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In a turn of events that I thought at the time probably made Randy Galloway pretty happy, the Rangers bullpen blew the game again. I figure he was just waiting for them to get home, lose a couple, and go “See – I told you so”. That’s part of the reason why I never listen to him on the radio. I think if we actually won the World Series, he’d complain about it. Anyway…
Brandon McCarthy pitched OK. Wasn’t lights out, but was decent enough. Enough that you didn’t feel afraid with him out there. Six innings, five hits, three earned runs. Technical quality start, but the fact that he didn’t embarrass himself or the team is major progress for the man that wears Mike Schmidt’s old Phillies number on the back of his Rangers uniform. CJ Wilson got back on the horse, and threw 1.2 innings of shutout ball after his debacle the previous game. Frank Francisco came in during the eighth and played four out closer. He wouldn’t have gotten the save, but the idea was we win it in the bottom of the ninth. That didn’t happen, and we went to that very very scary land. Rangers extra inning baseball. It’s enough to make you think that Michael Jackson is a good babysitter. Eddie Guardado came in to pitch the 10th inning, and he pitched like CJ Wilson did the previous night. 2/3 of an inning pitched, four earned runs on four hits (one of which was a home run) and a walk. Not good. Warner Madrigal mopped up with a scoreless final out, but the damage was done. We were down in extra innings. Not good.
What got us there offensively was pretty good. We started off the game early with three solo home runs. Michael Young, Nelson Cruz, & Chris Davis all hit home runs off of starter Alfredo Simon in the first inning plus. Simon then left the game with some sort of injury. He also took with him the Rangers offense. That was it for our offense through four relievers who shut the Rangers down from innings two through nine. Nothing. Seems to be a recurring theme at the moment. Usually teams like getting into other teams’ bullpens. Not us in 2009. When we get to the bullpen, we are usually done. We weren’t able to piece anything together until the 10th inning. At that point we were down 7-3. We did manage to get two runs across, and loaded the bases too for Josh Hamilton. The stage was set, and we didn’t deliver. Extra inning loss. That’s bad enough, but we had managed to get an offense going there. Just not enough to get over the hump, which was fairly annoying.
Also, Omar Vizquel’s deke in the field was quite smooth. Enjoyed that.
Michael Young was 3-4, raising his average to .355.
David Murphy is still struggling, his average is a donut still.

Sigh.
At least we had three home runs, including the titanic shot by Chris Davis.
Sigh. We’re better than this. Not April, guys. Stop it with the crap in April!

Gah!
I was going to write about how good Millwood was this game. He looked great. Seven innings of four hit, shutout ball. No walks. Looked really great out there. Then CJ Wilson came in and blew it. Couldn’t do anything out there. Officially charged with just three earned runs, although six were allowed in all. That was just awful. Nothing good to say there.
Josh Hamilton & Ian Kinsler’s home runs were wasted. Funny thing is we were mostly shut down, too. Last game we had just two hits. This game we had just five. Four of them were extra base hits, and we were efficient again, having just five hits and four runs.
But the bullpen!

Well, after the 15-2 fiasco, I wondered what the Rangers would do. More of the same, or bounce back. Well, they did neither. They were further shut down. It seems odd to say that when they scored more runs than the previous game, but we were totally shut down, despite actually scoring three runs. That, in and of itself was a miracle.
The Rangers had just two hits all day. But they were very well placed hits. The first one was a solo home run by Hank Blalock that actually put us in the lead, making you feel good. However, it didn’t last long, the Rangers gave up two in the bottom of the second. The Rangers didn’t get their lone other hit until the fifth. We had a walk and a couple of errors which loaded the bases. Josh Hamilton singled, scoring Chris Davis & Elvis Andrus. And that ended the Rangers offense for the day. That was it. The bizarre line of three runs on two hits. There’s nothing else to say about our offense, as that was the extent of it.
Great throw by Elvis Andrus doing the Jeter move from deep DEEP short (even shorter than Jeter), and only missing Gerald Laird by half a step. Any other catcher, it would have been an out, and been a season highlight. Great play.
Pitching wise, Matt Harrison made his first start of the season, and was “eh”. Had moments where he looked good, and others where he didn’t – pretty standard for a guy his age. 5.2 innings, nine hits and five walks (not good, really) for all four earned runs the Tigers got. Not a lot to say except that he only gave up three doubles, and no home runs. CJ Wilson & Jason Jennings looked good out of the pen (for their 2.1 innings). Jennings in particular struck out Cabrera & Ordonez, a good bit of pitching itself.
Comerica Field during the day there looked freakin fantasic in high definition. :)

Well, the Rangers are no longer the only undefeated American League team. They were defeated quite soundly. Kris Benson punches his ticket for the “Passable in Spring Training, but smeg all in April” award for 2009. That was just bad. Oh, we’ll probably see stories by professional sports writers about how it wasn’t as bad as the line looked (5IP, 10H, 8R, 7ER, 2BB, 3K, 2HR), but there’s no beating around the bush. That was bad. Madrigal & Rupe were no better, go look up their lines. I’m only writing one bad line today.
The only really good thing was a home run by Nelson Cruz in the 9th, which Eric Nadel got REALLY excited about. :)

