Our “closer by committee” committee blew a pretty decent start by Edinson Volquez, who looks like he may have gotten his act together. We have seen guys pitch well in September and then stink up the joint the following season, so I’m not getting too excited about that.
Still, it was a good outing. Volquez went six innings, gave up two runs (one earned) on five hits and one walk. Struck out six. A pretty decent outing there. Hate to waste those. Bill White came in and pitched a decent shutout frame. That’s when our closer committee blew it. CJ Wilson gave up a run in the eighth, and Joaquin Benoit gave up two, including the walk off winner. Granted, one of Benoit’s was an unearned run, but that didn’t much matter. It was a run; we lost. Speaking of losing, we’re three games behind Oakland for third place. Reachable for sure, but that “gut feeling” again tells me it won’t happen. Sigh.
Offensively, we were lead by Guillermo Quiroz & Travis Metcalf. Both had two hits and an RBI. Metcalf had a double and a home run, scoring twice. The rest of our offense was pretty scattered. Between the remainder of the players, there were three hits and one RBI (Young).
As a side note, is it just me, or does Bill White have that “Jim Morris feeling“? I know that is not the case, but it just “feels” that way to me, even though my brain says it’s not.
I thought about just posting “Sigh” and nothing else for this game, but given my mindset on Saturday, I wanted to end the season with some real commentary, and not the cop-out of a one word commentary. ;)

Well, I wasn’t in much of a mood to watch baseball for two reasons:

1. That “I want to stop” post I made on Saturday
2. Football was on.

Still, I tuned in to the beginning of the game as I was flipping channels. The Rangers didn’t do much in the top of the first inning, but they did in the bottom. Or at least Padilla did. Yeah, we won, but this was probably the moment most people will remember.

It’s of course not as famous as this fight picture…

Or even a good a fight as this one from last year…

But for some reason, fights on a baseball field always fire up the crowd. Most people seem to think “headhunters” or guys who have a reptuation for throwing at people are a bad thing. I disagree. I like that. These fans who were against this were obviously never fans of old school baseball. Back in the day, most people pitched that way. And the hitters either just took it or fought. There was no whining about rules, and this and that. It was part of the game. A part that’s been lost. You think Roger Clemens doesn’t do this? Of course he does. I like this. It’s not like Chan Ho Park, who hit people by accident. This is message baseball, something that we need more of.

As for the game itself, it was a big back and forth game. I did see the six run top of the second, which was cool to watch. I did not see the five run bottom of the third, which would have not been cool to watch, had I seen it. We traded singles in the fourth and fifth, and we went into the top of the 8th down one run.

Michael Young took care of that with a grand slam in the top of the eighth. I didn’t see that, either. Shame, but I was on football then. He came close to a cycle as well, missing the hardest one; the triple.

As is the case with a game that had 20 combined runs and 21 combined hits, there wasn’t much in the way of great pitching – the box score confirms that.

The Rangers lost this game to Oakland. It’s now their fifth loss in a row, and are now 4 games behind Oakland for escaping the basement in the AL West. Looks kinda bleak, doesn’t it?
The sad part is that TV didn’t even care. This game wasn’t broadcast in the Metroplex. I don’t understand that. There’s 162 games in the season. If we were one of these teams with crappy TV coverage like the Montreal Expos used to have where only a handful of games were on a season, I’d understand it. But not the Rangers. We either have 162 or close to it every year. I believe this was the only scheduled non TV game of the season. So what’s the deal with this one? Why was this date so special that it didn’t get on TV. We broadcast 161 other games (plus the 2 or 3 from Spring), so why not this last one? Doesn’t make any sense to me to schedule 161 of the 162 games. Someone please explain that to me.
Oh yeah, the game itself. After my post of earlier today, I’m not in the mood to write about game particulars.

I’ll make this short, because this game made me mad.
Their big inning (7) was better than our big inning (6), and that made the difference. Sigh.

We went into this series one game behind Oakland for third place. Lost the first two. Now down by three. If we lose one of the remaining two games, I say it’s done, we’re in the basement. Oh sure, mathematically we aren’t out, but that “gut feeling” says it’s over if we lose any more to Oakland this weekend, as Saturday and Sunday are the only games left against them directly all season.

