This game was about Kevin Millwood.
I was supposed to go to this game tonight to get the giveaway (the Build a Bear Bear) for my daughter, but I couldn’t go – my wife got sick, and it was better if we didn’t go. If anyone has an extra one of those, and wants to take pity on me, please let me know. :)

Definitely not John Rheinecker’s best game. Actually, it was fairly bad. But given the way he’s pitched in his games before this, I think no one is too bent out of shape over this one. Rhein gave up 11 hits and 5ER in four innings. Raised his season ERA to 3.60.
That’s pretty much the story of this game. It was rematch of the game Rhein & Mark Buehrle, but this time the roles were reversed. Buehrle gave up 2ER over 8 IP.
Rhein & Buehrle’s lines were the story of this game.

This was Vicente Padilla’s game.
8 innings pitched
3 hits
0 runs
3 walks
7 strikeouts
2 beanings of AJ Pierzynski
109 pitches (70 for strikes)
The most telling moment for me was in the second inning when the Sox had 2 men on at second and third with nobody out, and nobody scored. That was the Sox best chance all night, and they couldn’t capitalize.
On our offensive side, we hit around Javier Vazquez. Blalock started it with a solo home run in the third. We then hit him up for a four spot in the fourth. What’s nice about that is that all four runs came with two outs. We extended our major league leading doubles lead with three more tonight (Blalock, Tex, Kinsler).
Gary Matthews continues to keep his grip on the CF job, and went 3-5 tonight with an rbi and a run scored. He continues to look great. Kinsler was 2-3, even Hairston was 2-4. Only Barajas & DeRosa were hitless. But DeRosa had the defensive gem of the night with a one handed grab of a ball hit into the ground. It was do or die, and he threw home, and kept the Sox off the scoreboard. Was a great play.
Was a great win over the World Series Champs. Keeps us in first place.

The Rangers lost last night. I only got to see the first part of it, and I’ve been too busy at work today to write an update.
I’ll probalby have something to say later tonight when I update for tonight’s game, too.

John Koronka did not pitch well. He gave up hits to 8 of the first 11 batters, and then, well – it was too late. Well, actually it wasn’t, but the game felt out of hand almost immediately. Especially when going up against someone like Jose Contreras.
We had 32 at bats, and only got 6 hits out of all that. Barajas had two hits, and nobody else had more than 1. Barajas did have a two run homer in the fifth to make the score 6-3 at the time, but even then the game never felt that close at all. Just felt like we lost the game in the first inning.
Koronka stunk up the joint, giving up 6ER on 9H with 3BB over 4.2IP. Ugh. Benoit also gave up 2ER in his 3IP. Bauer finished up with 1.1IP and didn’t give up any runs, but by that point it was all over.
It’d be nice to blame it on a lack of rest after the travel fiasco involved in getting out of Boston after a DH, but I wouldn’t actually believe that.

After the rain on Saturday, we actually played a doubleheader on Sunday. Given I have several games to update tonight I won’t write a lot about each.
Game 1: The early game started at 11AM, which means I didn’t see much of it. I was at church when the game started, and since I had something scheduled to do in the afternoon, I didn’t have the time to watch all of this game, in fact, I only saw less than an hour of this one. But this game can be boiled down to essentially two home runs. Kevin Mench jacked a two run home run ove the Monstah off Josh Beckett which broke a 2-2 tie. The game was going well until the ninth inning when Otsuka blew a save, which has been rather unusual this year. It was however on a three run walk off home run to David Ortiz. Giving up a home run to Ortiz isn’t that unusual, but the game felt like ours – even when we were just tied. Just “felt” like we were going to come back and win. And that did happen, until the final pitch of the game. Here is the MLB.com update for this game.
Game 2: When Game two started I was in a movie theatre in Plano seeing the new Pixar flick Cars on a DLP screen (which I highly recommend over a conventional movie theatre). I didn’t get to see this game until later in the evening, and I accidentally saw the score before I finished watching ghe game, so that got ruined for me. I then flew threw the game in about 20 minutes on TiVo.
We had SIX more doubles this game. But outside those doubles, we had 16 more hits this game, all singles apparently. Mark DeRosa was 4-6, Tex was 3-6, there were hits all over the place. All of our starters had at least one hit (Matthews & DeRosa each had four). This one was a nice bounceback after the major disappointment of game one. Given I saw so little of teh games today, I’m gonna leave it at this, but since this was all about offense and numbers, I suggest checking out the box score below and reading that. Here is the MLB.com update for this game.

After a few attempts to play, and after a rather lengthy rain delay, the Rangers and the Red Sox finally got a game in on Saturday. As just about every angle of the game’s weather conditions has been covered, I’ll try not to write about that.
Johnny R pitched for us (I still have a hard time typing in and getting right the name Rheinecker), and didn’t pitch as good as his first couple of outings, but then again, nobody else has pitched like that, either. Rhein went only 5.2 innings in this one, giving up 3ER on 9 hits with three strikeouts. With those kinds of numbers, I’m surprised he didn’t give up more than three. Given the odd timing of the game due to weather, I didn’t get to see all of it; but from what I saw, he seemed what his line indicated – just “OK”.
However, right after that came Bryan Corey. When he was called up, I made a snide comment about him, not exactly rude, but not exactly pleasant, either. However, at least for this game, he silenced all critics. He faced four batters, struck out all four of them. I did see this, it looked great. Obviously that kind of record won’t hold up, but wow did that look good. :) Cordero & Otsuka followed up, and Cordero gave up a run, Otsuka got the save.
Offensively, we were led by Blalock & DeRosa, who were 3-4 & 2-5 respectively. The remainder of the team garnered just four hits collectively. Blalock had a home run off of former Sox closer Keith Foulke in the ninth inning. We also had three more doubles, which really seems like our strength this season.
I wrote the above text on Monday night around 10:30PM, so my memory is a bit foggy. I did write some text on Saturday when this originally happened; that text is here:
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Rangers beat the Sox in the one game that was actually played today. I’ll have something about it later. Wouldn’t mind a free hot dog or two, though.
The other one that was supposed to be played today was postponed and there will be a doublehader tomorrow. The first game starts at 11AM Dallas time, and the second at 4PM (presuming there isn’t a 16 inning game or something).
Both games will be on Fox Sports Southwest according to Josh Lewin during tonight’s game.
Here’s the official Rangers press release.