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Well, I tuned in to watch Yu Darvish pitch.  Got to see some of the game through mlb.tv as they don’t black anything out during Spring Training.  :)   Yu Darvish was quite wild.  Definitely didn’t pitch like anything worth writing about, but I’ll say something.

His full line is a weird mix.  Three innings pitched, just three hits, but four walks.  Allowed two earned runs.  Struck out three.  There were moments where he was as advertised.  Then there were moments when he was the second coming of Chan Ho Park.   Two of his walks came in the first inning.  Both times though he was saved by Torrealba who threw them both out on caught stealings.  Had that not happened, things probably would have been a whole lot worse.  Second inning had kind of the same thing, as the defense turned a double play behind him.   Darvish had this to say after the game:

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I’m not saying much about this game.  For a couple of reasons.

1. It was a no radio, no TV, no webcast game.  Boxscore only.  Those are hard for me to pay any kind of attention to, and I do better with commentary when I can pay attention to the game.
2. The reason I wasn’t paying attention was because I was busy putting together a toddler bed, and rearranging my son’s room when the game was on.  Last night was the first night my son slept in anything other than his crib.

So I was a bit occupied.

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Derek Holland has been making a lot of noise this spring so far that the goofy side of him is not his dominant side, and that he works rather hard on his pitching side.  He wants to downplay the goofiness (but I hope not eliminate it, as that made him more fun).  This outing shows that he is handling the pitching side quite well.   This game he started and went three innings.    Allowed just three hits and a single run, while striking out four.   More strikeouts than innings is ALWAYS a good thing.

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Colby Lewis is now the “ace” of the staff.  Someone has to be the #1 pitcher, right?  Today he pitched like he owned the job, and wasn’t just given it by default.

Colby went four innings (for Mar 10th, a long outing), and just dominated.  No hits, no walks, and five strikeouts.   No idea how many pitches he threw (wasn’t in the box score).  But everything I’ve read says it was a shutdown outing.   Hard to argue with the numbers in the box score.

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There’s not much to say about this one. The Rangers lost nine to nothing, and we’re never really in it at all.

I think I’ll give this one a pass. Not much positive to say about this one.   In fact, I pretty much stopped paying attention to it once I saw this on my iPhone:

This game brings us to a recent vintage path in spring training; one that has been previously traveled by C.J. Wilson & Alexi Ogando.  Neftali Feliz’s first start of the spring.  I didn’t get to see any of it, as I was occupied with some matters about my son at the time.   Looking back at it, I certainly didn’t miss a lot.  Feliz was rocked in the first inning.   Actually, it wasn’t that prolonged of a pain.    There was a five pitch single to Brent Morel, there was a three pitch double to Dayan Viciedo, and finally the three run home run to Adam Dunn, which was described as a “titanic” shot.   Feliz was down 3-0 after a 13 pitch span there.

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If there ever was any indicator that the Rangers franchise has not seen anything like the Yu Darvish media circus, it was in evidence today.  Forget the bazillion photographers who followed him around.  That kind of thing has been seen before (although not in that quantity).  What really impacted me was this:

The game was not scheduled to be on television.  It wasn’t scheduled to be on the radio, either.  It was, however scheduled to be webcast on mlb.com.  However, since Yu Darvish was starting – and more importantly it was his first start…  The first two innings were on regular radio.  Then the game went off the radio, and was exclusively on the regularly scheduled mlb.com webcast.   That’s mind boggling.  That a brand new pitcher, one who has yet to throw a single pitch in the majors had the power to change the broadcast schedule to include JUST his appearance on the mound.  That’s amazing.

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I didn’t get to hear too much of this game.  At the time the game started, I was actually at Children’s hospital with my wife and son for an appointment.  As the Doctor hadn’t come in yet, I fired up MLB At Bat on my phone, but the free WiFi in the hospital really stunk.  I was able to listen to a tiny little bit, but the connection kept dropping out.  Then I tried 3G, and that was worse, at points I had zero bars and dropped out to AT&T’s “Edge”.  Ugh.  So I tried to just do the play by play in At Bat, and that net connection kept dropping, so I gave up.  By the time we got home from the hospital and a trip out for dinner, the game was over, I found out the score at the end.

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