As per my policy of the last few years, I do not write about losses to the Yankees.

You know, after the euphoria of last night, I didn’t know what to expect out of Marlon Byrd tonight. Sometimes after a night like that, you get a flat 0-4 or 1-5 or something like that. But tonight, Byrd continued his positive vibe from last night into this game. Marlon was 3-4 with a walk, and three runs scored. He also stole two bases. It was quite the night offensively for him. No big grand slam or anything, but he was definitely felt. One of the runs scored was a gamble shot – he was almost thrown out by Bobby Abreu. Nice night again for Byrd.
As good as Byrd’s night was, it was positively awful for CJ Wilson. I know I’m jumping ahead (I generally tend to do my commentaries in game order). A lot has been said about CJ in the last few days. We’re hearing quotes like “He’s still our closer”, and “we’re going to work on a few things and get him back out there”. These are not real strong votes of confidence. Of course, he’s not helping himself. There’s talk that he might be hurt a little, but he doesn’t have that air of “closer” at the moment. Tonight’s performance certainly didn’t help things. 0.1 innings pitched, 1 hit batter (Arod), two walks, and one hit. A big one – a grand slam by Richie Sexson. Ugh. It was announced after the game that CJ Wilson was going to go on the disabled list. This could explain things, but he just hasn’t that “swagger”. Guess it’s Guardado time for awhile.
We had another efficient night at the plate. Rangers had eight runs, and we had only eight hits. Three of them were Marlon Byrd, two were David Murphy, and the other three were one each by Hamilton, Boggs, & Crush Davis. We actually were held mostly in check, but Yankee pitching gave up eight walks. That is NEVER good, and it’s hard to win when you give up that many walks.
One of the best performances of the night was Rangers starter Matt Harrison. Facing some of the best hitters in the league, he was fantastic. 6.1 innings pitched, five hits, two earned runs. Now *THAT* is a quality start. Great job by Matt. Hope those keep coming.
One of the greatest bits of the night was the fact that Alex Rodriguez hit into two 5-4-3 double plays (including the one that ended the game). He also was doubled off on a 5-4 line drive out. Gotta love that.
The Rangers are now six games over .500, and have won three in a row. We’re now only a game and a half behind the Yankees in the Wild card race. We still would have a lot of work to do on Wed & Thursday, but if we by some chance sweep the Yankees, we’ll pass them in the standings. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves quite yet on that one.
BTW, if you want some entertaining posts, check out the Yankees forums on mlb.com. After both games, there’s a ton of posts calling Girardi every name you can think of, wondering why they have Arod, you know. The kind of dumbass remarks you see on call in shows. It’s almost as amusing as Cowboys forums after one of their losses. Calling Matt Harrison a nobody or a “bum” I can understand. HOWEVER, the Yankee fans do show some real tastelessness with several remarks about Josh Hamilton. Specifically junk like this. Or like this. And ESPECIALLY this one. I had almost forgotten how dominant Yankee fans can be in the category of jerkoffs. I was blinded by the meteoric rise in jerkoff Red Sox fans the last few years that it clouded the original jerkoffiness of Yankees fans. Thanks for restoring my faith you twonks. Sigh.
Oh yeah, SUCK IT AGAIN, YANKEES!

Early on in this game, Vicente Padilla looked like he was really being squeezed by home plate umpire Andy Fletcher. It seemed like it to me. Especially in the first inning when there was a pitch that really should have ended the inning. It didn’t, and led to a run scoring that really shouldn’t have.

But that wasn’t the really interesting part. That came in the fifth, when at that point the score was 3-2 Yankees. Padilla was called for two straight balks in a row, and while I’m no balk expert, I find it unlikely they were both legit. That aside, Ron Washington came out and argued the second one, and got himself ejected. The second balk led to the one run the Yankees did get that inning. It really was a strange inning, but as odd as that seemed, the bottom half of the frame had a stranger play.
Ian Kinsler was up after a Ramon Vazquez single. Kinsler hit a ball that was initially ruled fair, and Pudge threw to second for an easy double play, because Kinsler didn’t go anywhere. There was a discussion, and the umps conferred, and ruled it was a foul ball. Replays showed that the ball hit him around the knee. He was ruled to still be in the batter’s box, but it was a real close shave call. He might have technically been in the box, but he was definitely on his way out when it happened. Kinsler ended up walking, and he was shortly followed by a three run home run by Michael Young – something that’s been missing again for the second straight year – Young’s power stroke.

