TORONTO – Drew Hutchison may very well have been pitching to keep his spot in the rotation Tuesday night. Or perhaps the readings of the tea leaves were off and he wasn’t. Either way, the perplexing right-hander gave the Toronto Blue Jays something to think about, this time for good reasons, with seven outstanding innings of work in the team’s ninth straight victory, a 4-2 win over the Oakland Athletics.

Hutchison left to a standing ovation from a crowd of 38,381 after allowing Marcus Semien’s infield single to open the eighth, the deepest he’s gone in a game since May 25 when he threw a four-hit shutout against the Chicago White Sox.

The key this time out was a focus on not coming out of his delivery to overthrow, a topic of discussion of late with manager John Gibbons and pitching coach Pete Walker. Gibbons reiterated the point over the weekend in New York, showing Hutchison an article about Noah Syndergaard in which the New York Mets pitching consultant spoke of the need to sometimes back off on the mound.

“It’s something we talked about a little bit, after last start and then a couple of other times,” said Hutchison. “Staying under control, I thought I did a better job of that. When you get into situations sometimes you tend to try to do a little too much instead of taking the foot off the gas a little bit and executing pitches.”

That hasn’t always been the case for Hutchison, who even as the wins have piled up – remarkably, he’s 11-2 despite a 5.26 ERA – has been frustratingly inconsistent. The Blue Jays have kicked around moving to a four-man staff next week, when they begin a stretch with three off-days over eight days.

There’s an argument to be made for that regardless, but the Blue Jays also flipped R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle’s upcoming starts, with the knuckleballer now going Wednesday and the left-hander Thursday. Buehrle mentioned that he “didn’t feel the greatest” his last time out against the Minnesota Twins, so an extra day of rest surely won’t hurt him, but the switch also gives the Blue Jays the potential to start Dickey on short rest against the New York Yankees on Sunday in Hutchison’s spot.

You know, just in case.

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Hutchison, though, surely did enough to at least buy himself another start, shaking off Danny Valencia’s RBI double in the first to face two batters over the minimum from the second through the seventh.

“Definitely better command, I didn’t think he was overthrowing, that’s what has gotten him into trouble a little bit in the past,” said Gibbons. “He gave up that run and then really kicked it in. He’s been kind of the whipping boy around here lately. To step up like that, it’s big.”

Semien’s little squib in the eighth ended a run of eight batters in a row and 14 of 15 retired, and even though he came around to score on Billy Burns’ RBI single off Aaron Sanchez, that didn’t matter. In all Hutchison allowed two runs on four hits and two walks with six strikeouts.

“By no means is that the reason he was really good,” Gibbons said in reference to the article he shared with Hutchison. “He knows those things, pitching coaches talk about that all the time, but I brought it up with him, ‘Hey, try this,’ because he’s got to live and die with location and sometimes you try to rev it up, you lose that. That’s naturally what happens. We’ll see.”

And even if the strong performance was against the lowly Athletics, it was still something to build upon.

“It’s been frustrating, definitely,” Hutchison said of his recent struggles. “I try to move on, there’s nothing I can do about that, if you’re worried about things that happened in the past, it’s going to affect your future, you have to go out there and make one pitch at a time, I talk about it all the time and it sounds boring, but it’s really what it comes down to. …

“I was down in the zone and then elevated when I wanted to. I think it’s something good to build off. I just stayed under control a little bit better, hopefully I can continue to do that.”

The Blue Jays (62-52), who have also won 12 of their past 13, did most of their heavy lifting in the second with some help from the porous defence of the Athletics (51-63).

Chris Colabello’s bloop single turned into a double when it bounced over Coco Crisp’s head, he scored when Semien threw away Russell Martin’s grounder to short, Justin Smoak then ripped an RBI double, advanced to third when Eric Sogard booted Kevin Pillar’s grounder and scored on Ryan Goins’ groundout.

Not exactly a prototypical inning for the Blue Jays.

“For as much as we’re notorious for hitting homers and doubles, we have a lot of professional hitters, a lot of guys who grind out at-bats and I think the way you become guys who slug in the big-leagues is you have to be a good hitter first,” said Colabello. “At any point and time one through nine, we have guys that understand what the situation entails and what they’re trying to accomplish.

“I got to second with nobody out and Russ did a great job of getting a ball to my left that I could take third on, I saw him really working to try and get the ball to the right of second base. It just happened to work out that they threw it away and we were able to get a run out of the play. That gets overlooked a little bit in the other stuff we do, obviously we hit a lot of homers, but I’ve seen it since I’ve been here, a lot of guys are taking situational hitting very seriously and certainly not being selfish in those moments.”

Jose Bautista made it a 4-1 game in a fashion they’re more accustomed to in the fifth as he clubbed his 27th homer of the season, off Kendall Graveman.

Hutchison, Sanchez and Roberto Osuna, handling the ninth for his 11th save, made the limited offence stand up, as another start by the 24-year-old ended in a victory, only this time with the kind of pitching performance more likely to make a win happen.