This game definitely belonged to Josh Hamilton. After almost making a spectacular play in center field (lost the ball to a snow cone hitting the ground), Josh proceeded to go 5-5 with a walk, scoring four times, and had five RBI’s. His hits included two home runs and a triple. Quite the performance. He has the major league lead in RBI’s. At the current rate he’s going, he’s looking at something like 35 home runs and about 140, 150, 160 RBI’s. It’s a seriously impressive set of numbers. We haven’t seen anything like that since the glory days of Juan Gonzalez in the late 90’s. I hope he can stay on the field.

Lost in the hoopla of all the home runs and Josh Hamilton was another pedestrian outing by Sidney Ponson, now making his second in a row. Granted, Ponson was hurt by some poor fielding, but still did not dominate. His line was five innings, 80 pitches (not that bad at all, actually), nine hits, and seven runs, although only three were earned. I’ve seen a lot worse lines than that, but watching the game he was just “eh”.
But there’s no doubt the big deal in this game was the home runs. While the box score says we had six, it honestly felt like more than that. The home runs came from Josh Hamilton (two), Jarrod Saltamacchia, David Murphy, Chris Shelton, & Michael Young.
The Rangers had seventeen hits in all. The only Ranger without a hit was Frank Catalanotto. Everyone else had at least one. Hamilton had five, David Murphy had three, Milton Bradley & Michael Young had two each, and the rest were all single hit performances. Still, it was enough to club the Astros into submission.
It always seems that some game against the Astros each year we score some really huge pile of runs. Normally it comes later in the six games we play. Hopefully, this wasn’t the last one.
More importantly, we can get back to .500 with a win on Saturday evening. It should be a great pitching matchup, Vicente Padilla goes against Roy Oswalt. I’ll be there.
Make sure and check out the MLB Recap link at the top of this entry. There’s video highlights of a lot of this. These new recaps they have in 2008 are worth checking out, now that they’re all into recaps and video clips.

The game just ended a minute ago. I’ll have some more to write later, but probably not till tomorrow.
My kid was up most of the night sick, so Mommy and Daddy got very little sleep. Will probably pass out tonight. :)
I ended up passing on commentary for this one. It was an extra inning loss, which always end up irritating me.

Kason Gabbard looked good again, and seemed to have no ill effects at being at the bottom of the pile due to Sexson’s still gutless move of charging the mound. Unfortunately, Kason didn’t get the win due to Josh Rupe letting some inherited runners score. Kason went 5.1 innings, gave up five hits and two walks. Rupe, who allowed runners to score, got the win, and got no earned runs on his ERA. Gotta love those baseball rules, eh? :)
But this game was about our defense. Kinsler, Vazquez, Hamilton all made spectacular plays in the field to rob several Mariner hitters.
We actually didn’t have a ton of offense. Just seven hits, and they were all by just four Ranger hitters (Murphy 2, Laird 2, Vazquez 2, Boggs 1). Boggs and Murphy doubled, but that was about it.
Scary moment for Gerald Laird going headfirst into second base, looked like he was done and headed to the DL when he hit the bag.
Eddie Guardado looked spectacular in the ninth, didn’t he? I have to admit I didn’t think that signing would amount to much. While it’s still early, and he can still tank, he’s done well so far, something I didn’t think would happen.

You know, as I sat here watching this game, I thought of several angles to take reporting on it. With all the seesawing in this one, I didn’t know which way I’d go in reporting this story. Now that it’s over, I can’t get the following image out of my mind, so it’s what I’m going with as commentary for this story. Except to say that Hamilton’s ball went WAY further than it was reported. Can we institute a recount? Can we overturn a distance call?

