This was a game I didn’t get to see much of. Had to work. But I did catch a few minutes here and there. What I didn’t miss was the mostly blah performance of Derek Holland. When I was thinking of writing for this game, I thought it was going to be one of those back and forth games. That did turn out to be the case in the middle innings for a little, but not as much as I realized.
The Rangers started out with a couple of runs early against Joe Blanton. A guy I remember from his time in Philly. When he got on the ropes early, I was immediately expecting a blowout. That didn’t happen. We did score 2, which is always helpful. But we let Blanton off the hook, as we could have had a lot more than that.
Holland was doing well early on, kept the Angels off the board through three innings. However, in the fourth he fell off the rails a bit. That inning went walk, single, double, wild pitch, and a sac fly. There were a few more plays that inning, but those were all the ones that accounted for scoring. The wild pitch led to a run, because the next play was the sac fly.
Fast forward a bit, and Holland gives up another three runs in the bottom of the sixth. At this point, we’re down 6-3, and I wasn’t feeling good about the game. Given I was working, I kind of opted to tune out at this point. I probably shouldn’t have done that, because I missed the Rangers scoring their three runs. I peeked in a little later, and we had tied it up 6-6 by this point. My own fault – shouldn’t have stopped, or at least switched to radio to have it in the background.
The three runs we got in the seventh were an adventure. Check this string of events. Single, pitching change, single, pitching change, walk, single, ground out, pitching change, error allowing run to score. The final at bat was a double play. So yeah, a messy inning for sure. But it resulted in three runs for the Rangers and a tie game.
At this point I had the game on again, and then we got to the top of the 10th, and AJ Pierzynski jacked a home run ball – which to me felt a lot like the home run ball Hank Blalock hit in the All Star game some years ago against Eric Gagne. Circumstances are obviously different. Different players, ballpark, etc.. But I instantly thought of the Blalock home run with this one. It won the game for us, so that’s always good. Only thing better would have been a walkoff at home. :)
A good game for sure. And it was just the first game of the series! More to come…