Back home against the Diamondbacks. I’m a bit disappointed in that neither Randy Johnson or Mike Morgan will pitch (at least Morgan not as a starter). I was going to go to the Sat evening game should Morgan have started, but they said he wasn’t. Oh well. We got behind early, and while we had a good rally in the bottom of the 9th against Arizona closer Matt Mantei, it wasn’t enough – we lost 5-4, even with two home runs (one by Raffy & one by Royce).
However, that wasn’t the story of this game. The story here was that we lost Ruben Mateo for the season. I watched it happen in the bottom of the seventh – the replay was quite bizarre (the TV guys said it wasn’t for the squeamish – more on the TV guys in a minute). It was a pretty ugly thing – he tripped over the base and went down in a heap face down. From the looks of it at the time, it looked exactly the same as the injury that knocked out Pittsburgh’s Jason Kendall last year for the season. He came back strong this year, but Ruben has a history of being hurt – I wonder how much that will impact this injury.
Also, TV guy Tom Grieve is out for a few games, apparently he had some sort of outpatient surgery to “remove a growth from his ear” – I can’t find any more info other than that. His replacement is the radio post game call-in guy Steve Busby (who used to do TV coverage from 1982-1994). I immediately thought Steve Busby was way more chatty than Tom Grieve was. Nothing against Tom, but Steve seemed to talk more than Tom normally does. Also, with Craig Miller not being there for the pre-game show, Ranger games have an odd feeling to ’em. I also want to bring back John Rhadigan for the “man in the ballpark” things – he was really funny.