There wasn’t really a whole lot to this game. Mike Morgan, outside of the second inning pitched very well, and the two Ranger relivers that followed (Venafro/Crabtree) each pitched one scoreless inning. Mike Morgan made one big mistake in the second, a three run home run to Kurt Abbott. Other than that, he was great. In fact, the Rockies went down 1-2-3 in every inning from the fourth to the ninth with only two hits in that mix. The three run home run did it.
The Rangers weren’t a whole lot better, except we didn’t go down 1-2-3 as many times. The Rockies did it in 7 of the 9 innings, we did it in only 3. Our lone scoring was the two solo home runs by Juan Gonzalez & Rafael Palmeiro in the 4th. We had a few chances (1st and 3rd with 2 outs in the first, 1st and 3rd with 1 out in the 9th), but we didn’t mount any real offense.
In fact, the offense for both sides was rather scattered, as there were a total of 15 hits for both teams, and 14 of them were by different players (only Echevarria for Colorado had two). We had our chances, and we didn’t come through. Oh well.
On to a hellacious 8 game stretch with four games in New York, and four in Boston. Ugh. Hope we come out of that still in first, and still in decent shape.
Ruben Mateo went 0-4 with a walk – he has one hit in his first two games, a home run. Mateo did try and make a good catch during the game, but missed it – he looked good, and he did change his uniform number from 38 to 21 – no reason given on TV that I heard for the switch.
Commentary by Jim Weeks:
Mike Morgan had his most effective outing of the year, but one bad pitch was belted for a 3 run homer and the Rangers lost.
This is one game the Rangers should have won. They had numerous opportunities to win the game, including in the 9th inning, but it wasn’t to be.
Ruben Mateo, sporting Ruben Sierra (and Roberto Clemente’s) #21, made a bad judgement play in center, diving for a ball he should have played differently. Although he walked in the game, he did strike out twice.
Juan Gonzalez drove in his 1,000th career run with a solo homer.