Through five and a half, this was a pretty good pitcher’s duel between Miguel Batista & Kameron Loe. OK, perhaps it’s not Steve Carlton vs Nolan Ryan good, but you couldn’t argue with a 2-0 score after five and a half innings. Things were going good in that regard.
Then the wheels fell off for Kameron Loe. As is the custom with the 2007 Rangers, the wheels normally fall off immediately, but this time it wasn’t until the sixth inning, when Loe gave up a 3 spot to go along with the two the Mariners already had. To be honest, I didn’t think he was as bad as his line looks, but as the old adage goes, “numbers don’t lie”. Oh well. Of course, eight hits and four walks in 5.2 IP isn’t that great either, so what the heck do I know?
Offensively, we got a pair of hits (single, double) from Ian Kinsler, and another pair of hits from Ramon Vazquez (singles). We had three more hits that were scattered (singles from Catalanotto & Byrd), one of which was a home run from Mark Teixeira, who has seriously helped his value in a trade, if we choose to go that route (which I really hope we do not).
The Rangers themselves matched the three spot the Mariners got in the bottom of the sixth with a three spot of their own in the seventh, so the game didn’t seem lost, it was 5-3 after 7.5 innings, so it felt like we were in striking distance.
In fact, we did pick up another run in the ninth. We lost (familiar), but showed some spark late (not familiar). Not sure what that means, though.
Keeping Score [UPDATED]
Saw a nice article over on mlb.com about the lost art of scorekeeping. It is true that it’s a lost art. I keep score at every game I go to, and when I do, I rarely see anyone else doing it. A few years back when I had a bigger season ticket package, I noticed a lot of others doing it (Hi Rose!), but it seemed to be regulars; only season ticket holders for some reason.
Now I can understand why. It requires you to pay attention to the entire game. A lot of fans who go to these games seem to (unfortunately) not have the attention span to watch the whole game, let alone pay attention to every single pitch. And don’t even get me started on the boob job & cocaine crowd at these things who are there to be on their cell phones, or just “to be seen”.
Anyway, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid in the 70’s, and still enjoy doing it today (I wish I still have some from my youth, I’d like to see how bad my kid scoring was). As an adult, I used to buy programs, until I realized I was paying the Rangers $3 a game to keep score, so I decided to make my own form in Microsoft Publisher 98, which basically was a copy of what was in the Rangers programs. This file is still available here on my site as a download if you use Microsoft Publisher. After awhile, I wanted something else, so I went to sporting goods stores and bought large printed books – at about $4 or $5 or so, it was’t bad at all, they usually lasted the whole season. But even that got tiring after awhile because of all the limitations that physical paper has on games with a lot of subs and extra innings.
However today, I don’t use paper anymore, about 6 or 7 seasons ago I started keeping score on my Palm. It’s so much easier to do it digitally, as you don’t have to worry about running out of space for extra innings, you don’t have to worry about where all the substitutions are going to go in those 18-4 blowout games where everyone is subbed out or moved around… Plus you can keep a theoretical unlimited amount of games in there. For me, it’s the only way to go. The software I use is called “Scorepad”, and can be obtained here One caveat, though. The stuff isn’t cheap. The full package is $169 (although when I bought it a few years back, it was $129). They do have a cheaper option if you only want to keep score on our Palm, and do not care about the desktop app – that version is only $39 (plus they have other options inbetween, check out their store link.
But if you have a PalmOS handheld, and like to score, you really should look into this. It’s good software. I took a picture of myself a few years ago, here’s what it looked like on my Palm at a game. You can click on it to go to a larger image where you can more clearly make out the screen.
UPDATE: Given I wrote about Scorepad, and keeping score, I decided to score Friday night’s game (Jun 1st) against the Mariners. I got a wild game to keep track of, and I’ll write more about the game on Saturday (it’s 2AM, and I’m exhausted), but I wanted to update my scoring entry here with some examples of what Scorepad generates. After the game was over, I synced the game back to the desktop application, and then I could look at it there. The desktop app has the ability to export the data to a box score HTML page, as well as a play by play HTML page. Both are here, as well as screen captures of a few places from the desktop app. Here’s a list of what I have here:
- Scorepad’s box score page
- Scorepad’s play by play page
- The desktop area for Texas
- The desktop area for Seattle
- A pitch sequence example
Now, the pitch sequence is where this program can get seriously hardcore. I don’t use this, because even for me, it’s a lot to keep track of. Not only do you keep track of each pitch, but you can also keep track of what kind of pitch it is, where it was in the zone, and what the speed was. Now, I don’t do this, because it’s even more information than I can keep track of (or care to). However, this software is also used by several major league baseball teams by their official scorekeepers, as well as numerous minor league and softball leagues, so it can be used to keep track of everything – it’s seriously powerful stuff.
I didn’t start off to write this article as piece on how much I loved Scorepad, it was more about my love of the actual scoring, not the facilitating software. I guess the two subjects are pretty well intertwined, though. :)
G55: Rangers win wild one in Seattle, 9-8
Late in the game, Josh Lewin made a reference to the image here, saying “we’ll be back with the kitchen sink, as this game has seem everything”. Well, about the only thing the game didn’t see was a fight. There was a lot in this game. I have to admit that TiVo has changed my baseball viewing habits an awful lot. It’s rare I sit there and watch the entire game, every pitch from front to back. I just get too impatient – especially if we’re losing, and start skipping forward. However, after writing the article on scoring a game yesterday, I decided to sit down and score this one, which means watch every pitch. That was helped by the fact that I used a break in the rain the last week to do some lawnmowing, and my body was a little sore from that.
