The Rangers were outhit 15-6. That’s the bottom line, really.
Kevin Millwood was ass. 3.2 innings, 8 hits, 2 walks,5 earned runs. He’s out of gas it seems, and I’m starting to see rumblings that the Rangers should sit him to not let him get to his vesting option. If they tried that, I could quite easily see Scott Boras raising a stink about that. I’m sure someone will write about whether or not Nolan’s “just shut up and pitch and stop whining about pitch count” mentality is causing this or not. But Kevin Millwood now is not the guy you want pitching a lot should we still manage to make the playoffs, which is more and more starting to not look like it’s going to happen.
I could write about the relievers, but I don’t want to. Millwood’s pitching performance was pretty bad, so I don’t feel like writing about Rangers pitching for this game at all.
If you want to look for something good, three of the six hits the Rangers got were extra base hits. Doubles by Kinsler & Davis, and a home run by Julio Borbon, which itself accounted for two of the three RBI’s. In fact, the other RBI was Borbon, too. So he had all three of the team’s RBI’s. Marlon Byrd had two singles. Not much else going on besides that.
Except rain. Lots of rain. They played through the game in a lot of rain until the bottom of the ninth when the Rangers had a man on first, and were playing in a swamp, more or less. Byrd had one of his two singles to lead off the inning, then Nelson Cruz hit a ball to short which was a perfect double play ball, except that Wilson slipped and fell, and Byrd slid past second base. It was a mess – it reminded me of the postponed Game 5 swamp in this past World Series.
Don Wakamatsu came out, and said something to the umpires, and play was put on hold, as the teams came off the field. The tarp was run out, but it had been raining on the field for a few hours, there was almost no point. The game was then called roughly an hour later, and it was over.
Granted, the Rangers were down by five there, but we did have two on with nobody out. I would have liked to have had the chance to keep going. Would have been nice to pick up the bottom of the ninth the next day or something like that. Would like to hear an official explanation for that or something.