This all followed the two run home run that David Murphy had in the fourth inning – a line shot that cleared the wall in right. So at this point, we’re up 5-4. It stayed that way for awhile until the top of the 8th when the Yankees tied it up on a solo home run by Xavier Nady, making it 5-5. It was a weird feeling then – the Yankees have always been known as a team that will beat the Rangers. Yet, that feeling was tempered by the feeling we have in 2008 of the team coming back an awful lot. So I wasn’t sure what to think at that point.

Before I get to the end of the game, I wanted to say something about the pitching. Padilla’s line was OK. Not great, but I think part of that was him being squeezed. His overall line was six innings, eight hits, one walk, and four earned runs. Struck out five. His last inning was the sixth, and his last few batters he had some extra gas in the tank. Padilla seemed to be at his best when he came out. He also threw 111 pitches, which in 100 degree heat, couldn’t have been any fun. So Padilla comes out, Jamey Wright pitches a scoreless inning, Frank Francisco pitched one inning, giving up the Nady home run. Eddie Guardado pitched the ninth, but in a non save situation.

Eddie ended up getting the win due to what happened in the bottom of the ninth. Domaso Marte (the other pickup from the Pirates on the team besides Nady) had pitched in the eighth, and didn’t allow any runs. You don’t use Rivera on the road in a tie game, so I guess Girardi decided to let him pitch the ninth, figuring they’d use Rivera in the 10th. Anyway, Milton Bradley led off as a pinch hitter; his first action in several games. He walked. What a shock. Was immediately replaced by Travis Metcalf as a pinch runner. Gerald Laird & Josh Hamilton also walked, surrounding a couple of outs made by Ian Kinsler & Michael Young. However, Marlon Byrd came up, and jacked a home run ball into Section 50 of the ballpark. This plated four guys – a walk off grand slam to take the game 9-5.

It was quite a cool shot watching Marlon get all kinds of excited. One always loves the big jumping pile of players (or the Flesh Pile as coined by Eric Nadel), but I got a kick out of watching Marlon Byrd high fiving people in the stands, almost knocking down Jim Knox in the process. Really laughed when Marlon stood there doing the bird wave to the fans in the stands. Loved that moment a lot.

Interesting that all nine of our runs came on three home runs. A two run shot (Murphy), a three run shot (Young), and a grand slam (Byrd). As for the Yankees? Screw ’em. They can lose, and miss the playoffs. Given that the new Steinbrenner running the shots seems to have inherited his dad’s penchant for foaming at the mouth, it ought to be interesting if/when the Yankees don’t make the playoffs. Will LOVE that.

One thing I totally forgot about when writing this article was that we FINALLY got to give games over .500 for the first time all season with this win. It also broke a ten game losing streak against the Yankees in Arlington.
And oh yes, SUCK IT, YANKEES!

I was busy almost all day and into the evening helping a friend downgrade his computer from Vista to XP, so I missed a bunch of this game. This will be a short one.
Luis Mendoza was a bit better than his last few starts where he got rocked. Seven innings, four earned runs, six hits, one walk. Not staller, but not horrendous, either. Pen was good too, with two innings of scoreless relief.
Offensively, the big shots were obviously Gerald Laird’s two two run home runs. That was huge. Chris Davis also had a big home run as well. That was the raw power in this game.
For the second night in a row, we had just seven hits. As noted above, three of them were home runs. There were two doubles and two singles, so it was leaning more towards extra base offense than the slower kind. Which helps when you have more runs than hits. :)
The dreaded Yankees (with Pudge – ugh) come to town starting tomorrow night. I will NOT be there.

