Dustin Nippert continues to prove me wrong. As I’ve said before, I really was in the “WTF” group of fans when he was brought on board late in spring. He stunk up the joint early, but lately has been quite good. His outing this Thursday won’t win any awards, but you can’t argue with the two most important stats, IMO, those being the win and the runs allowed (one). He was effectively wild, going five innings on 104 pitches, four hits, four walks, and as was said, just one run allowed.
That was the only run the Rangers allowed in all. Our pen shut down the Mariners for four innings, a nice job by Jamey Wright, Bill White, & Frank Francisco. All of them allowed no runs, but no hits either, which was very high on the coolness scale. But what was better was that none of them gave up any walks, either!
Offensively, the Rangers had 14 hits in all. Four doubles, one home run, and nine singles. On the negative side, Joaquin Arias was picked off first by a very nice pickoff move by Dallas Braden. Josh Hamilton was 3-4, Arias & Blalock were 2-5, and all the other hits were scattered. No Rangers batter (starter or sub) was hitless. That’s the kind of thing that’s nice to see.
Nice to get the series win, but I would have preferred the sweep – it is just the Mariners, after all.