First off, a complaint. Listening to the radio coverage of this game today, the Ranger announcers talked about “protesters” outside Jacobs Field who were complaining against the Indians use of the “Indian symbol” as their team logo. I mean, this team has been around for what, a zillion years – and people are just NOW complaining? Why is it all of a sudden a problem? Political correctness, that’s why. To me, anyone who complains about useless things like this deserves to be horsewhipped themselves. Stop wasting everyone’s time, and protest against REAL problems. What a waste of time. I know my mother reads these things, so I won’t truly say what I’m feeling here. Suffice it to say it’s much stronger than these words. For these people, I present this group of images.. Wish I could find out where they all live, I’d sign ’em all up for Indians mailings. :)
On the Baseball front – oh man.. Rick Helling! And in April! :) 8 innings pitched (132 pitches), 4 hits, two earned runs. What a performance! The only mistake was a long ball to Omar Visquel in the first inning – Rick’s first allowed HR in 2000. At this point in 1999 he had given up, what about 100 of them? Actually, Rick never allowed an Indian runner to second base after that. He had 9 strikeouts in 8 innings as well as two walks. Overall, a totally dominating performance by Rick. This is the kind of game he used to pitch all last year, and never got any run support for. Hopefully he’ll get some better stuff this year – would be nice to be more like the 20 game winner from two years ago.
On the other side, for a change, we started out the game with the lead – which hasn’t happened much so far this season. David Segui had a home run in the first for two of the three runs in that frame. We had a couple more runs in the third with small ball, which was nice to see. Our remaining two runs came off of solo home runs by Raffy & Pudge.
Was nice to see former Ranger Bobby Witt on the mound, and pitching fairly well, going three innings, allowing two hits and no runs with a strikeout. Fortunately, that wasn’t damaging to us.
One final remark – where was all of this when we were in New York? Sigh.