» Blue Jays finally unleash some home run damage to down Braves

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Through all the meetings and video sessions and whatever form of witchcraft the Blue Jays were channeling to snap the team’s lingering power outage, an antidote for all that ails finally made an appearance.

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First it was outfield Alan Roden, the upstart story of spring training who turned jumpstart bat to the Jays offence on Tuesday night at the Rogers Centre.

Anchoring the bottom of the Jays batting order, the 25-year-old served up a two-run blast that rocketed out of the stadium in a hurry for the first homer of his big-league career.

Four batters later it was the man general manager Ross Atkins signed to a five-year, $92.5 million US offer to provide a power surge. That would be Anthony Santander, who unleashed his second of the season but first at the Rogers Centre.

The five-run outburst in the fifth inning propelled the Jays and starter Kevin Gausman to a 6-3 win over the Braves, evening the three-game series at a win apiece. With the victory, the Jays improved to a credible 10-8 to continue their stretch of games with a record above .500 to eight in a row.

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The homers were the star of the show, a sight to behold coming from a team that with just nine entering Tuesday’s contest was tied for the fewest in the league.

Both balls had an exit velocity of 106.4 miles per hour.

Both came in one inning (the first multi-homer inning for Toronto hitters this season.)

And both were multi-run homers (two for Roden, three for Santander) the first time the Jays had managed that since the third game of the season.

Who doesn’t love the long ball, you say?

“It’s kind of what we’ve been waiting for,” manager John Schneider said after the game. “Today was a perfect example of just what it can do for the rest of the game when it does happen. That’s kind of been the difference in the first 18 games of our season. We’ve been missing that big hit. Today we got it.”

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The five-run surge certainly roused the crowd of 26,979 who to that point had seen stellar young Braves starter Spencer Schwellenbach shut the home team down with authority. Consider that the 24-year-old righty had allowed just one earned run in three starts (and at 0.45 owned the second best ERA in the majors.

As impressive as the sudden flash of power was, it was a fairly graphic illustration of what has afflicted this team and its ability to pile up timely runs for the better part of two-plus seasons.

There has been at least a subtle difference this year in the form of an acknowledgement from Schneider especially that the team can’t really get to where it wants to without some game-changing damage in its arsenal.

Prior to the game, Schneider’s latest “the hits will come” sermon was at least punctuated with an explanation as to why his team needed the biggest, baddest version of those knocks so badly.

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“We’ve got to start hitting homers to separate the score a little bit,” Schneider said, a nice preview of the effects of five runs scored via home runs in one inning. “Every couple of weeks we go under the hood (to analyze approach) a little bit and I think, minus the contact, quality has been really good and the at-bats have been really good.

“I’m confident that (the big hits) will happen.”

Beyond the obvious, the Jays have been looking for a means to support the strong starting pitching they’ve been getting consistently this season. Gausman’s was the latest such effort as he went sixes wild (six innings pitches, six hits allowed and six strikeouts) while holding the Braves to two runs.

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In other words, he was doing his part yet again to keep his team in the game while waiting for the icy bats to defrost.

For one night, anyway, the Toronto offence obliged, thanks to a rookie’s night to remember and a veteran showing why he was such an attractive free-agent pursuit.

BUT WHAT ABOUT VLAD?

Nowhere was the power outage that has hindered the Jays offence thus far this season been more vexing than it is with the man paid to lead his team on offence.

Yes, Vlad Guerrero Jr., without a homer through 18 games now, is stuck hard in one of the worst long ball lags of his career.

Dating back to last season, Guerrero has now gone 27 games without a homer and has hit one out in just one of his last 40 games now. That was on Sept. 19 in Texas when he hit a pair.

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That dearth of production has been almost unfathomable for a hitter who seemingly is capable of belting the ball out of the park at will. Think about it: Two homers in 40 games dating back to last fall, the equivalent of a quarter of a season.

Perhaps he’ll be inspired by the Roden-Santander outburst as Guerrero (who had a pair of walks and an RBI on Tuesday and is hitting .275) looks to break out of the second longest stretch of games without a homer in his career.

And for a power postscript? All three Braves runs on Tuesday were scored via solo home runs, giving them six in the series so far.

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