Rangerfans.com

This was an even more annoying game than the 9-8 loss the night before.
It’s rough when you have four times the number of hits as your opponent, yet you score nothing and still lose the game. CJ Wilson was pretty darned masterful. He allowed only two hits the whole game. One was a double to Macier Izturis, and the other a single to Mark Trumbo. However, the big deal was an error by Endy Chavez in the second, allowing Howie Kendrick to score. Chavez just dropped the ball, allowing Kendrick to score. Kendrick was on base due to being hit by a pitch, and then going to second on a wild pitch by CJ. So it was a short sequence of bad there, but it was the only time they had anything like that.
CJ was awesome other than that. Complete game loss, going eight innings, allowing just the two hits, one unearned run, walking one, and striking out eight. It lowered his season ERA to 2.94, but man. This loss hurt. More than the 9-8 one, because had our chances.
The Rangers had eight hits, including a 3-4 night by Elvis Andrus. Nelson Cruz was also 2-4. I mean in the first we had two men on with one out, and didn’t score. The sixth was worse, as we had the bases loaded. Blew it.
1-0 pitcher’s duels are usually a good thing to watch, but this felt more frustrating than the usual 1-0 game out there.

This game was annoying. I was tempted to write just “shit” because of the way the team lost the game.
Derek Holland and Dan Haren both stunk up the joint tonight. Holland gave up 7 earned runs in his 5.1 innings. Haren gave up 7 earned runs in his 4.1 innings.
Still… Shit. Rough way to end the 12 game winning streak.

After beating the Mariners and the A’s eight straight games, we move on to Anaheim. Given how anemic the Mariners offense was, and the A’s not being all that much better, you wonder, “Well OK, that’s all good, but is this JUST us beating up on bad teams? How good are we, really”?
With that attitude in tow, I sat down to listen to the game on Tuesday night on my iPad. It was Alexi Ogando vs Tyler Chatwood. Chatwood was someone the Rangers have never faced before, and while this wasn’t his first start (it was his 18th), he is still fairly early on his career. I never seem to like going against new pitchers early on, as we tend to get shut down. That wasn’t the case here.
Despite the final score being 7-0, we were only up 3-0 going into the eighth. Four of the seven runs were scored in the last two innings. The first run scored on back to back doubles by Hamilton & Beltre. The second run scored on a walk (Napoli), and a couple of singles (Chavez & Kinsler). The third run scored on a walk (Andrus), and a single (Young), coming after Andrus made it to third on another play. The fourth and fifth runs scored on a two run home run by Endy Chavez, scoring Napoli who had walked. The final two runs both came on solo home runs in the 9th by Josh Hamilton & Adrian Beltre, back to back. Nice even offense. As much as I like to see the orgasm of scoring from time to time (like a 10 run inning), a nice spread out offense is probably better for the long run.
Pitching wise, it was Alexi Ogando again. He seems to have recovered from his blip where he got bombed for a few starts. Eight innings, just four hits, three walks, and five strikeouts. More walks than usual, but it didn’t seem to hurt him. Mark Trumbo was the only Angel with more than one hit, and both of them were doubles, oddly enough. The other two hits were singles by Callaspo & Aybar. His numbers show an outstanding performance again.
Darren Oliver came in and pitched the ninth, and threw a perfect inning. Ogando was probably still OK to pitch the ninth, but it was said that Oliver was coming in to get some guys some work who haven’t pitched in over a week due to the All-Star break. It’s all good.
Rangers have now won 12 in a row, including FIVE shutouts in the last nine games. That’s amazing. Don’t think we’ve ever had a stretch quite like that before, have we? The entire rest of the division lost last night, so we picked up a game on everyone. We’re now:
Five games up on the Angels.
Twelve and a half games up on the Mariners
Fourteen games up on the A’s.
If we sweep the Angels (probably won’t happen, but still), we’ll come back home seven games up in the West (who knows about Mariners & A’s).
Looks like I picked a good time to come back to regular game updates. :)