Well, first off, I didn’t see most of this game. I spent the day with my family, and with it being Mother’s day, I saw just part of the early bits of the game before we headed out to do the family thing in the afternoon.
What I saw was the Sidney Ponson that has existed for the last few years make a reappearance. The one we’ve had up until this point has been really great. The one we got on Mother’s Day 2008 was well, “Sidney Ponson”. He actually stuck around the game for awhile (5.1 innings), but he gave up seven hits and five walks. That was pretty indicitave of the entire Rangers pitching staff, actually. Ponson was followed by Esteban German (0.2IP, 3H, 2R), Jamey Wright (2IP, 1H, 1R, 1BB), and Eddie Guardado (1IP, 2H, 3R, 2BB). None of our guys did particularly well this day.
Rich Harden came off the DL for Oakland, and proceeded to stink up the joint about as badly as Ponson did – worse if you look at the line. 3.2 innings, eight hits, four walks, and 5 runs. Not good.
Since I didn’t see much else of this game, I’ll pass on going into a lot more detail. Check out the MLB.com Recap I link to here, there’s plenty of detail, plus some video.

On Saturday evening, the Rangers went to extend their winning streak, but in the first inning, we got something that kind of made it not much matter. After just two thirds of an inning, Kevin Millwood came up lame after a pitch, and had to be removed from the game. The injury was later described as “mild strain of the right groin muscle”. It turns out it wasn’t so “mild”, as Kevin ended up on the disabled list over this. This now leaves just Vicente Padilla as still in the rotation from the original opening day starting rotation. Blech.
Josh Rupe followed Kevin, and threw three innings. He wasn’t sharp, gave up five hits and two walks. Fortunately, he just gave up one earned run in all that, with one unearned. Josh ended up with the win, but the next reliever had quite the dominant outing. Frank Francisco threw 2.1 innings, gave up just one hit. More importantly he faced eight batters. Struck out five of them. Guardado & Benoit followed up, keeping zeroes on the scoreboard. CJ Wilson finished up, although was not very good, giving up two runs in his one inning.
Offensively, we were driven by positions 1 through 4 in the lineup. All but one of our hits came from the first four spots in the lineup. Ian Kinsler, Michael Young, and Milton Bradley each had two hits. Josh Hamilton had three. Milton Bradley had a home run and a double. Josh Hamilton and the non 1-4 hit (which was by Duran) were also doubles.
We did lose our scoreless innings streak in this game too, but the more important part of this is that we won the game, bringing us back to just two games under .500.

I started listening to this game on my headphones. I had to mow the lawn. Since we bought our daughter a sandbox for her third birthday, I can’t let the grass in the back yard slide as much as I might have in the past, since she plays out there. Don’t want the fire ants to hide behind tall grass, eh? So I’m walking around the back yard listening to all the pre-game, as well as the start. The team made all the claims that last night was “behind us”, but you all know that Padilla will be on the mound, so you wonder if he’ll plunk someone – he’s pretty good at it. :)

Anyway, this game was quite good. Scott Feldman, who seems to be making some good first steps at becoming a starter took the hill for the Rangers. While it’s hard to judge how effective a pitcher is by listening to the radio sometimes, one gets the feeling that he was pretty decent. Obviously, his line spells that out, but I didn’t see how the pitches were moving, that kind of stuff. Speaking of Feldman’s line.. Six innings, two hits, four walks, but (something you probably already know) ZERO runs allowed. Feldman was followed up by Jamey Wright, Joaquin Benoit, & CJ Wilson. All of which threw a single frame of (again, scoreless) relief. This was Feldman’s first win of the year, and it continued in the line of great pitching we’ve received lately. This makes two great outings in a row for Scott. He was great in Oakland last Sunday as well when he got screwed over by a dropped ball – one of the “non error errors”.

When I was out mowing the lawn, Brandon Boggs took a dive into the left field wall, and from the sounds of it on the radio, he smacked his knee in a rather unfortunate place in the left field wall. As you can see in the picture above, there is a very small place where you could do this, so Brandon was unlucky in that he hit the really small spot. It knocked him down; he was on the ground for awhile, but stayed in the game. I did see the latter parts of the game on TV; they showed Brandon’s parents and sister (who seemed bored quite frankly, unlike his mom). I bet Mom was a bit freaked out during that.

