YUCK! Our pitching health problems get worse. On the day that Zimmerman was officially put on the DL, Chan Ho Park has to leave the game with a “mild hamstring”. Yuck – those never are good. I don’t think we have a starting pitcher candidate now that doesn’t have some sort of bangup to him! This is way not good. :(
Quite frankly, that’s about all I can think of on this game. Yeah, we scored 8 runs again for the second day in a row, but when you give up more than that, what’s the point?

We had a few home runs (Arod, Mike Young, & Ryan Ludwick). We also had a lot of bad pitching. Chris Michalak had to make a start in order to cover for our all of a sudden major health problems with our pitching. He was “eh”. Gave up 4 runs (3 earned) in 3 innings. John Rocker followed, and was horrible giving up four runs without getting anyone out! We had five pitchers after that (Miceli, Pena, R Rodriguez, Moreno, & Telford), all of whom combined to give up three runs over 5 innings. Blech.
Offensively, Hank Blalock continues to shine, now having been given the starters role at 3B. Mike Lamb? I don’t know what’s going to happen with him. I hear move to catcher, I hear trade – I have no idea, truthfully. He’ll probably start with Oklahoma, but I’d be surprised if he stays with us all year. Anyway, Blalock had our best offensive performance of the day, going 2 for 3, with two RBI’s, and a run scored. He’s looking good!
On the other side, Nomar Garciaparra (my wife’s favorite player) lookd pretty good from the clips I saw on TV, and from the box score. I hope he bounces back, the Sox will need him.

Started listening to this game over the MLB feed via the Devil Rays, but after a couple of innings, the feed cut out – I got nothing but silence. Bummer. Anyway, while I was listening, I have to say I was mostly bored with their announcing. It seems that I can’t really enjoy anyone except Harry Kalas in Philadelphia, or our guys here in Texas.
Doug Davis pitched well, going 6 innings, and giving up just one run on 5 hits, with 5K’s and 1BB. Good line. Our relief is doing well, too – Seanez continues to do well, I think he’ll stick. Juan Pena, who we just got in a trade gave up the other run – everyone else put up donuts (Cordero & Van Poppel).
Santiago Perez had the best day at the plate, going 3 for 4 and scoring two runs. Catalanotto was 2 for 4 as well. Looking good for opening day insofar as having a decent team put together. Just who that team will be is yet another story. :)

This game was good and bad for Dave Burba. Good that he pitched pretty well, great that he had some batting going on with a home run and a single that he stretched into a double – but bad in that he appeared to pull a hamstring running out the double. He came out of the game shortly after that, and it was announced as being a “minor” hamstring – no one seemed too concerned, but whenever you hear the word “hamstring”, it’s never good, IMHO.
On the other side, it was all Rangers. The two runs Burba allowed early on were all that was allowed. We sent quite a few pitchers to the hill including Rocker (who appeared to be very good), and none of them allowed anything.
For our offense we had two home runs, including the aforementioned home run by pitcher Dave Burba, as well as another by Juan Gonzalez. The other runs we got came mostly in big clumps, with 3 in the second, and 5 in the 4th. Nice to see a big win after losing quite a few, and three in a row. We now need to string together a few heading into the regular season.
Next Friday – baseball returns to the Ballpark! I’ll be there Saturday afternoon; if anyone else is going, drop me an email, we might be able to say hi! :)

Kenny Rogers has probably been our most dominating pitcher this pre-season. Yesterday was not his best outing. He didn’t pitch particularly bad, but he wasn’t exactly crisp either. He gave up 4 runs in five innings off of 10 hits.
On the flip side, we had a few home runs which were good to hear. Carl Everett & ARod both homered (on consecutive pitches) in the first – and Juan followed with one of his own in the third. That was it for our offense, though. Four runs on three home runs. The Pirates pitching was a bit better than ours – their starter (Josh Fogg) also gave up four runs the same as Rogers, but their pen gave up nothing for the final 4 innings. We gave up one – Colby Lewis pitched the final 4 innings himself.
After our big stretch of winning games in a row, we now have a pretty big stretch of not winning much at all. :(

No commentary due to me being sick – don’t remember much about this game 2 days later. :)

No commentary due to me being sick – don’t remember much about this game 3 days later. :)