Who would have thought that I’d get to use the sweep graphic in the first series of the year? I’d say nobody. For the first time in thirteen years, going back to our first championship year of 1996, the Rangers have started off the season 3-0. That year, they went 7-0 to start the season on the way to their first ever playoff appearance. One fun little note about the 1996 team. I didn’t remember this until I looked it up, but the first two series there were three game sweeps of both the Red Sox & Yankees.
Anyway, to the mound this day was Brandon McCarthy. A guy a lot of fans are essentially saying “Come on, man – this is it. NOW!” in terms of his pitching with the Rangers. By all accounts he’s supposed to be better than he was the last few years since he got here from Chicago. I think just about every Rangers fan wants him to do good, if even at a minimum you go “But… John Danks!” Anyway, McCarthy went out there and did something important. He didn’t embarrass himself, or the team. Not stellar, mind you – but passable enough. Five innings on 105 pitches, only four hits, but did have four walks. Two of those hits were home runs. One good thing was seven strikeouts. Looks like he was burned by the longball. Take those away, and it would have been a pretty decent outing.
Can’t say the same for Scott Feldman. Scott, only went 2.1 innings, but gave up five hits, and two more home runs for a total of four earned runs.
The funny thing is before this, we just utterly destroyed Carl Pavano, who probably won’t have a job anywhere anymore. That is if this pitching keeps up, coupled with what Joe Torre said about him in his Yankees book. Six hits, three walks, NINE EARNED RUNS in a total of just one official inning. He was out in the second, but never retired anyone. Thirty nine pitches, and twelve batters faced. Nine of them got on base, and all of them scored. I mean. WOW, THAT’S BAD! I actually missed this stuff, as I thought the game started at 2PM, when it started at 1, so I missed the first couple of innings. Bummer, those were the best ones.
Of course, the flip side of that horrendous performance by Carl Pavano (who now has an ERA of 81.00) was that our offense was really in gear. First off, with this being the series finale, and a day game after a night game, we got the rest of our position players in the game. Andruw Jones & Omar Vizquel started this. Jones’ first game as a Ranger was pretty good. 3-5 with an RBI and two runs scored. One of his hits was a double. To that, we had three doubles in all, Marlon Byrd & Ian Kinser got their first home runs of the season, and there were eight singles. Kinsler & Jones had the most hits with three. Young, Byrd, & Vizquel had two hits each, and our batting averages for the starting lineup are looking pretty darned good (except for Chris Dais, who is hitting just .091 for the season so far).
Was a good way to set outselves off for the road in Detroit. Funny comment on the radio, they said there was a big sign in the Rangers clubhouse about “no red on the road”. Rut-roh. :) This game starts something odd, it was the first of four consecutive day games. All three games in Detroit are day games. That seems quite odd. It’s not like this is Wrigley Field or anything, Detroit is not a day only town. Unless it’s a “It’s cold there, and playing in the sun is warmer” kind of issue.

mlb.com started with the headline, “Rangers Cruz to 2-0”. Silly headline aside, it’s a good point. Nelson Cruz had a great game. He had two titanic home runs – including one into the upper deck, and made a freakin’ fantastic catch in right field. He went 2-4 with 3 RBI’s, and two runs scored (when he batted himself in twice).
Nelson & Elvis were the only guys with two hits. In fact, hits were scarce overall, we had just nine of them, but made ’em work for our eight runs. Speaking of Elvis, he christened his career pretty nicely with a solo home run that went into the Rangers bullpen in the 6th inning. It won someone on TV $200, and it ended up with CJ Wilson. Another good one was a triple by Josh Hamilton, and we also had our usual gaggle of doubles (three of them). In fact, only two of our nine hits were singles, seven were of the extra base variety.
What was especially cool about Nelson Cruz & Elvis Andrus was how HUGE their smiles were in this game. Elvis’ was understandable – first major league home run, but Cruz was nutso smiling, especially after that big catch of his. It was quite refreshing to see that much smiling in a game.
Bit of a scary moment when Jarrod Saltammachia had to come out of the game with what was described as lightheadedness.
Pitching wise, it started off with Vicente Pidente looking like he was going to match the performance of Kevin Millwood from opening day. While he did get the win, and battled, he didn’t have dominating stuff outside of the early part of the game. In all, he went 5.2 innings, giving up four hits and three walks for three earned runs. He was let down a bit by a couple of errors behind him. There was a third later on when CJ was pitching. All of them were the same – they pulled Chris Davis off first base via a wild throw. They were Elvis, Michael Young, & CJ Wilson doing the throwing. Only one lead to a run, it was an unearned one on the ledger of Jason Jennings, but you don’t like to see that many errors, even if two of them didn’t lead to anything.
Frank Francisco came in and got his first save of the season. Eddie G also had a short appearance. The pitching wasn’t as crisp as it was opening day, but it was great to see the win. Even greater to see the players wear the red T-shirts and red caps. It did kind of make the “home white/blue” uniform look like the old 90’s red uniform, even if it wasn’t. :)