Anyway, the following inning, Brandon erased any doubt over whether he was really hurt or not by jacking a home run into the left field seats for a 1-0 lead. This kid really has earned his spot, and I cannot see a reason why we’d send him back down now. With his emergence, did anyone see a regular outfield of Brandon Boggs, Josh Hamilton, & David Murphy at the start of the season? I didn’t. These guys are all doing very well. I rather hope they don’t try and shoehorn someone in (Cruz) to get at bats “or a look”. The guys out there now are doing great, and should stay there until they prove otherwise.

Boggs’ home run was all we really needed, but he didn’t stop there. Boggs had two other RBI’s when he doubled in the sixth inning, scoring Bradley & Hamilton. Boggs had a great line tonight – he went 3-4 with a run scored, and three RBI’s. Not bad when your parents are in the stands at all. :) The other run was driven in by league leading Josh Hamilton who went 2-4 this game.

It’s three shutouts in a row. It’s thirty one innings in a row of shutout ball by the staff. It’s quite a pitching feat, even more so that it’s from a team that is not known for this kind of stuff. Kevin Millwood goes on Saturday to see if the streak can be continued.

Richie Sexson is still gutless for throwing his helmet. Should have been more than six.

“That is a gutless, six foot seven, two hundred hitting. formerly good player – what a joke.”

This game started off with a lot of moves, and a little less than halfway through there were a lot of moves on the field. First off, the roster moves. Two guys were activated from the disabled list. One was tonight’s starter Kason Gabbard. The other was third baseman Travis Metcalf, who hadn’t yet appeared in a game this year. Metcalf didn’t really seem needed to me right now, as German Duran is doing a decent job over there, and we have Ramon Vazquez both to handle third till Blalock returns. However, with Ben Broussard being designated for assignment today, I guess you needed an infielder. Broussard other than the first couple of games of the season really hasn’t hit the ball at all. Nice enough guy, but man, he was just not getting it done. Additionally, A.J. Murray was sent back to AAA, but that’s no surprise, he was just up for a spot start.

Then the game started. Kason Gabbard started for us, and was looking pretty good. Gave up no runs, and just two hits. But unfortunately, he only went 3.2 innings (more on that later).
The game started off well, with Vazquez singling and both Hamilton and Bradley walking. A sac fly and a single later, the Rangers are up 2-0. Felix Hernandez (I still refuse to use his dumbass nickname) labored. I didn’t get a count, but he was around 30 pitches for the inning. Gabbard tossed up a donut on the scoreboard in the first. Gerald Laird was hit by a pitch, and then was driven in by a two run home run by Ian Kinsler. That was about it for the Rangers offense for awhile. In the fourth, Ian Kinsler was hit by a pitch. He wasn’t thrilled about it by his look at the plate, but didn’t do anything about it.

Then in the bottom of the fourth comes the head scratcher of the evening. Kason Gabbard threw a pitch up high, but over the plate. For some really unknown reason, Richie Sexson charged the mound. The pitch was easily a foot or more away from him – he ducked out of a pitch that if it was a foot lower would have been a strike. And he charged the mound. That was quite odd. Then to make it worse on himself (probably with the Commissioner’s league) he tossed his batting helmet at Gabbard before he got to the mound. Charging the mound is a suspension anyway, but throwing an object will probably make the penalty worse.

As he was charging the mound, Josh Lewin said “…with a helmet throw – COME ON!” In the replays of this and the discussion while the melee was going on, Tom Grieve came out with a comment that was right up there with his opinion on Hideki Irabu’s ability to pitch himself out of a paper bag. Grieve’s quote here that made me laugh out loud was:

“If he doesn’t get suspended for a week for that gutless move, I’ll be completely shocked. Number one; for charging the mound on a pitch that wasn’t even close, and then getting twenty feet away and throwing a helmet at him like a girl. What a joke.”

