Alejandro Kirk hit two homers and drove in six runs to power the Blue Jays to a 13-4 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday to give Toronto its first American League East Division title since 2015.<\/p>\n
Kirk hit his first career grand slam in Toronto’s five-run first inning and added a two-run shot in the fifth.<\/p>\n
The Blue Jays put the game away with a five-run seventh inning. Addison Barger and George Springer homered for Toronto in the frame.<\/p>\n
Toronto secured the top seed in the AL at 94-68 and will have home-field advantage when the best-of-five division series begins Saturday at Rogers Centre.<\/p>\n
The Blue Jays started the day needing a victory or a New York Yankees loss to Baltimore to secure a first-place finish.<\/p>\n
Toronto set the tone early in front of a sellout crowd of 42,083 on a glorious autumn afternoon.<\/p>\n
After Ian Seymour (4-3) issued back-to-back walks, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. drove in a run to put Toronto on the board. Daulton Varsho singled to load the bases before Kirk’s 387-yard blast over the wall in left field.<\/p>\n
The plucky Rays made it a one-run game by scoring three runs in the third inning against Toronto starter Kevin Gausman, who was pulled after Tampa Bay loaded the bases with two outs in the fourth.<\/p>\n
Mason Fluharty came on and struck out Jonathan Aranda to escape the jam. In the fifth inning, Kirk launched a 419-foot blast to straightaway centre field.<\/p>\n
It was Toronto’s fourth straight win. The second-place Yankees beat the Orioles 3-2 but will have to settle for an appearance in the wild-card series.<\/p>\n
The Rays (77-85) fell to a season-worst eight games under .500.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alejandro Kirk hit two homers and drove in six runs to power the Blue Jays to a 13-4…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-176425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}