Blue Jays take advantage of Marlins baserunning mistakes

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The baseball gods evened things out a little when it came to the ever-fragile hamstring.

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The Jays began the week on the short end of some bad hamstring news as the American League strikeout leader and Jays right-hander Dylan Cease had to go in the injured list because of gimpy hamstring.

But while the Jays are still figuring out how they will deal without Cease, it was the Miami Marlins’ turn on Wednesday to suffer the fickle fate of a wonky hamstring.

For four innings, fireballer Eury Perez was nearly unhittable. The Jays had recorded three singles and had nine strikeouts against him as Perez routinely lit up the radar gun with 100-plus mph heat.

An early run had the Marlins feeling pretty good about themselves until a right hamstring spasm ended Perez’s afternoon after just 12 outs, again, nine of those via strikeout.

And that turned out to be the big break of the game as the Jays would go on to score single runs in the fifth and the sixth — first on a two-out double by Nathan Lukes that plated Tyler Heineman and an inning later on Kazuma Okamoto’s 11th home run of the year for an eventual 2-1 win.

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Baserunning gambles cost Marlins

The Marlins’ penchant for gambling on the basepaths seemed to take care of a lot for the rest of the afternoon as the visitors ran into four caught stealings as they tried to put pressure on the Blue Jays defence that just refused to fold.

Full credit to catcher Heineman, who threw a trio of runners out at second base, not to mention a fourth at third base, although Jeff Hoffman got credit for that pickoff.

Heineman was at his best and the Marlins running game at their worst in the eighth inning. With one out and runners on the corners and trailing by a single run, Louis Varland came on to face the meat of the Marlins lineup. The Jays reliever rang up Connor Norby on strikes with Jakob Marsee at first attempting to take second.

Heineman came up throwing and gunned down the Marlins centre fielder to end the inning, stranding the potential tying run at third base.

The Marlins have made chaos on the basepaths their friend and ally for most of the season, but on this day in particular, it came back to bite them in a big way.

Tyler Rogers, who got a rare save opportunity as the Jays chose to use Varland in the eighth against a tougher part of the lineup, converted his second save as a Blue Jay.

With that win the Jays have now won four of its past five series.

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