Scott Feldman has probably been our second most consistent starting pitcher this season, behind I’d say Vicente Padilla. So what do you do with a guy like that in the second half? Put him in the bullpen. There was some talk during the All Star break that Feldman would be going to the pen in the second half. The stated reason is one that’s hard to argue with, I suppose. He’s apparently either at, or about to pass his largest number of innings pitched in his career, I think they’re trying to protect him. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but don’t pitchers get stretched out in that regard by being pitched, and not protected? I guess it’s only a mild complaint, but when you get performances like we got this game, you don’t want him in the pen.
Scott Feldman tossed six innings, and allowed just one run on four hits. Had three walks, which isn’t great, but there were three double plays turned behind Scott. The pen was quite good too. Three guys followed Scott (Francisco, Guardado, Wright), and between them there was just one hit allowed (Guardado). Great pitching performance. It’s too bad they can’t be consistent for a great length of time – look at our last dozen or so scores, they’re not consistently showing this great pitching game after game.
Offensively, it’s a tale of home runs. Five of our six home runs were accounted for by the longball. Classic Texas Rangers offense. There was a three run shot by Josh Hamilton in the third inning, and there was a two run shot by Hank Blalock in the eighth, his first home run in bloody ages. Given we had six runs, we didn’t have a ton of hits (just eight). Half of them were doubles, though, so we had four doubles, two home runs, and two singles.
Was a nice win, and nice to see Blalock get back on the HR chart. Probably should savor those, as I can’t imagine he’ll be a Ranger come 2009.

That headline is really unfair to Vicente Padilla, Eddie Guardado, & CJ Wilson, but I think most people will remember Taylor Teagarden most in this game.

Heck, Taylor got his first caught stealing throw in the majors. He got his first major league hit, which also happened to be a home run. Said home run was also the lone run in this game, and broke up a perfect game bid at the time by Minnesota starter Scott Baker. How cool was all that? It was quite a moment, and he didn’t visibly smile enough for my tastes. :)

Baker certainly personified the concept of “hard luck loss” in this one – no doubt.

This looked like the Vicente Padilla we’ve been seeing all season – going after guys, and not nibbling. His last two outings before this one were the ones where he was presumably hurt, and it’s nice to see him bounce back to his old 2008 self when coming off the DL. Hopefully he stays that way.

Despite the win, I’m a bit surprised at how underwhelming our offense was in this series in Minnesota. For all three games COMBINED we had a total of just three runs (one was zero, too) and eleven hits. Blech. It’s like we went to sleep. That was a horrendous performance. If it wasn’t for our pitching on Sunday, we would have been swept out of Minnesota, and quite frankly, the way we were hitting, we probably deserved that.

Having said all of that, it was quite nice to see Taylor Teagarden have such a cool day. Makes you wonder if that’s it for him for awhile, given our catcher heavy situation right now.

Ugh. The only good moment of this game was Chris Davis’ home run.
I know it’s only two games out of the break, but after last night and tonight combined, does anyone else feel like it’s April again?

First off, I wanted to make a comment about the MLB Game Recap for this game. For the last few seasons, I’ve been linking to the recaps on the official mlb site. This year they’ve gotten a lot better, with video and pictures, and recaps from both sides. They’ve been a serious improvement. There’s technically three recaps for each game. The ones that are slanted for the home and visiting team comprise two, and then there’s a third that covers the “general MLB recap”, which also includes the other two. Anyway, for the general MLB one, someone is writing what I would perceive as “comedic headlines”, where it’s things like “Texas Two Step stops such and such team”. But the one for this game really struck me as odd, mostly because it seems bizarre. The phrase was “Perky pitching powers three-hit derby”. Perky? Perky? What exactly is “perky pitching”? That really seems odd to me.
Thing is, this little diatribe I wrote about the word “perky” is more than what can really be said about the actual game. I think most Rangers fans were riding high off of Josh Hamilton’s HR Derby performance. Ian Kinsler’s 25 game hitting streak was ready to be extended, and most Rangers fans I think were feeling good about the team. Unfortunately, we ran into Twins pitcher Glen Perkins. He tossed a gem against the Rangers, going six innings, allowing no runs and just three hits. Those hits were a double (Byrd), and two singles (Young, Bradley). Perkins only went six innings and 98 pitches, though. I thought he probably could have gone longer, but you can’t argue that he would have done better than the bullpen guys who followed. The three Twins relievers each pitched a single perfect inning. You can’t beat that.
Millwood was not good. 6.1 innings, eleven hits, one walk for five earned runs. Bleh.
But the bottom line was the Twins pitching shut us down totally, and handed us our first shutout of the season. Hats off to Perkins and crew for a well pitched game.

The Rangers had four guys in this game, and they all played. Granted, two of them started, and one of the other two should have started, so that came as no surprise. What was a bit of a surprise was the fact that for roughly an inning or so, all four of them were in the game at the same time – if not all on the field at the same time, as Bradley was a DH. Here’s a short summary of what our guys did:

• Josh Hamilton – 1-3 with a steal. His hit was a single. He got a lot of applause because of his home run derby moves. Wasn’t terribly impactful in the game.
• Milton Bradley – 0-2 with a walk and a steal. He was also picked off. The walk was a surprise. OK, not really. He’s been doing that all season.
• Ian Kinsler – 1-5 with a steal and a caught stealing. He also had a great tag on a not terribly well pitched strike out, throw ’em out throw from Dioner Navarro. Was well played.
• Michael Young – 2-5 with what could have been the game winning single in the 11th, but Dioner Navarro was thrown out at the plate. That was made up for by the bottom of the 15th.

I’m not going to get into the individual stuff about the whole game, but the first four innings and innings 9-14 were both scoreless, but for different reasons. The first four were well pitched. The others were well danced. Both teams really gave the othe team a ton of chances, but nobody could get the job done.
Defense was weird. There were some fantastic plays at the plate on both sides (Adrian Gonzalez pick and Miguel Tejada falling down throw plays to save the game comes to mind as well as Ichiro’s throw to get Albert Pujols). Then there was Dan Uggla, who had three errors on his own, although the third wasn’t really his fault.
Young’s hit and lost game winning RBI in the 12th was nowhere near as bad as the bottom of the 11th where the AL had the bases loaded and nobody out, and couldn’t score. In the bottom of the 10th/11th, three of the six outs were at home plate. The National League had the bases loaded in the top of the 12th, and couldn’t push one across, either. AL led off the bottom of the 12th with a double, couldn’t do anything with it. There were a ton of chances in extra innings, but nobody could seal the deal until Young came up again in the bottom of the 15th with the bases loaded and sac flied in Justin Morneau.
Four hours and fifty minutes later, Michael Young gets the game winner for the second time in the last three All-Star Games. Gotta love that.
I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed in the pre-game stuff. Oh, there was nothing wrong with it, and I really did like seeing all the Hall of Famers, but there were quite a few of them that probably should have been there like Johnny Bench & Nolan Ryan. I did like how they staged it so Yogi Berra was the last announced Hall of Famer. Some other things I wished would have happened is have Joe Torre be on the NL coaching staff for some reason. Likewise having Don Zimmer on the AL staff.