The Red Sox lost to Marcus Stroman and the Toronto Blue Jays 6-1 last night. Full disclosure: I was at the Boston College-Florida State football game last night, so I didn’t watch a second of the Sox until this morning. I’m gonna keep this recap short and sweet because the game was bereft of fireworks and Boston still managed to lose handily.

I will note that despite losing 3 of their last 4, and due mostly to every other potential wild card team’s failure to run away with it, the Red Sox still find themselves only 7 games out of the playoffs.

Brock Holt started for Pablo Sandoval at 3rd base and Josh Rutledge started for Dustin Pedroia at 2nd base. And in a move that has been hinted at recently, Mookie Betts played in right field so that Jackie Bradley, Jr. could get some time in center field.

Rick Porcello got the start and pretty quickly looked like he didn’t have his best stuff, allowing back-to-back singles from Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista before getting Edwin Encarnacion to ground into a double play to end the 1st.

Holt had a pretty tough night filling in for Sandoval. It started with a Kevin Pillar double in the 3rd inning that glanced off his glove and made its way into the left field corner. A sacrifice moved Pillar to third and a ground out scored him, so that probably didn’t sit too well with the Brock Star. 1-0, Toronto.

An error by Holt in the 4th inning with a man on 1st meant that the Blue Jays ended up with men on 1st and 2nd with no outs, and Justin Smoak stroked a deep double to score both runners. Ryan Goins tripled off the right field wall for good measure, and the Jays led 4-0.

Travis Shaw singled to start the bottom half of the 4th, and Rusney Castillo got first on a fielder’s choice. From there, Boston managed to manufacture a run. Castillo got to second base on a wild pitch from Stroman, moved to third on a clean single to center by Blake Swihart, and scored on an infield single from Rutledge, who was initially called out before a replay.

Toronto started the 6th inning with 3 consecutive singles, one of which, by Russell Martin, was of the infield variety (in Holt’s direction). Despite Porcello’s best efforts, Toronto came away with two more runs: one on a wild pitch and one on a sacrifice fly. 6-1, Toronto. That’d be the final.

Heath Hembree, whose ERA was once 40.50 after an extremely unfortunate outing on April 26th against the Orioles, got it all the way down under 4.00 after another clean outing in the 8th inning. 3.98, Heath! Congrats! I’m actually unreasonably proud for some reason. He fell on this pitch with 2 outs, but it looks like he emerged okay.