Nope, wasn’t any better than the rest of the games on the road trip. We got swept for the third time this series, going 1-12 on the entire trip. In fact, for the entire month of August, we’re 4-15. Way to go, guys. Not much else needs to be said, really.
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August 20, 2005 was my 40th birthday. And I spent it sick. Wasn’t a fun day, spent most of it horizontal or at the porcelain altar. The Rangers didn’t fare much better, getting shut down AGAIN for the 11th time in the 12 games of the road trip.
Scott Kazmir, who is a guy I’d love to have (as I’m sure the Mets would too ), shut down the Rangers going six innings, giving up just one run, four hits, and striking out ten. He looked pretty damn awesome. The two runs we got were in the traditional Rangers way, solo home runs (Matthews in 6th, Soriano in 9th). Outside of that, we had just four hits the rest of the game, pretty much were dominated. The game didn’t feel as close as the 4-2 score indicates.
On our pitching side, Benoit seems to indicate he isn’t cut out for starting. He went 5 innings, giving up 4 runs on six hits with 2 walks. Not godawful, but not great, either. Brocail, Shouse, & Loe kept the Rays off the board for the rest of the game, but it didn’t do much good.
Sunday’s game is the last one of the road trip. Probably won’t be any better.
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You know, when we lose 2-1 games, I tend to think along the lines of “Well, we were beaten by a better performance”. That is definitely true, but in this case, this 2-1 loss felt like 10-1 loss, given all the other losses surrounding it in the schedule.
Juan Dominguez threw a shutout through 5 innings, but gave up a couple of hits and a sac fly in the 6th, which gave the Rays their two runs. It was enough because we got one in the first, and that was it. Seth McClung was brilliant, scattering just 3 hits over his 7 innings of work. It’s hard to beat that no matter who the team is.
Steve Karsay looked pretty good again in this game, going 2.2 IP and giving up donut, while striking out two. Given the state of our bullpen, he’s probably a candidate for the pen next year, too.
A loss is a loss, and we’ve got too many of them to recover from now.
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Ah well. That didn’t last long. CJ Wilson ran out there and got murdered again. I know you need to run guys out there and let ’em take their lumps to grow homegrown pitchers. But boy is it ugly doing that, and it generally makes the natives restless, especially when you live in a sports town so hell bent on “Now now now”.
Hank Blalock had another error today and went 1 for 3. He’s been bumped down in the lineup, as he doesn’t seem to be producing of late. All of our starters in this game got at least one hit, except for Adrian Gonzalez, who was called back up before this game (he played first, Tex DH’ed). We were led by David Dellucci (2-4, 2R) and Sandy Alomar (2-4). We had four doubles (DeRosa, Dellucci, Young, Alomar). But not enough for the win, because our pitching stunk up the joint again. Although if you took CJ Wilson out of the equation and put a zero in where he was, then we would have won.
Was really nice to see Justin Thompson back in the majors. A really nice story. I hope he sticks around and is effective for more than just the last 6 weeks of the season, as I would like to see all the work he took to get back here and all the loyalty shown on both his side and the Rangers side pay off for more than just six weeks of relief pitching.
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Last week when I got mad and said I wasn’t going to do any more updates until the Rangers won, I figured it would be two or three more games. Maybe four. NOT EIGHT! It appeared I flew my “I give up” banner at the right time, because right after that, the bottom fell out, and our season was over. There’s been griping about management by our top players, both privately and publicly, apparently. That’s not good. Michael Young made the quote “I want to play for a winner”. Uh-oh. It’s getting really ugly, folks.
However, last night the ship was righted, if at least for just one night. Chris Young pitched the way he is supposed to – 8 innings of 2 hit shutout ball. Cordero came in, and got a no doubt save. We got just enough offense for the win. It was a very crisply played game. Looked good. Outcome was good. Too bad we didn’t have more of these.
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