Sunday afternoon featured one young Rangers pitcher vs another young pitcher who was supposed to be a Rangers pitcher.
Matt Harrison, acquired in a blockbuster trade when we sent Mark Teixeira to the Braves squared off against Blake Beavan, who was sent to Seattle in the blockbuster trade where we got Cliff Lee last summer.
While neither was really bad, Harrison was clearly better, as he only allowed one run, and it came late in his outing. Beavan wasn’t bad either, his only mistake was a big three run home run to Mitch Moreland early on, which was actually all the runs the Rangers got. Moreland was just 1-4, but the one was the big home run, so that pretty much was his day right there.
The Rangers offense was pretty scattered, as we had just seven hits. Only Mike Napoli had more than one. However, four of the seven were extra base hits. There was Moreland’s home run, and three doubles (Hamilton, Beltre, Napoli). As “eh” as that was, the Mariners were even worse. Just five hits total, nobody got more than one, and four of them were singles. Just one double.
Matt Harrison went 7.2 innings, allowing just five hits and one walk, while punching out four and allowing just a single run. That run came after the one line Mariners extra base hit was scored by one of their singles. Mark Lowe came in, finished off that inning, and Neftali Feliz finished it off with his 20th save. Both Lowe & Feliz were perfect, so it topped off Harrison’s performance quite well.
This is the second straight four game sweep in a row. That’s quite impressive, and if we can pull that kind of thing off against Anaheim, we’ll put some distance between us and the rest of the division. If we pull off some sort of big trade at the deadline too, it’ll be an epic boost to the confidence going into the last third of the season, for sure.

Another late game I missed the end of, as I fell asleep on the sofa listening to it. As I get older, these later night games start to bug me more. Thanks for letting Selig off the hook there, Tom Hicks.
Anyway, I’m not going to write a ton about this one, as I have some other stuff to do, but it was pretty much the CJ Wilson & Felix Hernandez show pitching wise. Ian Kinsler led off with a home run, and it stayed that way until the bottom of the fifth when an Ichiro single stopped the Rangers scoreless streak at 33, tying the game.
We picked up another run in the sixth, and stayed that way for the rest of the game. It was somewhere around there that I fell asleep and missed the other runs the Rangers scored.
Sorry for such a short writeup, but I have a few things to do around the house before today’s game came on the air.

My weekly TV game came on Friday night. So I settled in rather late, and started watching the game.
The game started off in a way that I thought it would. Rangers would pound out a few, and our starter would hold ’em down. We got half of that. Colby Lewis started off well, and kept the Mariners down (not that that’s too hard anyway).
The Rangers picked up a run in the first, and in the second. The third inning started off with Elvis Andrus walking. That was the last time a Ranger got on base until Endy Chavez started off the eighth by singling. Doug Fister, who threw something like 42 pitches in the first two innings calmed down, and was lights out there from innings 3-7. It was a good old pitchers duel, with Texas up 2-0 in the lead.
Given the way the Mariners (do not) score runs, they had some odd defensive plays. In the first inning, they had the infield in, something you almost never see. Pretty strong indictment of their offense that they had the infield in during the first. They also threw home in the 8th to stop a run from scoring where you wouldn’t normally see that kind of play.
That rundown in the 8th allowed the Rangers’ runners to get up to second and third while Chavez was stuck in the rundown. Those two guys scored later. In fact, the first three of the four runs the Rangers got were on sacrifice flies. Don’t see that too often, either.
Going into the bottom of the ninth, Colby Lewis was still out there. He managed to get the first two outs, but sandwiched in there were two singles, to put two guys on. Which then invoked the really weird rule that says a pitcher is eligible for a save if the tying run is on the on deck circle. I never agreed with that, but it did allow Feliz to come in, get the final out, and get a save.
But this was really about Colby Lewis. I would have loved to have seen the complete game, but I get why Wash took him out there. Still, it was another shutout, which was our ninth straight win, and our third straight game with a shutout. Most impressive.