The first Rangers game on TV this season comes way earlier in camp than it usually does. I talked about the schedule before, so this isn’t new, but we have five TV games this year, as opposed to the usual two. As with most Spring Ranger games, it was filled with ads for the team itself, the gift shop, tickets, etc.. That’s not a problem, just stating what I saw.
BTW, there was a “commercial” that ran twice during the game talking about new scoreboards and such featuring Chuck Morgan. On Wednesday, I’m going out to the Ballpark, Chuck Morgan was kind enough to let me come out there and take a few pictures of what the stuff looks like. I’ll bring those to you when I get them done.
As for the game itself, it was lightning fast. It was 2:03. When I told my wife about that, she said “That’s a big surprise, given the usual substitutions in the spring”. It did make me think. There were no subs made during play. All the subs were start of inning ones that don’t delay anything. And other than the trip to the mound in the ninth with the trainer, there were no mound visits that I recall, either. Extremely fast game. That did help keep the chatter down with people in the booth you don’t care to see (Mayor of Surprise, woman from Southwest Airlines – does anyone except them really care?)
Still, part of what made the game move was pitching. We had a lot of the good kind. In all, each team had just seven hits. The only Ranger to give up a run was Eddie Guardado in the ninth. Vicente Padilla was especially good. He went four gave up no runs on just a single hit. Outstanding. Dustin Nippert went two innings on three hits. Warner Madrigal & Elizardo Ramirez also tossed scoreless single innings. Even Guardado who gave up the lone run had just one hit.
Offensively, the only guys who really appeared to have anything going on were David Murphy, who finally got the first run of the game in the fifth with a solo home run. Murph was 2-3 overall. The other guy was Andruw Jones, who was 2-4 with a double (which was a dicey call, it should have been a single and an error I think). The only other run came on a Josh Hamilton sac fly, which was not too far away from being a grand slam as I recall.
Taylor Teagarden threw out two Sox trying to steal – both times it wasn’t funny – they were dead on nailed. That was nice to see.
I would have preferred a slightly longer game for the first one on TV, but I couldn’t complain too much. Was nice to see the Rangers back on TV with a new game (not the games that turn up on ESPN Classic or MLBN now). :)
