The Rangers are still winless this spring with a record of 0-3-1 after a big loss to the Rockies on Monday. In other news, the Cleveland Indians are 5-0. Guess those big signings of Nick Swisher & Michael Bourn are paying off. Or it’s Tito. But I digress. I’m also tired and pumped full of decongestant, so my head is a bit weird tonight. :) Back to the Rangers. When you have a loss like 9-1, you have to go digging for the positives usually. Which means trawling the box score and the beat writers’ coverage as again this was a no broadcast game.
The Rangers started with Martin Perez on the hill, and he had an excellent outing. Two innings pitched, no hits allowed, no walks. Punched out two. He also threw just 10 pitches over two innings, all 10 of them for strikes. Yeah, I’d say that was a good outing. Obviously it’s not good to get too high over a first outing even if it’s a good one, but man, that’s so much nicer to see in the box score than what Matt Harrison did on Sunday. Be nice if he can sustain this going forward. Obvioulsy, you’re not going to no hit everyone all the time, but something closer to this, then a 5 ERA would be most helpful.
Another candidate for the rotation Justin Grimm followed, and he well, didn’t do as good. He did have an economical 15 pitches over his two innings. But he allowed four hits and a walk, to combine for three earned runs. That wasn’t nearly as bad as the final Rangers pitcher of the day Neil Ramirez. He had just one inning, but allowed five hits and five earned runs. Also allowed two home runs. Decent number of pitches, though – 13. But still, that’s a pretty bad outing.
But Martin Perez’ outing was quite good, and something I’d like to see a lot more of from him.
Offensively, the Rangers were pretty shut down. Just five hits over the nine innings. The best thing we can say here is that Leonys Martin had two of the hits – both singles. Elvis Andrus had a single, Mitch Moreland had a single, and Craig Gentry doubled. That’s it. The Rockies also only walked three guys, so there was little offense to speak of for Texas. We did squeak home a run in the sixth, but really, we were never really in this, the way the Rockies pitched.
We go to Tuesday and Game 5, still in search of our first win of 2013…