Strong outing from Chatwood a relief

The view from Deep Left Field on the Blue Jays’ 7-4 win in Baltimore on Sunday:

Blue Jays fans can be forgiven for thinking “here we go again” after Trent Thornton gave up two eighth-inning home runs Sunday to cut a comfortable five-run lead to a nervous 6-4 advantage. After all, going into the game, the Jays had lost 12 of the last 22 games they had led or tied in the seventh inning or later, an abysmal number.

Even with an insurance run in the top of the ninth, fingernails were worn to the nub watching Tyler Chatwood take the ball for the bottom of the frame. Seeing his first four pitches wind up nowhere near the strike zone only made it worse.

This was the third time the Jays gave Chatwood the final inning of a game in a save situation. The right-hander retired just three of the 10 hitters he faced in the previous two opportunities, allowing five runs on two hits and walking five. Small sample, but an ERA of 45.00.

Chatwood had a miserable few weeks, but started to turn things around with back-toback outings in which he had allowed neither a hit nor a walk. The walk-free streak came to an end quickly but, as bad as Chatwood looked in facing that first hitter, he didn’t allow things to unravel on him.

The righty retired the next three batters on a total of 11 pitches — nine of them strikes — all on ground balls, picking up his first save in a Jays uniform and the fifth of his career.

On a day when Jordan Romano

was unavailable, having thrown two innings to secure the victory Saturday, Chatwood rewarding the team’s continued faith in him was a more than welcome sight.

Bottoms up: The back half of the batting order was the key to the Jays’ success Sunday afternoon, led by the ninth hitter, Reese McGuire, who

smacked a single and three doubles for his second career four-hit game.

McGuire led off the fifth inning with one of those twobaggers, sparking a four-run rally, and drove in insurance runs in each of the eighth and ninth innings.

The bottom four hitters in the lineup reached base a dozen times, turning things over to the point that Marcus Semien came to bat six times, and setting the table for the big bats.

It’s no mystery that teams are likelier to score a lot more often when the bottom of the order is producing. It feels as though the 2015 team did its best work when Kevin Pillar and Ryan Goins were getting hits and hanging out on base for Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista. That’s now two games in a row where the hitters at the bottom have done some heavy lifting. Singles by Santiago Espinal and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., batting seventh and eighth, set up Saturday’s gamewinning, six-run rally in the ninth inning.

Happy Father’s Day: Teoscar Hernandez was back with the team after spending three days at home for Friday’s 5 a.m. birth of son Mateo Javier, and he celebrated his return and the arrival of his new baby boy with a two-hit game on Father’s Day.

He had an infield single in the middle of a two-out, firstinning rally during which the Jays loaded the bases but didn’t score. His other hit came in the middle of the fifth-inning rally in which the Jays scored the bulk of their runs. His double into the left-field corner cashed Bo Bichette with the go-ahead run, the second of four the Jays would score in the frame.

It was far from the most emotional Father’s Day moment in Jays history — that will forever belong to John McDonald, who homered in 2010 in his first game back after the funeral of his father — but it was a nice welcome gift for the newest Hernandez, and a big help to the Jays as they got back to the .500 mark for the season.