Toronto's Lawrie has ups and downs
Brett Lawrie is 22 and still learning.
And as good as he can be, the third baseman can hurt the team by being too aggressive.
He hit the game-tying double in the eighth inning of Friday's 8-5 loss to Boston. But then he was thrown
out at third trying to advance on a ground ball to shortstop.
He made another mistake in the fifth inning that led to the go-ahead two-run single by Daniel Nava. With
two out, Mauro Gomez hit a ground ball to Lawrie. Instead of taking the easy out at first base, he tried to
tag Mike Aviles who was running from second.
Aviles made a spin move and Lawrie missed the tag, the inning was alive and eventually Nava got the big
single.
Should he have taken the play at first?
"Easy to say yes in hindsight," manager John Farrell said. "That's a routine ground ball out with a
below-average runner at the plate in Gomez. So yeah you can sit here and say that the routine out is to
execute at first base. He chose to try and tag him, avoid the throw, Aviles avoids the tag. To me it looked
like he went outside the established baseline but the call stood as it was."
"I went to go tag him and he just, I don't know, I've got to watch the replay because as far as I'm
concerned he was out of the baseline from what I saw," Lawrie said. "I didn't tag him, he got around me,
just an unfortunate lucky break."
The throw to first was his first instinct.
"Obviously," Lawrie said. "But out of the corner of my eye, he was running full speed at me so I figured
I could just go tag him and just run to the dugout. I wasn't thinking about it too much."
That is what is needed, a little more thinking ahead of the play.
