mlb.com started with the headline, “Rangers Cruz to 2-0”. Silly headline aside, it’s a good point. Nelson Cruz had a great game. He had two titanic home runs – including one into the upper deck, and made a freakin’ fantastic catch in right field. He went 2-4 with 3 RBI’s, and two runs scored (when he batted himself in twice).
Nelson & Elvis were the only guys with two hits. In fact, hits were scarce overall, we had just nine of them, but made ’em work for our eight runs. Speaking of Elvis, he christened his career pretty nicely with a solo home run that went into the Rangers bullpen in the 6th inning. It won someone on TV $200, and it ended up with CJ Wilson. Another good one was a triple by Josh Hamilton, and we also had our usual gaggle of doubles (three of them). In fact, only two of our nine hits were singles, seven were of the extra base variety.
What was especially cool about Nelson Cruz & Elvis Andrus was how HUGE their smiles were in this game. Elvis’ was understandable – first major league home run, but Cruz was nutso smiling, especially after that big catch of his. It was quite refreshing to see that much smiling in a game.
Bit of a scary moment when Jarrod Saltammachia had to come out of the game with what was described as lightheadedness.
Pitching wise, it started off with Vicente Pidente looking like he was going to match the performance of Kevin Millwood from opening day. While he did get the win, and battled, he didn’t have dominating stuff outside of the early part of the game. In all, he went 5.2 innings, giving up four hits and three walks for three earned runs. He was let down a bit by a couple of errors behind him. There was a third later on when CJ was pitching. All of them were the same – they pulled Chris Davis off first base via a wild throw. They were Elvis, Michael Young, & CJ Wilson doing the throwing. Only one lead to a run, it was an unearned one on the ledger of Jason Jennings, but you don’t like to see that many errors, even if two of them didn’t lead to anything.
Frank Francisco came in and got his first save of the season. Eddie G also had a short appearance. The pitching wasn’t as crisp as it was opening day, but it was great to see the win. Even greater to see the players wear the red T-shirts and red caps. It did kind of make the “home white/blue” uniform look like the old 90’s red uniform, even if it wasn’t. :)