This game definitely belonged to Josh Hamilton. After almost making a spectacular play in center field (lost the ball to a snow cone hitting the ground), Josh proceeded to go 5-5 with a walk, scoring four times, and had five RBI’s. His hits included two home runs and a triple. Quite the performance. He has the major league lead in RBI’s. At the current rate he’s going, he’s looking at something like 35 home runs and about 140, 150, 160 RBI’s. It’s a seriously impressive set of numbers. We haven’t seen anything like that since the glory days of Juan Gonzalez in the late 90’s. I hope he can stay on the field.
Lost in the hoopla of all the home runs and Josh Hamilton was another pedestrian outing by Sidney Ponson, now making his second in a row. Granted, Ponson was hurt by some poor fielding, but still did not dominate. His line was five innings, 80 pitches (not that bad at all, actually), nine hits, and seven runs, although only three were earned. I’ve seen a lot worse lines than that, but watching the game he was just “eh”.
But there’s no doubt the big deal in this game was the home runs. While the box score says we had six, it honestly felt like more than that. The home runs came from Josh Hamilton (two), Jarrod Saltamacchia, David Murphy, Chris Shelton, & Michael Young.
The Rangers had seventeen hits in all. The only Ranger without a hit was Frank Catalanotto. Everyone else had at least one. Hamilton had five, David Murphy had three, Milton Bradley & Michael Young had two each, and the rest were all single hit performances. Still, it was enough to club the Astros into submission.
It always seems that some game against the Astros each year we score some really huge pile of runs. Normally it comes later in the six games we play. Hopefully, this wasn’t the last one.
More importantly, we can get back to .500 with a win on Saturday evening. It should be a great pitching matchup, Vicente Padilla goes against Roy Oswalt. I’ll be there.
Make sure and check out the MLB Recap link at the top of this entry. There’s video highlights of a lot of this. These new recaps they have in 2008 are worth checking out, now that they’re all into recaps and video clips.
Okay, my once a year rant about inter-league play. I like it. I think it is a great idea. You get to see teams that you normally would not see. I like it. Now for the comment that I have made once a year since it started. Let’s use the VISITOR’S team rules! Let the people in the Ballpark see their pitcher’s bat. Let’s let people in Reliant see a DH! Yes, I enjoy seeing the varied National League teams that we play. I would be more interested in see a double switch out at the Ballpark. I have mentioned this to several people and they think it is great, wonderful, awesome idea. This ain’t rocket science people, just baseball. Okay, end of rant until next year.