Chicago Cubs vs. Toronto Blue Jays preview, Saturday 8/19, 1:20 CT

A brief review of Friday night’s action in the N.L. Central:

The Pirates spotted the Cardinals an 11-3 lead, then scored five runs in the eighth and two in the ninth and had the bases loaded when Elias Diaz struck out to end the game with an 11-10 Cardinals win.

That’s good and bad. The bad part is that the Cardinals remained 1½ games behind the Cubs. The good part is that it appears that the Cardinals bullpen looks pretty bad. That can’t be good for them going forward.

The Pirates dropped to 6½ games behind the Cubs and they are now as close to last place in the Central as to first place.

The Brewers lost to the Rockies 8-4, dropping into third place and two games behind the Cubs.

The Cardinals and Pirates play Saturday afternoon at 3:05 p.m. CT in Pittsburgh; the Brewers and Rockies on Saturday evening at 7:10 p.m. CT in Denver.

Here are today’s particulars.

Cubs lineup:

Jay CF, Schwarber LF, Bryant 3B, Rizzo 1B, Happ 2B, Avila C, Heyward RF, Baez SS, Quintana P

The Blue Jays lineup was not available at posting time. Please check the BCB Twitter feed for the Blue Jays lineup.

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Jose Quintana vs. Nick Tepesch

Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Jose Quintana’s six Cubs starts: one excellent, two good, two decent, one bad. I’d like to see more in the first two categories, please.

He faced the Blue Jays June 16 in Toronto and threw seven good innings, allowing five hits and two runs. The runs were solo homers, one by Steve Pearce, the other by Kendrys Morales.

Quintana needs to do a better job of keeping baseballs in the park. He’s allowed 20 homers in 139⅓ innings this year after just 22 in 208 innings last year.

Nick Tepesch was originally drafted by the Rangers, and he started 39 games for them in 2013 and 2014 with limited success.

Then in 2015, he suffered thoracic outlet syndrome and missed the entire season. Since then he’s been an itinerant, going through the Dodgers, Athletics, Royals, Twins and Blue Jays organizations — and that’s just since June 2016!

He has made two starts for the Jays. One was bad, the other pretty good. He faced the Cubs back in 2013, but only Anthony Rizzo remains from that team. Current Cubs are 2-for-10 vs. Tepesch, which means pretty much nothing.

Today's game is on ABC7 Chicago. It’s also on MLB Network outside the Chicago market.

Here is the complete MLB.com Mediacenter for today.

MLB.com Gameday

Baseball-reference.com game preview

SB Nation game preview

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The 2017 Game Thread procedure will be the same as the one used during 2016. Here's how it works.

You'll find the game preview posted separately on the front page, two hours before game time (90 minutes for some early day games following night games).

At the same time, a StoryStream containing the preview will also post on the front page. The First Pitch Thread and all the overflow threads will be published in that stream, as well as the recap. The recap will also live on the front page as a separate post, and at the time I write the recap I will rename the stream "Cubs vs. (Team) (Day of Week) Game Threads" so you can go back and find every thread related to that particular game.

You will also be able to find the preview, First Pitch Thread, all the overflow threads and recap in the box marked "Chicago Cubs Game Threads" at the bottom of the front page (you can also find them in this section link). They will also appear in the game's StoryStream as noted above.

The First Pitch thread will post at five minutes before game time, then an overflow thread at one hour, two hours and 2:45 after the scheduled game time.

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Discuss amongst yourselves.