This one can be summed up easily. The Angels hit more home runs this game than the Rangers did, and that’s why they won.
I lucked out, and got the game on national TV. Was going to squeeze some time in before I had to start on the carousel of taking a kid to a birthday party, picking up the wife from work, and then doing some weekend shift work for my job. Shouldn’t have bothered, as Matt Harrison stunk it up for the second start of the season. He gave up two two run home runs in the first inning, which put a damper on the proceedings. We never recovered from that , and due to the horrid start, I made no effort to hide the score and save watching the game for later. Turns out that was a good call.
In the first, the two run home runs were by Albert Pujols & Mark Trumbo. Pujols is no shame. Trumbo isn’t a slouch either. But to give up TWO of them in the first inning right after you had come off a bad first start of the season? Yeah, that didn’t feel good at all. Matt also gave up a run in the second inning, and then settled down, but the damage was done. Matt was out after five innings, having thrown 96 pitches. While I only watched the first inning on TV, he did seem to be all over the place, and his sinker was not sinking. I don’t care if it’s Albert Pujols or me. Leave too many pitches up, and they’re getting hit.
He was followed by Jason Frasor who had the same outing, only his was a lot more compressed. Frasor pitched two thirds of an inning, and allowed two hits. Both of them were solo home runs (Pujols again and Bourjos). So that wasn’t good.
Joe Ortiz came in this game, and pitched two pretty good innings. He did allow an unearned run, but just two hits and a walk. I didn’t get to see this guy, but I really liked what I saw coming out of spring. Hope he holds it together.
Robbie Ross also pitched, went 1.1 innings, no hits, no runs, just one walk.
So Harrison’s second straight outing wasn’t good. Way too early to panic about it, but it is an eyebrow raiser. Visualize Spock and his eyebrow raising. That’s what I’m thinking here. ;)
Offensively, we didn’t have a ton of sustained offense. We did have four runs on nine hits, but most didn’t come with any real solid offense, just bang-bang stuff. We did get a nice set of back to back home runs in the third inning by Mitch Moreland and Ian Kinsler. Later on in the ninth inning, Nelson Cruz also jacked a home run. All three of them were solo, and accounted for 3 of the 4 runs the Rangers got. While I didn’t see any of them, this WAS an extremely windy day, and balls were flying all over the place. From what I can gather Moreland’s HR was legit. Not sure about Kinsler or Cruz’s home runs, but still. Seven home runs between the two teams in one game is a lot.
Oh well, you know you’re not beating the Angels every game we play them. Just hope we end up winning more than we lose. Rubber game Sunday evening, Darvish vs Weaver. This ought to be good!