Well, I’m back. As the White Sox series is about to start later this evening, I need to get back into things. I probably could have updated for the Toronto series, but I got lazy. As I wrote before, I was home on a two week trip to Pennsylvia to visit my family and my wife’s. While we were in Pittsburgh, we attended Fanfest, which was a lot of fun. I did post some pictures of that online, you can see them here. As a lot of games passed between my last update and now I’ll have rather short recaps of them. Most of them I didn’t even see being out of town. :)
June 28th: Rangers lose to Giants, 5-1. The big deal in this one was a grand slam that John Rheinecker gave up to Ray Durham. Of course the Rangers only pushed across one run of their own – only getting one extra base hit. While we lost by 4, this game felt like a game where we lost by just 1. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
June 29th: Rangers lose to Giants, 2-1. Even more maddening than the 5-1 loss, or the fiasco that was the foul/fair ball of Teixeira’s for me. 2-1 games mean one thing – you didn’t hit well enough to win. A great start (6IP, 4H, 1ER) was wasted by John Koronka. He was bested by Jason Schmidt (7IP, 5H, 1ER). Ian Kinsler had two of the 5 hits, we had not much going on. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
June 30th: Rangers beat Astros, 3-1. Padilla beats Oswalt. Vicente Padilla, who has become our hottest pitcher of late bested Roy Oswalt in Arlington. Oswalt even pitched a complete game (8IP, 9H, 3ER), but still got the loss. That was because the Astros were dominated by Padilla. Vicente went 8 innings, giving up just 4 hits and 1ER. Otsuka got his 16th save of the season. If I wasn’t headed out of town on a trip in two days, I probably would have been at this game. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 1st: Rangers lose to Astros, 7-0. Another shutout. Four Houston pitchers combined on a 3 hit shutout of the Rangers. Man, we had NOTHING this game. John Wasdin technically had a quality start, but was nowhere near sniffing a win. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 2nd: Rangers lose to Astros, 9-5. The first of the games I didn’t get to see, as I was in Philadelphia by the time the game started. I did see on ESPN about Millwood having to come out of the game early. At the time I thought it was going to be bad, but it turns out not to be. Not a very well pitched game by Texas, giving up 16 hits with 3 walks. There goes the Silver boot to Houston. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 3rd: Rangers beat Blue Jays, 6-1. John Rheinecker turned in a great performance, going 7 innings, giving up just one run on 5 hits. He was followed up by Coco & Bryan Corey for the win. Mark DeRosa had a home run, and Kinsler, Laird, & Mike Young (two) had doubles in this one. From the line score, it appeared we didn’t get it into gear until late, scoring 5 of our six runs in the 6th, 7th, & 8th. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 4th: Rangers lose to Blue Jays, 3-2. John Koronka took a tough loss, going 8 innings total, giving up just three runs, but was bested by former Cy Young winner, Roy Halladay. Halladay went 7.2 Innings, gave up no runs. We tried to come back against BJ Ryan, but couldn’t seal the deal. Mike Young got his 1,000th career hit, if his health holds up, I think 3,000 will be no problem for him at all. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 5th: Rangers beat Blue Jays, 9-3. Vicente Padilla got his 8th win of the season tonight, going 6.2 innings, giving up 3 runs. But we more tha covered that by doing a number on the Toronto staff. Toronto ran four pitchers out there, none of them escaped unscathed. Casey Janssen took the worst of it, going just 3.1 innings, giving up 5ER. We had 5 doubles and four home runs in this one. Lots of offense here (14 hits total). [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 6th: Off day for Rangers. I was at a Phillies game this night. Had seriously great seats, just two rows between me and the home dugout. Got to see closeups of Pat Burrell striking out.
July 7th: Rangers beat Twins, 9-4. Like the last game against the Jays, the Rangers got out fast, scoring 8 of their nine runs in the first three innings. Again, we had four doubles, and two home runs this game – most of which came in the first three innings. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 8th: Rangers lose to Twins, 4-0. The second time we were shut out this month. This time we were closed down by Francisco Liriano (and two relievers). We could get only six hits in all (2 by DeRosa). John Rheinecker didn’t pitch bad again (6IP, 3ER), but was beat by someone else. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 9th: Rangers beat Twins, 5-2. In a surprise, John Koronka beat Johan Santana. Johan Santana seemed to melt, based on the fact that of the 5ER he gave up, 4 of them were in his final two innings. John Koronka picked up the win in this game, although he went the minimum 5 to get it. Two home runs this game, one by Tex, one by Matthews. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 10th: I attended the Fanfest in Pittsburgh this day. Was a lot of fun – I posted some pictures of it online here. My wife got to meet and talk to Jackie Robinson’s daughter, and I noticed Billy Ripken hanging out in the baseball card show, stopped to talk to him for a bit – that was quite fun, too.
