I didn’t get to hear too much of this game. At the time the game started, I was actually at Children’s hospital with my wife and son for an appointment. As the Doctor hadn’t come in yet, I fired up MLB At Bat on my phone, but the free WiFi in the hospital really stunk. I was able to listen to a tiny little bit, but the connection kept dropping out. Then I tried 3G, and that was worse, at points I had zero bars and dropped out to AT&T’s “Edge”. Ugh. So I tried to just do the play by play in At Bat, and that net connection kept dropping, so I gave up. By the time we got home from the hospital and a trip out for dinner, the game was over, I found out the score at the end.
I missed a fun game from the looks of the recap. Especially compared to the first two games of the season. Shame I missed all the fun. Matt Harrison started the game, and pitched two shutout innings for a nice start to the spring. He’s one of the guys I think needs to step it up a bit this year. Not like he’s been bad – he hasn’t. But in my mind anyway, he still has that stigma of “prospect we got for Teixeira”. I think he needs to ramp it up like Derek Holland did last year and dominate. Would be awesome.
All the starters except Mitch Moreland had at least one hit. Oddly enough with 19 hits, nobody had more than two. Just two other guys besides moreland took an ofer, so it was spread out pretty well. There were three home runs (Conor Jackson, Leonys Martin, & Yangervis Solarte), four doubles (Mike Olt, Elvis Andrus, Greg Miclat, & Adrian Beltre), and 12 singles. With no triples or home runs, it was a fairly sustained attack, although we did put up a six spot in the 8th, against probably what Arizona won’t run out there come April, either.
All three runs that the D’Backs got came against Jake Brigham. Everyone else the Rangers threw out there (Harrison, Hamburger, Ross, Eppley, Miller, Castillo) threw zeroes. Of those guys, Hamburger, Ross, & Eppley threw scoreless ball, and Ross’ inning was a perfect one with two strikeouts on an unkown number of pitches, as spring box scores don’t include pitch counts. So our pitching was decent.
Good pitching and a bombastic offense will lead to a landslide win most of the time. Wished I would have been able to hear it, but I couldn’t, but that’s OK. I’ll take the win.
Tomorrow I’m likely missing part of the game, as Apple’s iPad 3 press conference is at noon. :)