Maddon said of Fletcher’s winning hit, which left the bat at only 70.3 mph but found a landing spot between two Blue Jays. “That’s what he’s capable of doing.”
With the win, the Angels improved to 5-2. In all of their wins, they’ve scored the winning run during their last trip to the plate.
“You always want the close games to go your way,” Fletcher said. “It feels like the last few years, they haven’t. But right now, it’s going great.”
Mike Trout had a career-first, for a regular-season game anyway.
He hit a home run so far, it landed on the campus of an elementary school.
It happened in the fifth inning when the score was tied at 3-3. Blue Jays starter Ross Stripling threw Trout a first-pitch fastball up in the zone. Trout clobbered it 444 feet over the left-field wall.
In most MLB stadiums, it would have landed in the bleachers. Maybe even the outfield concourse. But TD Ballpark — the Blue Jays’ 8,500-seat spring training stadium that is temporarily serving as their home venue because of COVID-19 travel restrictions to Canada — has none of those things.
Instead, the ballpark neighbors Curtis Fundamental Elementary School. And Trout’s homer, his third-straight game with a big fly, appeared to land somewhere on its grounds.
“Luckily,” Maddon said, “school was off for the evening.”
Trout also singled and doubled, raising his batting average to .417 and on-base-plus-slugging percentage to 1.438. He might have completed the cycle, too, had Blue Jays center fielder Randal Grichuk not robbed him with a diving catch in the ninth inning that kept the score tied.
Making his first start of the season, Griffin Canning took an inning to find his footing.
In the first, he gave up a one-out walk, a two-out RBI single and two-run home run to Vladimir Guerrero Jr, putting the Angels in an early 3-1 hole.
After that though, the third-year right-hander hit his stride.
He retired 14 straight batters over the next five innings, striking out two batters in the third, all three he faced in the fourth and seven overall in his five-inning, four-run start.
“I just, for lack of a better term, zoned out,” said Canning, who was removed only after giving up a solo homer to Cavan Biggio in the sixth. “Ideally, I get in that mindset every game. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. It shouldn’t take a three-run first inning for me to get there, but that’s just what happened today.”
Canning also used a fastball-slider combination almost exclusively throughout the night, throwing the two a combined 70 times in 81 total pitches.
After throwing cutters and changeups more than 15% of the time each last season, he opted for just 10 changeups and no cutters against the Blue Jays.
“It was more just the matchup,” he explained. “Facing a lot of righties, that was the plan going into it. And it was working well, so might as well just stick with it.”
Maddon said Shohei Ohtani’s next start will not come until at least next week because of a blister the right-hander has been nursing since spring training.
If the Angels had stuck to their six-man rotation, Ohtani’s next start would have been Sunday. But Maddon said they’re being cautious. “It’s gotten a lot better,” Maddon said, before adding: “We want this to be totally well and not become an issue this year.”
Maddon said the team will make a decision on Ohtani’s next start at the beginning of next week.
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