As the season draws to a close, it’s getting hard to get motivated to write about games like this. I still like the team, and still care, but another season like this means that game numbers above say 135 are ones I’m less inclined to write about. Sometimes I’m tempted to go “Ah they lost. If you’re reading this, then you probably know why already anyway”. Still, I didn’t want to quit on the season, so I’ll have a few words to say:
Kevin Millwood started the game, and coming into this series, I felt good about our chances of passing Oakland and staying out of the basement. Early on though it didn’t seem like that was a possibility. We went down 2-0 in the first inning, and then 4-1 after three, and then 6-1 after five. Blech. Seen this story before. Rangers starter struggles, gives up a bunch of runs, team can’t come back. I’d expect that from youngsters, but not Kevin Millwood – a veteran. He just looked flat. 92 pitches in 4.2 innings, 8 hits, 3 walks, 6 earned runs. Very Mark Clark like. On the positive side, our bullpen didn’t give up any more in their 3.1 innings of work.
We did try and come back late though. After a mostly sleepy offense which generated just one run through six innings, we got some offense going in the seventh. Single, double, single resulted in the first run. Then Ian Kinsler was hit by a pitch, and Michael Young doubled home the other two runs. Was kind of a bang-bang sequence, not a long buildup of 10 pitch at bats and just singles. Kind of happened in a hurry, if you take out a pitching change in the middle.
But it wasn’t enough. It got us close, but the scoring was over at that point. Another loss. Sigh.

I didn’t see this game at all, as it was on during my bowling league night. There was a TV on about two lanes away from us, so I would peek at it, but it was so disjointed I can’t say I watched it at all. :) But from looking at the box score, this one can be summed up as..
Justin Verlander was better than Edinson Volquez. Of course that’s not a completely fair assessment, but I’d like one of our young pitchers to come up and get 17 wins in his first two full seasons as well – that always seems to happen to other teams, not us. Verlander pretty much shut us down for the game.
Michael Young got two hits. Needs 21 to get to 200. 16 games left. Better get a couple more multi hit games in a hurry. A 5-5 game would help too. :)
I’m going to let this one go without further comment, as there isn’t much else to say. We now head to Oakland for a four game series which very well could determine third place in our division – them or us. We’re one game behind them going in.

Anyone think McCarthy was rushed back for this? At this point in the season, there’s little to be gained from coming back off the DL just to make a start in a lost season. If he was not feeling great, than maybe starting this game wasn’t a great idea. He didn’t even get out of the first inning, giving up 3 hits, three runs and a walk. Not good by any stretch.
Jamey Wright followed and pitched a “quality start” in relief, going six innings, giving up one earned run on four hits and 2 walks. Struck out three. That’s a pretty decent start. I’m starting to wonder if he’ll be brought back next year to compete for the rotation, or if he’ll try and parlay his relatively decent (if not great) season here into a bigger paycheck and a guarantee elsewhere. Wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened (Gary Matthews, anyone?) Wes Littleton cleaned up, going the final 1.1 innings, and didn’t give up any runs.
After very few singles in game one, that’s all we got in game two. Seven singles. Four by the first two batters, so it was a spread out offense (aka silent). The only run we got was on a sacrifice fly by Marlon Byrd. Was a pretty flat offense.
That’s usually attributable to the opposing pitcher. The Tigers threw a guy who I think holds the record for most “J’s” in his name. ;) That would be Jarr Jurrjens. He threw five innings, giving up just three hits and one run. In fact, he left the game with only 72 pitches, I wonder why he was cut short. His line indicates he didn’t really need to come out. The rest of the Detroit pen combined for four innings of shutout ball.
Hard to come back against that.

Game one of the doubleheader in Detroit went pretty well.
Vicente Padilla took the hill for us, and was pretty decent, given his rather sub par 2007 season as a whole. Pidente’s line was six innings, three hits, no runs, three walks and six strikeouts. 99 pitches in all. Pretty good line. Mike Wood followed, and gave up the brunt of the Detroit offense in a rather poor looking line. 1.2 innings, 6 hits 5 earned runs, and one strikeout. Not good. AJ Murray was the only other pitcher we used, and he went 1.1 innings, and gave up the the final Detroit run.
Offensively, this game was all about the longball. We hit seven of them. That I believe breaks a club record for most home runs in a road game. I think that’s what I heard Eric & Vic say during the broadcast. David Murphy had one, Marlon Byrd had two, Jarrod Saltamacchia had one, Ramon Vazquez one, Hank Blalock had one, and finally Freddy Guzman had one. That was Guzman’s first major league home run, too. What’s amusing is that Guzman had taken over for Byrd in center, so that was three jacks from the CF position.
In all, of the 14 hits we had total, 11 of them were extra base hits. Just three singles in all this. Which is a nice segway into…
David Murphy almost got a cycle. He did have a shot, he needed just the single, and was up, but struck out. At least he got the chance, unlike Cat the other day. Speaking of Murphy, he’s starting to look like a realistic candidate to be a regular player next year. He’s certainly taken advantage of his late season opportunity. He definitely seems like a more realistic option than Nelson Cruz, or perhaps even Marlon Byrd. Problem with that is that Cruz has a friggin cannon of an arm, and Byrd seems to have become a fan favorite. Heck, he’s doing a lot better than Jason Botts. Anyway, Murphy looks like a good bet to be around for awhile.