One of the guys who has been a phenom this spring has been the White Sox pitcher Brandon McCarthy. His line has been fabulous. But not anymore. The Rangers torched him. McCarthy gave up 9 hits and 7 earned runs in 3.2 IP. The amusing thing is that none of the other White Sox pitchers gave up anything. We had scored all our runs in the second (5) and third (2) innings. After that, donut. Cotts, Hermanson, & Walker kept the Ranger bats under check for 5.1 innings. But the pasting we put on McCarthy was more than enough.
In the pasting was a home run by Hank Blalock (his first of the spring). In total, Blalock and 3 RBI’s. Gerald Laird had two, and Adrian Gonzalez had one. In fact Gonzalez went 3 for 4, and is looking more like a guy who is ready to come up to the majors in my eyes. I suspect if he doesn’t make it up this season, he might get moved, unless we’re holding on to him incase Teixeira/Boras wants insane money for Tex to stay. Richard Hidalgo also went 2 for 4, and is looking like an awesome acquisition so far this spring. Alfonso Soriano seems to have broken out of his slump, going 2 for 3 this game, although from what I’m reading, he still isn’t at 100%, and it might be mental.
Pitching wise, Ryan Drese pitched like he was in mid season form, going 6 innings, 5 hits, and just one earned run. The only downside is that he walked 4 and only struck out 3. But still, he got the job done, and has earned the opening game nod from Buck Showalter; Kenny Rogers gets the home opener. Our other pitchers (Nunez, Tejera, Wasdin, & Brocail) gave up just one run (it was Tejera) over their combined 3 IP.
Overall, a very well played game. Too bad we haven’t had more of these this spring.
You can view my full report for this game here.

I don’t know what you know about Christian Holy Week ceremonies, but I spent the night before at church in a vigil, and as such I got under two hours of sleep for the night. I crapped out early on Friday night, I was blowing z’s by 9PM, which means I heard little of the Rangers game.
Ricardo Rodriguez broke his streak of awesome pitching performances this spring with a real “Chan Ho” type of outing, going 4.1 innings, giving up 12 hits, and 6 earned runs. Ron Mahay who also has been spectacular all spring had a stinker of his own, giving up 3 hits and 3 earned runs in his one inning of work. Not a good night for our staff at all, save for Ryan Bukvich who gave up nothing in his 1.2 innings of work.
Offensively, I can’t really tell what happened with the Rangers, as all the online box scores are broken, giving zeroes across the board for every Ranger player, and it only lists the starters, too. Some highlights I can glean from repots are that Kevin Mench had a home run, as did Gerald Laird (his third), who seems to be trying to win back his job again, he’s playing as well as he did last spring too, I think.
You can view my full update for this game here.

The Rangers beat the Royals 6-4 behind a mostly good performance by Chan Ho Park (damn). Proper update on Friday.

No time to write a proper story for this, as I didn’t get to do THIS until after 5PM the day after this game happened. I will say this. We finally won, and it’s interesting that the combined scores of today’s and yesterday’s game was A’s 25, Rangers 22. Lots of runs in the last 18 innings of baseball. :)
You can view my full update for this game here.