July 11th: Mike Young was the All-star game MVP. It was quite cool to see that. Really nice to see him get some national press. My wife and I hung out in a local bar for the start of the All Star game. We were probably the only people clapping for the AL players, and specifically Mike Young and Gary Matthews, but it was nice to have that kind of communal fun. We ate dinner at this place, was quite nice.
July 12th: Off day – no baseball.
July 13th: Rangers beat Orioles, 15-1. Bombs away is the word here. Mark Teixeira led the way in this one with a career high 3 home runs, as well as 7 RBI’s. We had six home runs in all, as well as two doubles. Offense all over the place. Of the 11 different batters we sent up there, only Jerry Hairston didn’t get a hit, and he was a late inning sub anyway. All our starting 9 had hits. Vicente Padilla had a great game here too, but that kind of got buried behind all the offense. Padilla went 7, giving up 4 hits and just 1 earned run. He continues to roll. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 14th: Rangers beat Orioles, 2-1. Our offense disappeared after last night. We could only garner 4 hits in all, but it was enough, as we won 2-1 over Kris Benson and the Orioles. Benson did what Oswalt did a week ago or so, pitch a complete game aginst the Rangers, but lost. Kevin Millwood showed no ill effects of his early exit last time out. He went 6, gave up just one run, and the trio of Bauer/Cordero/Otsuka sealed the win, earning Aki his 18th save, and in my opinion the pole position for the closer’s job in 2007. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 15th: Rangers lose to Orioles, 8-1. Uh, hello? Where’d our offense go? After the outburst to start the second half, we haven’t done much since. Two runs yesterday on four hits, one run on six hits tonight. Rheinecker got bombed, giving up 7ER in 3.2IP – that was pretty much the game in a nutshell. Our pitcher got bombed, and we broke out the no hit sticks. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 16th: Rangers lose to Orioles, 4-0. Not only did our offense actually get worse by getting shut out for the third time this month (and it’s only half over), we also tossed in three errors for good measure. Blech. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 17th: Rangers lose to Blue Jays, 10-1. OK, this is getting sad. In the the last four games, we’ve gotten a total of 4 runs. Not only that, John Koronka stunk up the joint this game, giving up 9ER in 3.2IP. 
[ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 18th: Rangers beat Blue Jays, 5-2. It’s still sad when we win the game, and score more runs than we did in the previous four combined without getting to double digits. However, it wasn’t all nice, as we scored all five of our runs in the 8th inning – it looked like we were well on our way to another scoreless game at that point – I have to admit. I did see this one, but only from the seventh inning onwards, so I got to see all the fun. All those runs came right in time too, as Padilla had just come out of the game after pitching 7 innings, giving up just two runs – he deserved the win. Fortunately our bats came alive at exactly the right time to get Vicente his 10th win of the season. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 19th: Rangers beat Blue Jays, 5-4. We had another game like last night, where we had donut through six innings (well, OK 1 run, but it felt like less), and then picked up four in the 7th frame and then held on for the win. Kevin Millwood joined Vicente Padilla as a game winner on the staff. Assuming he picks up a win on his other start in the remainder of July, that would give him 11, and a pace to get about 16 or so – maybe 17 depending on how that “half a win” falls. :) We were led here by Gerald Laird, who went 2 for 3 (two doubles) and scored twice. Gary Matthews was the beneficiary of that, getting two RBI’s. Mark DeRosa also had a line drive opposite field home run in this game, too. [ MLB.com recap of game ]
July 20th: Rangers lose to the Red Sox, 6-4. A makeup game from all the rain we had in Boston on our trips in there. This was a scheduled day off, but it made for quite an intersting travel day for the Rangers, being in three towns in one day. Rheinecker got hit around a bit again, going just 3.2IP, giving up 8 hits and 4 ER. That’s pretty similar to Curt Schilling’s line too, except Schill went 7, doubling more or less Rheinecker’s distance. The difference here is that Bryan Corey also gave up 2ER in his inning plus for the Rangers, while nobody from the Boston pen gave up anything. Offensively we had two doubles this game on a total of 11 hits. And now we’re off to Chicago for a few games there. Do we still have a ballpark? I haven’t seen a game at home in almost two whole months it feels, and this all seems like road games. :) [ MLB.com recap of game ]
And there we are. All caught up. Now time to get back to the grind of doing daily updates again.