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Time for another mulligan. Too busy at work today.

A trio of Texas Rangers hit their first home runs of the spring. They are Joaquin Arias, Chris Davis, and Michael Young.
The big moment for Texas came in the fourth inning when we scored six, which included Chris Davis’ solo home run.
Kevin Millwood was better than the 10 run fiasco he had last time, but still wasn’t great. Five innings, six hits, one walk, four earned runs.
Joaquin Arias only had one at bat, but got a hit. He is now batting over .500 for the spring! Metcalf, Byrd, & Elvis all had two hits. )
Sorry for the lack of writing. I had forgotten one of my co workers was on vacation this week, and the time I would have spent writing was spent picking up some of his work.
Today the Rangers have a scheduled off day again – there’s a lot more of those this year than usual.

First, this was a bonus TV game. MLB Network was carrying the White Sox feed for the game, and as such I was able to watch this one on TV. They talked to Buddy Bell, who is involved in some advisory capacity with the White Sox now. Wasn’t that bad, actually for watching the other team’s announcers – they knew our team, they had a lot of nice things to say about our big prospects, especially Justin Smoak & Max Ramirez.
Matt Harrison started this game, and looked quite good. Four innings, four hits, one walk, four strikeouts, and just one run. And that run was a solo home run. In fact, home runs were pretty much the order of the day for the Chicago offense. They had four home runs off of four different Ranger pitchers. Three of them were solo shots, but the big one was the last one, which came on the last pitch of the game. Brian Anderson jacked a walkoff grand slam to end the game. That was Anderson’s second home run of the afternoon, actually. But that’s the crappy end of the game spring pitching.
The guys who count for the regular season were better than that. Derrick Turnbow pitched “OK”. His line doesn’t show it, but he seemed to labor a bunch. Josh Rupe gave up two walks and a hit (with a run) in his inning. Jennings had two innings, but four hits and a run. Meh on the last couple of guys.
Offensively, I’m surprised we had as many runs as we did, because we had just six hits, and three of those were by Joaquin “En Fuego” Arias. Arias was 3-4 today after going 3-4 the previous game. If he keeps this up for another week or so, it might make the final cuts difficult. But outside of Arias, we managed just a double by Marlon Byrd, a bloop single by Omar Vizquel, & a single by Chris Davis.
This loss now drops us to three in a row in the loss column, and drops us one game under .500 for the spring.

Well, the other half of the Rangers team stayed behind in Surpise to play the Royals, and this half of the squad didn’t fare as good as the one that went away to play LA.
The story of this game was the effectiveness of former Ranger pitcher Robinson Tejeda. He went four innings, gave up four hits and three walks, but also struck out seven Rangers of the 12 outs recorded. Another former Ranger, Jamey Wright followed with two innings of shutout ball. The remaining two KC pitchers also threw goose eggs. I wouldn’t get too worked up about Tejeda. I followed him in Philly, I obviously followed him in Texas. You should know as well as I do he has these flashes for short periods, and relapses.
Anyway, our offense was pretty darned ineffective. Only one guy had anything going on, and that was Joaquin Arias, who had three of the seven overall hits the guys wearing Texas on their chests got, however none of his hits led to a score. The only run we got at all was a double by Marlon Byrd, who scored Hank Blalock. That was it.
Pitching wise for Texas, Vicente Padilla threw three, gave up three hits and two walks and three earned runs. Meh. One of the hits was a two run home run. In fact, the other run of the game was against Frank Francisco; again a home run.
So no, neither game on Friday was particularly fun for a Rangers fan.
Saturday brings something unannounced. A Rangers game on television. It’s not the Rangers guys, but the game will be on MLB Network on Saturday afternoon, presumably using White Sox coverage (assuming it’s not blacked out).

In the first of the two split squad games, the Rangers played against the Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles in Phoenix. While this was the road game, it wasn’t the usual road spring game in that about half our regulars were here, and half were left behind in Surprise to play the other game. Really seemed like a split squad from a quick glance at the scorecard.
Anyway, the Rangers jumped out early in this one. In the first inning, Josh Hamilton hit a two run home run, and then was immediately followed by a solo home run by Nelson Cruz. And then.. well, that was it. All of our scoring was done by the fourth batter of the game. We had just three more hits the entire rest of the game (one of them was a second hit by Hamilton). So a promising started just ended there with a “promising start”.
Of course, the big ol’ “4” in the error column of the linescore has a lot to say about it. Two of the errors were by pitchers (Mathis & Harrison). Duran missed a catch, and Adam Melhuse threw one away. Sloppy play there for sure. Only one run was unearned, and we did turn four double plays in the game.
Pretty much all of the Dodgers offense was also early. Our starter in this one was Doug Mathis, who went three innings, allowing three of the four Dodger runs (one was the aforementioned unearned one). The Rangers threw eight pitchers out there in all, which is a huge number when you consider that Mathis threw three innings. The only other Ranger pitcher to give up a run was the final one, Thomas Diamond who walked two, not really helping himself at all.
Somewhat annoying that we got out to that kind of start and then nothing.
Fun note in that the Rangers did not take Andruw Jones with them in the split squad game against the Dodgers. :)