The Rangers return to the Ballpark (newly trashed christened with more Ameriquest Field junk) after being on the road for several weeks plus the All-Star break, PLUS an extra day off after the all star break. Seems like we haven’t played here since last season, which might be why they had a psuedo-opening Day feel around the park last night. Anyway, someone who seems to really love this place pitched here last night. Ryan Drese. I’ve done a complete turnaround on him – I said before I never was a fan of his, but he’s proven me completely wrong. I wanted him gone from the moment we got him – not now, and I’m not afraid to say I was wrong about it. Drese has an ERA under two at this ballpark, which is a big accomplishment. He continued his ground ball mastery, and went 7 innings, giving up only one earned run, and was generally awesome.
So much so that it really kept the game moving, the entire game only took 2:15 to play, which is a very low figure considering there was a total of 13 runs scored, and 24 hits total. I suppose that came from the fact that there weren’t a million pitching changes, and the ones that did happen mostly happened between innings.
We bombed last year’s Cy Young award winner Roy Halladay to the tune of 6ER over 4 innings. Not surprising, as it was said on TV that his career ERA in this park was 8.8something. However, Halladay has not been pitching like himself the last few years, but I don’t mind taking advantage of that. The charge was led by Lance Nix, who had a career day getting four hits. Soriano also had 4 RBI’s, and we had three home runs (Texieira, Soriano, Nix). The home runs led to the attention of one of the Ballpark’s newest uh.. “improvements”
I’m not going to comment fully on this until I see it myself later today (Saturday) with my own eyes. Didn’t look terribly overwhelming on TV. There were several changes to the Ballpark during the break, but I’ll get into that more fully on my Saturday game commentary.
And in a bit of sad news, former Ranger friend Rick Helling was released by the Rangers after not doing too well in a comeback experiment in AAA. Rick has said he plans to retire – it’s a shame it didn’t work out, I would have loved to have seen him back in Arlington again.
— Joe Siegler