Well, my daughter was born on Saturday April 16th (an 8-0 loss by the Rangers no less – thanks guys!), and when I stopped doing updates a few days before that, the Rangers’ stats were a winning percentage of .444, we were tied for third place one game out. I don’t do any updates for about 11 games or so, and what do I find when I come back for updates? We’ve got a winning percentage of .476, we’re tied for third and are 1.5 games out. So basically, not much has changed. Which is both good and bad. I would have liked to have made some progress there, but as we’ve kind of treaded water during this time, no one else has stepped on us to keep us down, either.
In this game, Ryan Drese, who was a very pleasant surprise in 2004 didn’t show the same kind of stuff. He was beat around a bit, giving up 11 hits in his 6.1 innings of work. He allowed 5 runs (4ER), and didn’t seem to have a good control of the game at any point. He did strike out five, but the way I saw him pitch, that was a surprise. Ron Mahay followed Drese with a pretty good 1.2 innings allowing no runs, which kept us in the game. However, Brocail came in and gave up two in the 9th which to my eyes seemed to deflate the Rangers. We had been down the whole game, but were within striking distance. Just needed one. Then we needed 3 to tie, four to win, and it didn’t seem like we had any gas in the tank after Brocail’s ninth.
Offensively, we didn’t do a whole lot. We had a total of 8 hits. Four of them were home runs (Dellucci, Teixeira, Mench, & Soriano). All of them were solo. That left just four other hits for the entire game. Even given that, we still were very close until the ninth. Just didn’t seem to be able to get much going.
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