Rangerfans.com

What a beautiful game. I admit going into this game, I was feeling distressed. After the slaughter we got from Seattle in the last series with them, the prospect of losing against them again (we could have conceivably been 11.5 games out after this series) didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence. Kenny Rogers, however – had a lot of confidence.
And a lot of pitches. He was brilliant, throwing a 5 hit shutout against the best hitting team in the AL, the Mariners. There were a few double plays turned behind him, and a big night from Raffy (1 HR, 4 RBI, 1 Double). In fact, Raffy got his 450th home run, as well as his 499th career double. In fact, Raffy leads all the majors with I believe 11 doubles this year.
Mike Young also jacked a home run, and had a good day. Mike Lamb had a double, and Arod had a couple of RBI’s too. A nice game, nice to see a big win. However, we have to take all three in Seattle, really. Two out of 3 would be nice, but all 3 would put us 5.5 games out when we get out of the AL West, which isn’t all that bad, really.

No time to write commentary on this game today – too busy at work. Was nice to see a win, though.

This was totally disheartening. I really was sad after this game, and I generally don’t get that swept up in my emotions (for real) – it is after all just a game. But I really was depressed after this game. Then I went and lost a game of baseball on my Xbox, too. :(
Anyway, Kevin Mench was the story of this game, after the good pitching performance by Doug Davis. It was amusing that Kevin Mench managed to trip over his own bat out of the batter’s box – I had never seen that in 25+ years of watching baseball. :)
When I got up in the morning, I saw that John Rocker had been sent down. He deserved it, but quite frankly, I wish he pitched better, as I enjoyed watching Rocker on the mound. I hope he gets it together (although he should have done that in spring training).

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! I was at the game, too. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! The best part of the game was Mench, Arod’s home run, and a baseball toss between James Baldwin and the home plate umpire (they had three balls going at once, and the umpire threw a ball into short center field – was pretty funny). Other than that, check out this line from our pitching.

TEXAS                        ip       h   r  er  bb  so  hr    era
D Burba                       5       7   6   6   1   6   2   6.89
C Lewis (B, 1)                1 1/3   4   4   4   4   1   0   7.36
C Michalak                      1/3   0   0   0   1   0   0   6.75
T Van Poppel                  1 1/3   1   0   0   0   2   0   7.50
J Rocker                      1       1   1   0   1   0   0   6.75
D Miceli (L, 0-2)             1       2   2   2   2   1   0  11.11

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!
What does a Rangers fan do after a sweep by the Mariners? He has to wear this “gift” given to him from some friends in Seattle. I tried to look excited doing it.

Additional game notes are available here.

We tried to win, but can we? Nooooooooooooo. Stupid bullpen. 9-7 loss to the M’s.
Arod had 5 RBI’s and two HR’s, we turned a triple play, but was that good enough? No, of course not. Our stupid bullpen. :(
Additional game notes are available here.

Well, we lost this game too, but it wasn’t as annoying as last night’s (at least for me). We were winning for awhile, and I thought Irabu was pitching well. Our usual problem came into play – bullpen can’t keep any runs off the board. :(
Seattle had an ejection two nights in a row, which was amusing.
Carl Everett had a pretty majestic looking home run into the upper deck in right field. Overall, one never likes to see losses, and I just had a feeling that this was going to slip away once we got to the bullpen. Hopefully we can take Sunday & Monday for a split.

Ugh. Down 5-0 in the first inning. I was driving around in my car with my wife, and I really really have a hard time getting into games when we’re down this many early. When I got home, I didn’t really pay attention to the game at all, and that’s not a bad thing, as we lost anyway. :(