Well, tonight marked the major league debut of a former Ranger manager’s cousin – Sam Narron. I always like watching major league debuts. Partly because I like to see a kid get a shot, partially because of the chance that something very cool could happen (like Brian Sikorski against the Yankees a couple of years ago). Anyway, Sam didn’t fare too well tonight, going 2.2 innings and giving up four runs. I hope he’ll get another shot, as I can’t imagine a major league debut is good for a pitcher’s nerves.
He wasn’t helped by Eric Byrnes, who is batting something like .625 against us this year – Byrnes had two home runs, both against Narron. Byrnes also had a double in this game I believe, and was hit by a pitch, so he was on base most of the night. However, after Narron departed, that ended. Surprisingly, Joaquin Benoit came on, and pitched 4.1 innings, and gave up NO runs, on two hits. He was everything we always wanted him to be. Out of the bullpen. That seems to be where he does best anymore. Might be time to think about him being our long man for a long time. ;)
We didn’t get much going against Rich Harden for the longest time – we didn’t get any runs until the 5th inning when we pushed across two. One was on a Blalock single, and the other was a gift on a wild pitch. That was all the scoring on both sides until the bottom of the 8th, when we broke through for a 5 spot to take the lead on two two run singles by Laynce Nix & Mike Young. Tex also had a solo home run in that inning – so we had a nice win on a big inning, not powered by a big home run.
Two other small things. It was damn hot out there. Yeah, I know it’s Texas, but still – I never really feel uncomfortable out there, even on some of the hottest nights. Tonight I was so uncomfortable, I contemplated leaving the game early. I don’t know if it was where I was sitting (section 212), but I did not enjoy the game from that aspect. I did, however, enjoy the retro uniforms. Hell, even Rangers Captain had a retro uniform on, too, which made me chuckle.
The end result tonight? We’re back in first place.

This was an interesting game for me for a few reasons. First, I had just come back from a trip to Philadelphia. I visited the new Phillies park up there, and I was attending my first Ranger game in a bit. I didn’t see them on TV for a week, and haven’t listened on the radio, so I enjoyed being back at my home ballpark. Second, I was part of the group that was in the Ebbets Field Luxury Box (the second deck one out in left field) with a bunch of folks from Jamey Newberg’s site. That was cool.
I did score the game, but even with that, I felt kind of disconnected from the game, as a lot of time was spent talking to folks, and just generally hanging around. Because of that, I won’t write about the specifics of the game, but there is one good thing to add.
If there ever is a time to be in a luxury box, it’s when you are in a rain delay. :)
We did fall out of first place, and sad as that is – I’ll add this. If I told you we’d be in 2nd place only half a game out of first the day before the trading deadline, I bet you would have thought I was insane. Even if we never get back to first, and miss the playoffs, this will be a great season.

Not much good happened in this one. We lost 11-1, and got a total of three hits, two of them by Eric Young. The Angels, on the other hand had 10 runs and 16 hits.
However, the really bad news was that we lost Ric-Rod for awhile. He was hit in the arm by a line drive off the bat of Robb Quinlan. Later on, they said he had a broken elbow, and is on the DL “indefinitely”. That’s really not good, as he was I’m sure you know was viewed as the permanent third starter. That’s just not good.
One interesting thing happened in this game you don’t often see. The Angels moved their DH in to play the field, which means they surrendered the DH – the pitcher was officially required to bat, although it didn’t happen as Anaheim used a PH in that spot in the ninth.
In case you missed it, this is my last update for about a week, as I’m going home to visit family and check out the new stadium the Phillies have. See you on June 30th as I’ll start up updates again when the Rangers come back home.

I didn’t start watching this game until 11:45PM last night, so I wasn’t in the mood to score it – in fact, I whizzed through watching the whole game in about 40 minutes in high speed on my TiVo. ;)
What I did see this game was a lot of pitching. Escobar struck out about 600 Rangers tonight. Ryan Drese didn’t allow a whole lot himself over his 7 innings. A well pitched game all around.

Nice comeback win! Too bad we had to come back in the first place, as Wasdin definitely pitched well enough to win. Wasdin got (technically) a quality start, and left with the lead, but unfortunately, a rare blown save for us – Frank Francisco was lights out his first inning, but gave up a HR ball to let the Sox tie it in the 8th. Almanzar came in, and put out the fire, as Francisco left two on base. Coco came in and was even more lights out, striking out the side to get his 29th save.
Teixeira’s HR streak came to an end, but he got a hit in the bottom of the 8th to help us with the victory. Rod Barajas was hot tonight with three doubles, and Gary Matthews Jr had a two run HR as well. Not a spectacular offensive night – we had 6 runs on 10 hits, but we had ours when they mattered most, it seemed.
Nice night to be out at the ballpark.

The score wasn’t even as close as 12-6, it seemed.
Benoit was crap. What a shock. We had three home runs (Matthews, Blalock, Teixeira). Tex’s was his fifth in a row, tying a club record.
That’s about all I have to say about this game.

Well, I was at this game last night, and I have to say through seven innings, it was a real snoozer. We had a single run through those seven – up to that point, Batista was pretty dominating. In the eighth, he appeared to run out of gas. He walked a couple, and then aided by an error by Carlos Delgado, we pushed across two runs, until Mark Teixeira came up, and jacked the first pitch he saw into the Rangers bullpen with the bases loaded for the win.
Yeah, some other things happened this game, but the grand slam was really the only thing that I bet most people will remember from this one. Was a really quick, very thrilling end to what I thought was going to be a real bore of a game.

