The Rangers go to Seattle, and take on their toughest pitcher, Felix Hernandez.  As is my custom, I refuse to call him “King Felix”.  Again, if you’re a Mariners fan, or are Mariners media, that’s fine.  But I’m tired of seeing Rangers media give him the accolade by calling him that.  I refuse.   Anyway, while there’s no denying he’s a great pitcher, the Rangers don’t seem to be dominated by him.  Oh, he’s beat us, sure – but we’ve beat him our fair share.   Probably more than we should, considering how dominating he can be.   That’s good, IMO – great pitchers should beat you, but when you can hold your own with them, you’re doing good yourself.

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Before the season started, I wrote about Derek Holland that I hope he pitches well this season.   Well, so far he has.  Unfortunately, he’s just 0-1 so far on the young season.  Last night’s game was a good definition of “Hard Luck Loser”.    Derek’s line on Wednesday was 8IP, 5H, 3BB, 4K, 2ER on 110 pitches.  You tell me your starter goes out there and throws eight innings, allows just two runs?   Yeah, I’ll take that ANY GAME from any of our starters.   You cannot fault Derek Holland for this loss. [Read more…]

When I was watching this game, as Tepesch progressed through the game I was immediately reminded of Brian Sikorski.   He’s a Ranger starter who made his major league debut on Aug 16, 2000 (boxscore) against the Yankees, and nailed it.   I wrote about that here.  I bring this up, because I wasn’t the only one to make that connection.  Jamey Newberg did as well, he wrote about that in his update on Tepesch’s debut.   But this night wasn’t about Sikorski, it’s about Tepesch. [Read more…]

I didn’t get to see any of this game, missed the whole thing.  Lot of noise about the last pitch of the game afterwards.    It got Joe Nathan his 300th career save, and if you watch the pitch itself, it does seem like we caught a break on that.   After the game, Joe Maddon of the Rays threw a major wobbler on Twitter about it.  But even the ump came out and said he blew the call.  Check this out.. [Read more…]

It was immediate right away that Yu Darvish wasn’t going to have the same kind of game against the Angels that he did against the Astros.  That’s not simply because the Angels are a better team.  He was wild.  It felt a little like his first ever start here in Arlington last year.  He recovered, and kept the damage to a minimum, but we were down 2-0 pretty quickly in the top of the first. [Read more…]

This one can be summed up easily.  The Angels hit more home runs this game than the Rangers did, and that’s why they won.

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I think I’m going to go with a stream of “comments”, vs an article for this game. I’m sitting at my desk doing a ton of things at once (all baseball related), and I have the chance to have live comments here..

Pregame:

Glad for this game to get started, I’m tired of hearing EVERY sports commentator asked “What do you think the reaction to Josh Hamilton will be?” Seriously, does this honestly need to be asked? The “Be silent” people don’t have a chance. We all know what the reaction will be.

I had to stay home for this one, I had a ticket option, but certain realities kept me from attenting. That’s unfortunate, but I’m still “virtually” at the game. Being connected with the radio, mlb.tv, and twitter feeds & Facebook timelines from people who ARE there.. It’ll be cool.

Even though I’m sitting at my computer, and could stream the game over the Internet, I broke out a manual radio, pulled the antenna up, and listened that way. Seems more “pure”. :) [Read more…]

I was out of practice keeping track of Rangers games, and given this one started at 1PM, I forgot about that until 2, so I missed the beginning.  Apparently what I missed was more of the lining up of strikeouts that Darvish had been doing in Game 2.   Alexi Ogando continued that parade of Astros walking back to the dugout in this game, too.    While he didn’t have 14 of them, he did have 10.  Always a good number to see.   Even better when it came in 6.1 innings of work! [Read more…]

Going into the bottom of the ninth inning, I had Eric Nadel on, and I have to say, I was getting waves of chills going over my back.  I mean, OH MAN.  I wasn’t watching when Kenny Rogers pitched his perfect game, but I have to imagine it felt like this.  I had contacted several friends, told them they needed to get the game on.   It was one of those “moments”.    While I am tired of hearing about the Cruz non catch in right in the World Series, I have to say that Newy Scruggs equated it well.  He said this was like that.  You got up high, let yourself believe, and the it crashed down.  Yeah, it was pretty crushing.   Before that, I was fist pumping sitting in front of my computer, I was seriously into it.  Was texting a friend at the same time, chatting with another on Facebook’s chat, so yeah, I was into it with a few friends.   Then… Marwin Gonzalez.  I mean, who? [Read more…]

I was ready to go.  I caught up most of the parts of my Rangers site, I had the game loaded up on “WatchESPN”, so I got to see the game (and listened to some bad announcing).   Matt Harrison was looking good early, on, and then “that” happened.   And by that, I meant that somewhere between the top of the fourth and the bottom of the fourth, the Rangers and Astros seemed to switch uniforms.  They certainly were not playing like they were supposed to.   I think they switched uniforms! [Read more…]