When I fought about Yu Darvish coming here, I never really thought of him as a strikeout pitcher. Maybe it’s because of his size, but I don’t know but he never struck me as a big strikeout pitcher. However all the guys who started for the Rangers in quite a while he seems to be the most consistent in getting 10+ strikeout games. This game was no different. Darvish had 10 strikeouts over seven innings.
His overall line was okay, it wasn’t dominant, but it wasn’t bad either. Darvish struck out 10 for his 10th win of the season. 10 wins before July? Yeah I’ll take that. His complete line had seven innings pitched with 113 pictures. He allowed four hits and one walk for four earned runs. One of the runs was a solo homerun to Prince Fielder which is not a huge surprise there.
Two of the runs Darvish give up where in the first inning which put us down two to nothing pretty quickly. However the Rangers didn’t just lie there and we did get a homerun in the first inning. It was a leadoff shot by Ian Kinsler. The Tigers actually went up 3 to 1 in the top of the fourth, before the Rangers put up a four spot in the bottom of that same inning to go up 5 to 3 at which point they would never relinquish the lead.
Speaking of tens, the Rangers had 10 hits in this game. Ian Kinsler and Michael Young both had two, but everybody else just had one. Mike Napoli was the only starter to take an ofer. There was some power in this game, Elvis had a double, Michael Young had a triple. Ian Kinsler and Josh Hamilton had solo homeruns. It was another well-balanced game offensively.
The rest of the pitching was okay. Mike Adams and Joe Nathan both pitched one inning. Mike Adams gave up a run but Joe Nathan give up nothing on the way to his 17th save.
This win is our 46th of the season, against 29 losses.