Well, this game was cruising along nicely. Vicente Padilla and Joel Piniero were pitching a scoreless shutout through five innings. Things were nice. The Rangers then got a few runs in the sixth. Gary Matthews broke the ice with a home run to right field. We then loaded the bases, and Kevin Mench just missed a grand slam (and $25k for someone on the Sonic contest) by a few feet. Still, he got his first two RBI’s of the season on a double the scraped the top of the wall in the left field wall. It stayed that way, and Padilla was still in the game in the bottom of the seventh. He gave up a solo home run in the seventh, and game out having pitched an excellent game. Seven innings, only thee hits, and one earned run (the HR). He did walk three, but struck out seven.
Joaquin Benoit came on, and gave up two runs after a play that initially looked like a bad call, but was probably right (the ball that Adrian Brown in right trapped). Our pen couldn’t hold it again, and we went into the ninth 3-3. Eddie Guardardo came on, and he’s someone we always seem to have good success against. Eddie threw 38 pitches in the top of the ninth – a lot of stuff happened, and we did get one run off of him in the ninth, and it was on a walked in run.
In the bottom of the ninth Cordero came on after Tom Grieve was saying that he wasn’t supposed to pitch at all, but Buck Showalter showed some support for his closer and sending him back out there after getting slammed last night. The game ended on a nice defensive play by Hank Blalock and a nice pick by Mark Teixeira. But for me the play here was the pitching by Padilla. He was quite the pitcher we’ve needed the last few years tonight, and it’s a shame he got a no decision.
We come back home to Arlington with a winning road record. That’s a nice thing to have.