That made me laugh out loud. Another really good Grieve line from this was the one I started this article with. I actually thought of another word to use here, but it definitely isn’t a good one to use on a baseball blog like this one. All I’ll say about that is “meow”. Grieve’s comments made me get out the laptop and start writing this commentary before the game was over; something I don’t normally do. After the initial remark, there was the usual brawl milling around, and pushing and shoving happened. The only actual person who was ejected was Sexson – probably because there wasn’t any real fighting in the brawl outside of Sexson. What was interesting was the clip of Milton Bradley pushing Gerald Laird – about 3 or 4 times on camera, and with some force too. On one of them, I thought Bradley was going to push Laird down, actually.

Gabbard ended up coming out of the game shortly after that; early reports say it was about his leg, and not his back (which he was on the DL for). One never knows if it was directly related to Sexson, but that seems like the obvious response to the situation. Gabbard was followed up by Franklyn German, Jamey Wright, Eddie Guadardo, & Frank Francisco. These guys continued their pen dominance, and allowed squat. In fact, all those guys allowed just two hits.

In the sixth, we tacked on another run after a Gerald Laird double, and a Ramon Vazquez single. Speaking of Vazquez, he started in place of Michael Young tonight, and more than picked up the slack for Young. Vazquez went 4-5 with with an RBI and a run scored. A pretty good night for him. Brandon Boggs was 2-3 with a walk, showing no signs of giving up his spot to go back to AAA.

This was the first time the Rangers had back to back shutouts in four years.

With two shutouts in a row, plus going back into Tuesday night’s game, that’s a total of 22 innings in a row the Rangers have shut out the Mariners, and going further back, that’s just one run in the last 27 innings, and just one in the previous 32 (the M’s put up a four spot in the third on Monday’s game).

The one thing I don’t want to see is Tom Grieve back down from his comments. Stick to your guns, man. You were right. Don’t back off them. Don’t apologize.

This was an extremely well pitched game – on both sides of the field. The Rangers were going up against Eric Bedard, who for some reason seems to have had his reputation as a “Godlike” pitcher increased just because he was traded away from Baltimore. Now don’t get me wrong, he was a great pitcher in Baltimore, but does anyone else feel that the press is making him out to be better than he really is, merely because he wears a different uniform? Anyway, Bedard did pitch well, he went seven innings, gave up just six hits and two runs. Struck out five. A pretty decent outing.
Thing is, Vicente Padilla is pitching by far the best he’s ever done in a Rangers uniform – perhaps ever? He was fantastic – he went seven innings as well, but no runs and just two hits with eight strikeouts and two walks. On top of that, he was stupidly efficient with his pitches. Going into the seventh, he had thrown something like 60 pitches total. He had to work a bit in the seventh, but the first six were total cruise control. Even the seventh was something cool. Vicente’s two walks were both in the seventh. He started the inning with them. Then proceeded to strike out the side. He looked strong, he could have come back out for the eighth, I’m sure, but I understand the decision.
Also on Padilla, the way he just went after Seattle after the two walks in the seventh was really impressive. I’m going to shamelessley steal this bit from Joey M over at Baseball Time in Arlington, because he already wrote this better than I could. :)

And yet, it was Padilla’s seventh inning that really stole the show, if only because of the way he buckled down in the face of adversity. After walking Raul Ibanez and Adrian Beltre on back-to-back 3-2 pitches to lead off the frame (which prompted a predictable visit from pitching coach Mark Connor), Vicente went into overdrive:
92. 95. 94. Strikeout looking.
95. 96. 95. 95. 95. Strikeout looking.
96. 96. 97. 95. 96. 96. Strikeout swinging.
Dynamic. Singular. Electric. I’m not sure any one adjective can properly describe that 14-pitch sequence.

The two runs we got were both scored by Milton Bradley. One was in the fourth when Bradley scored on Brandon Boggs’ first career triple. The other was the sixth when Bradley jacked a home run ball into the Mariners’ bullpen. We had a chance to get some more in the latter innings, but didn’t come through.
The win now puts us in sole possession of third place. I really hope we win Thursday night, as I don’t want to leave Seattle tied for last place again. We’re now 15-20, and inching back to .500.
I also hope we win against the Red Wings, but I don’t see it happening.