This game had a lot of consistent scoring by the Rangers. We scored at least one run in six of the nine innings played. We worked a lot of counts full all night – the six Mariner pitchers threw just over 200 pitches between them, which works out to be about 22 per inning, which is a lot. And that leads to one of the most bizarre stats of the night. The Rangers tied the franchise record for most men left on base in a nine inning game, with 17. That’s 17 men on base in nine innings. I don’t recall how many times we left the bases loaded, but with 17, there had to have been a few. All of our starters except Matt Kata had at least one hit. Three of ’em (Laird, Young, Lofton) had two hits, and two of ’em (Diaz, Byrd) had three. Five of our 16 hits were doubles, and we had no triples or home runs, so it was mostly singles ball. Which is fine. Things were pretty much spread out too, no single player had a game that towered over another, although Marlon Byrd had a good night with three (very hardly hit) hits and an RBI. A lot of this was helped by the wildness of the Mariner pitchers. There was a stretch there where it didn’t seem like there was any strike zone at all – everything seemed to be called a ball for awhile. That wasn’t a function of a bad umpire, but pitchers who couldn’t locate – at all.
Defensively the best moment was the home run robbing catch by Kenny Lofton in the seventh that was the SportsCenter moment. Lofton stole a home run from over the wall against Adrian Beltre, and got the ball back to first (through Michael Young) to double off Keni Johjima. The look on Beltre’s face on TV was quite priceless. I’m also SERIOUSLY surprised there were no pictures of Lofton’s catch online. You’d think that would be something that would have been picked up, but I did not see any pictures of it. Darnit.
Scary moment when Mark Teixeira was walking off the field – he looked rather out of it to this very non medical person, and I knew it wasn’t looking good. You saw him getting attention from Jamie Reed in the dugout, and the big red welt on the side of his face looked bad – where he got hit in the side of the face by a ball sliding into home plate. Later on they said it was a “mild concussion”, and he hopefully doesn’t miss any time, but you never want to see something like that.
Our bullpen wasn’t too bad overall. Only Jack Benoit gave up any runs, and his was only one run. But in a back and forth game like this was, that can be a lot. Millwood gave up seven runs (only 4 earned) on 10 hits in five innings. That looks ugly, and those numbers are NOT good, but he seemed better than that. I know several of those runs would have not scored if for a couple of blunders (if not actual errors) by Ian Kinsler. Both plays lead to innings being continued, and then to further runs. One was a mental error on Kinsler when a ball that looked like a double play ball was hit to him and he calmly threw to first, obviously thinking there were two outs. That inning continued, and they scored a few more. As I sit here, I can’t recall the details of the other play, but I remember at the time thinking – “Oh boy, there’s another”.
Gagne got the save, which alone was an unusual thing to say this season. If there’s ever a guy who is primed to be out of town before Jul 31st, it’s him. A guy like that has no place on this bad of a team, so he’ll likely get traded to a contender. I wonder if the Dodgers would want him back? :)
Quite odd to get our 20th win of the season on June 1st. Wow.
Millwood activated, Koronka down
- P Kevin Millwood activated from the DL
- P John Koronka optioned to AAA [ Link ]
G54: Rangers out of it early, lose 9-5
Hands up those of you who thought it was over in the first inning.
Hands up those of you who really thought it was over after the third, being down 7-0.
Hands up those of you who wouldn’t mind seeing Jose Canseco pitch again instead of Vicente Padilla.
Hands up those of you who thought “OK, this wasn’t so bad” when we got the 5 spot in the fourth to come back 7-5.
Hands up those of you who were even still watching when we got the 5 spot.
Hands up those of you who turned off the TV when Catalanotto didn’t get the job done, leaving the bases loaded.
Hands up those of you think Sosa is gone right after he hits #600?
Hands up those of you who think we have any chance left this year? I’m waiting…
Hands up those of you who think that Paris Hilton’s impending jail term is more interesting right now than the 2007 Texas Rangers?
Test
Testing something, having some server issues today.
My site’s past
For those of you who are recent to my site, I started this awhile back. I put my site online back in December of 1998. I don’t have any particular reason why – or if I did, I can’t remember it all these years later. :) But I did get at least one really good season during all the time I’ve been running this site. Too bad it was the first one.
Anyway, I’ve been doing the site in “blog” format for a couple of years now, and the years from 1999-2004 were in the “old format” I used to do. Tonight I started moving the old entries into the blog format. Once I eventually get them all done, I’ll be taking the old pages offline – that should help kill off some dead weight on this site (the total space usage for this siteis seriously large). Plus there will be benefits like searching old reports, etc, etc..
Anyway, if you look down the right hand menu of the site, you’ll see categories for 1999-2004 that weren’t there before; I started putting the old entries in. It will take awhile, as they all have to be done by hand. Requires cut/paste of old writeup, formatting the box score (which I want to save), and manually setting the date so it will show up in the right place. Not exactly tough, but it can be tedious. Plus with about 200 entries a season (162 regular, 30 or so spring training), there’s a lot of them to get through.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for visiting the site. I know I’m not the most popular Rangers site out there, but I do get enjoyment still out of doing the site all these years later. I just wish they’d win a bit more often than they do.
What will Arod do next?
Couple of years ago it was the slap heard round the world. Now it’s Arod screaming in the ear of a fielder trying to make a catch (story). He’s also been rumoured to have been in strip joints with a woman who is not his wife.
What’s next?
G53: Rangers lose to A’s, 6-1
The last hit the Rangers got in this game was a single by Frank Catalanotto to lead off the fourth inning. After that, the Rangers were done. We didn’t get anything after that. That’s the story of this one.
I’ll probably add something later, but I’m at work at the moment.
Koronka up, Wood down
- P John Koronka recalled from AAA
- P Mike Wood optioned to AAA [ Link ]
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