Music: {allcanada} ROMERO LEADS BLUE JAYS INTO SECOND GAME VERSUS ORIOLES

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

{allcanada} ROMERO LEADS BLUE JAYS INTO SECOND GAME VERSUS ORIOLES

The Blue Jays will look to build on last night's walk-off victory over Baltimore when they send Ricky Romero against Orioles eight-game winner Jake Arrieta tonight in Toronto.

Romero will face the Orioles for the 10th time in his career. He is 3-3 with a 3.88 ERA over the first nine outings, including a loss to Arrieta on June 4 in which he was charged with five runs and 11 hits over 7 2/3 innings.

The southpaw then lost his second straight start on Thursday, allowing three runs on eight hits over eight innings of a 3-2 setback to the Royals. Despite pitching at least seven innings for a sixth straight start, the 26-year-old Romero fell to 5-6 with a 3.18 ERA in 13 outings.

Arrieta will try to halt his club's 15-game road series losing streak to the Blue Jays tonight.

The right-hander has won two straight starts and is 4-2 over his last six outings. He carried a no-hitter through five innings of his last appearance on Friday versus the Rays and ended up allowing two hits and three walks over seven scoreless innings to claim a 7-0 victory.

Arrieta improved to 8-3 with a 4.48 earned run average in 14 starts and is aiming tonight to join Boston's Jon Lester as nine-game winners in the American League.

The 25-year-old has won both of his career starts versus the Blue Jays, including a June 4 meeting at Baltimore in which he hurled six innings and gave up three runs in a 5-3 triumph.

Toronto, though, still took two of three in that set and is 18-4 versus Baltimore in the past 22 meetings. Victories have been even harder for the O's to come by up north as they haven't won as the road club against the Blue Jays since Aug. 7, 2009 and have lost 24 of their last 26 trips to Toronto.

The Jays carried a five-game home slide, their longest since April 2008, into last night's opener, but won in dramatic fashion on Adam Lind's walk-off homer to begin the 11th inning that gave his club a 6-5 victory.

Lind smacked Toronto's club-record fourth walk-off homer this season, while the first baseman is now hitting .400 (14-for-35) with five home runs and 12 RBI in 10 games since missing nearly a month of action with a back injury.

"The way we won tonight I thought was great. Any win you can get in the division is going to be big," Lind said.

Aaron Hill also went yard as the Blue Jays halted a four-game overall losing streak.

J.J. Hardy, Nick Markakis and Luke Scott all finished with three hits, but the Orioles went 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position and needed a two-run homer from Matt Wieters in the eighth inning to force extra innings. Still, they lost their third straight game.

"We created opportunities. We had some situations like when we got that man on third base and one out. That was a kick in the pants," Orioles manager Buck Showalter said on his team's website. "There's just so many good things that happened to get back in that game. We just couldn't get over the hump."