Ricardo Rodriguez continues his streak – he now has 15.1 consecutive innings of shutout baseball – look out Orel! ;) Seriously, it was nice to see two really great performances in a row from him – could he be the third to the Rogers/Drese front end of the rotation? I hope so. If he is, it would have to really cheese off the Indians, as both Drese and Rodriguez used to be their property. Rrod went 6.1 scoreless innings tonight. They weren’t exactly easy, though – only the first was 1-2-3. Several times they had two guys on base, but Rrod managed to get out of all of them. Our bullpen in this game (Shouse, Francisco, Mahay) combined to throw 2.2 innings of hitless relief – something really nice to see.
Offensively, we didn’t have much going on at all. We only had six hits. Three of them were from Soriano, two from Mike Young, and one from Mark Teixeira – a three run blast in the fourth that whizzed right by the group of folks I was with in Section 10; that looked cool. We were out-hit 8-6 in this game, but we got the W, which is what counted.
As I mentioned above, there was a group of us at this game tonight. I organized this with several folks from my forums, and there were 19 of us out in Section 10 tonight. Technically, that doesn’t count as a group by the rules, but my ticket guy said it wasn’t worth losing the sale over a single ticket, so he got me in with 19. It was nice putting some faces to everyone, and while I didn’t get to talk to everyone as much as I would have liked, I had a great time. We had two rows of seats (one of 8 seats, and one of 11 – this was one of those angled sections with odd rows, the one in front had just two seats in it), so that made it hard to be able to talk to everyone, which is what I had wanted to do. I might try and do this again before the end of the season, do this in a game in September. To all of you who came, thank you – I really enjoyed myself. Too bad about the mob scene at the Rawlings Grill. The place really is good, but they get overwhelmed when 43,000 people show up. :)

One other thing – someone there asked me about the software I use on my Palm to score games. It’s called Scorepad, and you can check it out here. It’s not cheap if you want the whole enchilada, but for what I do with it, I felt it was worth it.

The Rangers return to the Ballpark (newly trashed christened with more Ameriquest Field junk) after being on the road for several weeks plus the All-Star break, PLUS an extra day off after the all star break. Seems like we haven’t played here since last season, which might be why they had a psuedo-opening Day feel around the park last night. Anyway, someone who seems to really love this place pitched here last night. Ryan Drese. I’ve done a complete turnaround on him – I said before I never was a fan of his, but he’s proven me completely wrong. I wanted him gone from the moment we got him – not now, and I’m not afraid to say I was wrong about it. Drese has an ERA under two at this ballpark, which is a big accomplishment. He continued his ground ball mastery, and went 7 innings, giving up only one earned run, and was generally awesome.
So much so that it really kept the game moving, the entire game only took 2:15 to play, which is a very low figure considering there was a total of 13 runs scored, and 24 hits total. I suppose that came from the fact that there weren’t a million pitching changes, and the ones that did happen mostly happened between innings.
We bombed last year’s Cy Young award winner Roy Halladay to the tune of 6ER over 4 innings. Not surprising, as it was said on TV that his career ERA in this park was 8.8something. However, Halladay has not been pitching like himself the last few years, but I don’t mind taking advantage of that. The charge was led by Lance Nix, who had a career day getting four hits. Soriano also had 4 RBI’s, and we had three home runs (Texieira, Soriano, Nix). The home runs led to the attention of one of the Ballpark’s newest uh.. “improvements” . The bell.
I’m not going to comment fully on this until I see it myself later today (Saturday) with my own eyes. Didn’t look terribly overwhelming on TV. There were several changes to the Ballpark during the break, but I’ll get into that more fully on my Saturday game commentary.
And in a bit of sad news, former Ranger friend Rick Helling was released by the Rangers after not doing too well in a comeback experiment in AAA. Rick has said he plans to retire – it’s a shame it didn’t work out, I would have loved to have seen him back in Arlington again.
— Joe Siegler

There’s plenty on the actual game itself, so you can read the coverage below, a few comments by me about the Ranger related stuff…
We had five All-Star players this year, a new record. Here’s a quick rundown of what happened with them.
Francisco Cordero: Didn’t play, but then again with the push to avoid tie games, some folks have to be kept out.
Kenny Rogers: Didn’t play, but not surprising, as he was pseudo-hurt anyway. Probably would have had to go extra innings to see him.
Hank Blalock: Came in during the top of the 6th, went 0-2. Didn’t do much, but nice to have him here.
Mike Young: Came in during the top of the 5th, also went 0-2, but made a fabulous defensive play.
Alfonso Soriano: Oh, went 2 for 3 with 3 RBI’s, 1R, and one big three run HR. Named MVP of the game!
Not only did we have the top vote getter in the entire shebang, but he was named MVP of the game. I’m sure part of that stuff has to do with him being a former Yankee, but you know what? He’s wearing our uniform now. Soriano was the first Ranger MVP of an All Star game since Julio Franco did it in 1990.
We did have five players in the game, but it seemed dominated by Soriano. I was quite surprised when he was named the MVP, as I didn’t think there really was a standout player on either side – the standout performance was a negative one, that being Roger Clemens. As usual, my wife and I loved watching the player intros, which I think is the best part for a lot of people. Was it me, or did it seem really rushed? They seemed to spend less time on each player than they did before. Curt Schilling will get fined again, for writing on his cap – that’s a no no that he seems to repeatedly ignore.
Last night, someone on my forums asked me what I thought the score would be. I generally don’t like to predict All Star games, since there’s too many variables, and too many players. Pushed though, I said “AL 7-4”. I ALMOST got it right – it was AL 7-4 for quite awhile until Ortiz of the Red Sox screwed it up for me with a 2 run HR to make it 9-4.
Let’s hope the second half goes as well as the first half does for us, and that Tom Hicks really does replace John Hart with Grady Fuson right away as was implicated on Tuesday in the Ft Worth Star Telegram. :)