TORONTO -- It wasn’t another 14-strikeout performance from Red Sox starter Payton Tolle, but it didn’t need to be.
He was dominant in a different way on Thursday afternoon against the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre.
Tolle tossed eight innings, allowing zero runs on two hits to help the visitors to a 7-0 win. He struck out four and issued two walks.
His effort, which took only 91 pitches, helped salvage a victory in the four-game series and snap Boston’s five-game losing streak.
Instead of flashing his swing and miss stuff, Tolle found a way to work around early traffic on the base paths and induce soft contact when needed.
The last time Tolle took the mound on Aug. 7, a 13-1 win over the Athletics, he surrendered one run over six innings with the 14 strikeouts. It came on the heels of the Red Sox using eight relievers in an extra-inning game the night before.
On Thursday, his team needed him again for a different reason: To put an end to the worst stretch of losses since the opening road trip of the season.
He did just that, despite not recording his first strikeout until the bottom of the sixth inning when he fanned Charles McAdoo.
Willson Contreras kickstarted the offense by driving in Wilyer Abreu with an RBI double off Blue Jays starter Max Scherzer in the top of the first for a 1-0 lead.
Caleb Durbin then delivered the knockout blow in the top of the eighth off reliever Chase Lee when he turned on an 81 mph sweeper and sent it over the left-field wall for a grand slam. Masataka Yoshida's sac fly and Durbin's RBI single gave Boston two more insurance runs.
Boston improved its record to 65-56 and will now head to Pittsburgh for a weekend series to close out a seven-game road trip.