Dioner Navarro broke the thirteenth inning to pieces with a grand slam in Tampa Bay’s 8-3 win over Toronto yesterday.

Carl Crawford had already put the Rays ahead in the thirteenth with a sacrifice fly that scored Jason Bartlett, but Navarro sealed the deal with his bases-clearing blast that was his first home run of the season. If you’re a regular reader, you know all about the local opinion of Navarro’s prospects (try here, here, and here for a sampling), but anyone can see he’s doing well in the (small sample alert) seventeen games he’s played since returning from a DL stay for a cut hand. Navarro’s batting .368/.400/.874 with three doubles and ten RBI over twenty-one hits.

Most projections put Navarro somewhere around .250 for batting average this year, and around ten home runs, though as Brandon and Patrick have noted (see links above), he has the potential to produce more.

Evan Longoria, meanwhile, is stuck in a 5-for-32 rut over the past nine games, batting .225 on the season. He was held out of the starting lineup yesterday but entered late in the game as a defensive substitute, and went one-for-three in the final innings.