Blue Jays Opening Day thoughts

With a preview still to come, a couple of quick thoughts about today's disheartening loss:

• This was a great example of how baseball is a game of inches. Melky Cabrera's homerun clears the fence by 6 inches (don't listen to Yahoo's boxscore - that ball barely cleared the fence). Marco Scurtaro hits a line drive that would drive in the go-ahead run, if it wasn't in the upper limits of Jason Giambi's leap, or was a foot to the left or right of Giambi. Joba Chamberlain would have struck out Vernon Wells, if the pitch was 6 inches lower (wait, that was called a strike?) If those plays fall 6 inches in another direction, the Jays win the game.


• With that said, the Jays managed to once again revert to their non-converting ways, not capitalizing on men in scoring position when they had the opportunity. Hill was on second base with none out in the 7th, and nothing came of it. Rios works Chamberlain for the walk in the 8th, and then Wells and Thomas strike out. If the Jays are going to contend, they need to take advantage of every opportunity they have to score, because there aren't going to be that many. Right now, they don't seem to have improved on last year.