For something like the seventh time this year, we tried to get to five games over .500, but failed. The problem we had was even getting one game over .500 for awhile. The bar has been raised a bit to getting stuck at five games over. Hopefully there’s enough time to get through that new ceiling so we can set another one at say 10 games over .500, which if we sustain that through the end of the season, we’ll have a better record than anyone expected at the start of the season, or probably most people when they get a look at our pitching staff ERA.
Scott Feldman may be out of gas, as he’s definitely not as snappy as he was earlier this year. There was a lot of talk of him going to the pen, and that may yet happen, but he doesn’t seem anywhere near as crisp as he was just a month ago, even. His line is five hits and three walks over 5.1 innings for a total of four runs (three earned). No home runs at least, but he just didn’t have it to my eyes. We could blame the heat, but I think it might be a lack of gas already. Jamey Wright followed, and didn’t help matters by giving up two earned runs in his .2 innings of work. Josh Rupe settled things down by throwing three shutout innings, but by then the damage was done – we weren’t coming back this time.
Offensively, we had just six hits, and only four players got them. Frank Catalanotto had a hit, and Josh Hamilton, David Murphy, & Gerald Laird each had two. Wasn’t a great game on our behalf, and while we only lost by two, I just didn’t feel we were in the game. Perhaps I was missing something, but my memory sitting here writing about it on Sunday night tells me that we just didn’t have it.
Oh well, try to take the series on Sunday afternoon.

When a team starts coming back all the time like the Rangers have been doing, you start hearing a lot about “We never quit”, and “This team just won’t give up”, and things like that. Fans sometimes get into it too, with the “There is no lead they can’t come back from”. Me, I’m not that blind with belief. I always assume we’ll do something wrong, and the rally will fizzle. That way when they DO come back for a win, it feels that much cooler.
That’s what we got tonight. Another walkoff win. Those are always fun. This wasn’t the kind where it ended with a home run, and you had the dancing pile of players at home plate. This was the kind that ended with a David Murphy single, so you had two piles. One at home plate for the winning run, and another over near first where David Murphy was. Those always seem both more exciting and less exciting. Less because of the impact that having all the players in one big mob generates. More, because you have some guys running all over the place, since they don’t know what to do, or which jumping pile of players to celebrate with. Either way, they’re fun, and that’s what happened at the end of this game.
It didn’t start off that way. Tommy Hunter made his major league debut pitching tonight, and his performance is generally the way ML debuts go for pitchers. They’re generally not going to go eight innings with four hits and one run. They go more like Hunter did – five innings, eight hits, two walks, and six earned runs. ERA of 10.80. His game did start quite odd, though. The first two batters were retired easily enough, but the third (Alex Rios) was awarded first base on pitcher’s interference. Hunter and Chris Davis kind of crashed into each other going after the ball, and by the time Rios got down the line, there was nowhere to go, Davis & Hunter blocked the path to the base. If that wasn’t goofy enough, the next batter (Lyle Overbay) also reached – this time due to catcher’s interference by Gerald Laird. Was a very odd way to get going in your first major league inning. Hunter got out of the inning, but that was about it. In the second, Scott Rolen hit a three run home run. In the next inning, Lyle Overbay hit a two run home run, putting the Jays up 5-0 in the third. They tacked on another in the fourth to go up 6-0.
Josh Hamilton drove in a couple more runs on a two run home run to dead center field, setting off one of the better pileups of kids on Greene’s Hill I’ve seen in awhile. The clip of the kid who got the ball out of the dogpile made it to the Top 10 plays of the night on ESPN’s SportsCenter too – that was rather amusing. A bunch of singles and a double or so mixed in all put together gave us a nice 4 spot to tie the game 6-6 after five.
It stayed that way until the ninth when the Blue Jays plated a pair to go up 8-6 in the top of the ninth. They did that on a single, a triple, and a ground out RBI (by Shrek, no less). That set the state for the bottom of the ninth, where the Rangers made a big run at Toronto closer, BJ Ryan. Salty walked, Michael Young singled, and then Brandon Boggs doubled, scoring Salty. Marlon Byrd was intentionally walked (to set up a double play at any base presumably). Thing is David Murphy singled down the left field line far enough away which allowed two runs to come across, winning the game, setting off the player excitement I talked about above.
Nice comeback win, although I’m getting tired of having to come back from 4 or 5 runs all the time. Turns out team management was too, as the rangers fired their pitching coach & bullpen coach after the game. Out are Mark Conner & Dom Chiti. Their replacements are Andy Hawkins & Jim Colburn respectively. Colburn I don’t know much about at all except he was a pitching coach for the Dodgers & Pirates under Jim Tracy. Andy Hawkins has worked with a lot of our current guys in AAA, so that should work well.
We try again to get to five over .500 on Saturday.