Saturday’s game was the much ballyhooed meeting between the top batting average guys in the AL (Hamilton & Bradley) against the top ERA pitcher in the AL (Lee). Cliff Lee didn’t pitch like the guy who had a sub 2 era. He walked four, gave up seven hits in his 6.2 innings of work, but just two earned runs. That’s more like Lee, but he walked a lot, which was very uncharacteristic. The Rangers couldn’t capitalize, though. We had no power in this game, of our eight hits overall, just one was not a single; it was a Byrd double.
We did score two runs as I mentioned. Those were RBI’s by Ian Kinsler & David Murphy. Of the walks, three of them were to Chris Shelton, who wins the Heinz Ketchup “patience” award for this game.
Nice defensive moment when Marlon Byrd threw out Michael Aubry at the plate.
However, this game was decided on a three run home run by Ben Francisco in the third inning. Scott Feldman started this game for Texas, and was pretty good. He was getting good pitches, but had a couple of mistakes – and they cost big. One was this home run to Francisco, the other was another home run to Jhonny Peralta in the sixth. If it wasn’t for the home runs, Feldman could have beat Cliff Lee and the Indians; not to be.
Oh well, was one of the games that falls under “Yeah, I would have liked to have won, but we pitched well, got beat by a really good pitcher, can’t complain too hard about that one”.