After the third inning, I needed to hit the head, so on the way I remarked to my wife (who was reading in the bedroom) “Man, it’s about time the Rangers had a game like this, we’re winning 10-0 in the third inning”. Since our daughter was born, my wife has kind of tuned out on Rangers games. That’s fair, since she spends so much time taking care of our girl that when Samantha is asleep, Mommy usually wants to pass out. Last night though she watched the first inning with me, and the Rangers were up 2-0. So when I walked by her last night saying we were winning, she remarked that she needed to watch them more. She also remarked in the inning she did watch, “Wow, I don’t know any of these guys”. I did inform her about what I wrote about her in the Rusty Greer entry from yesterday, which is what made her say she didn’t know anyone.
The game started off nicely, as Miguel Batista (who normally pitches well against us) was really putting up a stink in Seattle. He threw I think 47 pitches in the first inning, walked several, and had virtually no command to speak of. To be honest, he should have given up more than two runs in the first inning. If I remember right, we left the bases loaded, and it just felt like we should have nuked Batista a lot worse, although that was still to come.
Sidney Ponson, who seems to be the 2008 “Lightning in a Bottle” pitcher for Texas so far started off the bottom of the first with a walk and a single, and you thought – “Uh, oh – here we go”, but he ended up getting out of the inning with no runs scored. Good. So Batista goes back out there for the second, and gives up just a single run, which wasn’t too bad for the Mariners. 3-0 is still manageable, even if your starter is stinking worse than the animal barn during the State Fair. Ponson follows that up with a 1-2-3 in the bottom of the second. Then the Rangers come out for the third.
Batista is still out there – at this point having thrown about 6,453 pitches. Not surprisingly, Milton Bradley leads off with a walk. David Murphy followed it up with a home run to right field. It was a line drive home run from a ball rather high in the strike zone (if not out of). Was nice to see it go out – because off the bat, it didn’t have the trajectory that looked like a home run – it looked like a double in the gap. Batista did get Boggs to strike out, but then walked Catalanotto (Batista’s SIXTH walk), which prompted John McLaren to finally pull Miguel Batista. In from the pen comes Cha Seung Baek, a guy who has traditionally in the past done extremely well against Texas. Not tonight – Baek was just as bad as Batista (in this inning, anyway). Saltamacchia flies out to Ichiro, but Ramon Vazquez followed up with a single. Michael Young singled, scoring both Catalanotto and Vazquez. Funny thing about Young’s single is that it looked like an out – was heading up the middle, but Seattle second baseman Jose Lopez had the ball go just under his glove. Really – it looked like an out, and then – whoops – there it is in center. Lopez probably REALLY wished he had caught it a few minutes later, because it would have ended the inning. Instead Lopez watched with everyone else as a Josh Hamilton hit ball was deposited WAY up in the upper deck in right – it was a SERIOUSLY impressive home run. The kind that you just watch and go “HOLY CRAP – Look at that!” Josh & Tom were both impressed with it. I didn’t hear it on the radio, but I suspect Eric & Victor were also impressed. If you click on the MLB Game Recap for this game, there’s video highlights there, and you can hear the Mariners call of the home run too – even they were impressed with it. Milton Bradley finished up the inning with a ground out (he was the first and last batter in the frame).
That home run restored Hamilton to the major league leading lead in RBI’s with 36. Josh is looking quite good, and boy, I hope he stays on the field. I know Volquez is looking good in Cincinnati now (at this point, 6GS, 4-1, 1.27 ERA), but Hamilton has been equally as good on our side, so it’s nice to see this trade working so well.
I watched through the fourth, and at this point did something I didn’t normally do – I turned off the game when we were winning. I did that because I wanted to play some Grand Theft Auto IV – if I waited till the end of the game, I’d be too tired to get in some gameplay. Peeked in on the game from time to time, but I was confident in the win – turns out (for once) I was right about it – the Rangers didn’t score any more this game. The Mariners did pick up a lone run in the fifth on two consecutive doubles by Balentien and Ichiro.
Ponson got the win, and is now 2-0. Sidney went seven innings, gave up seven hits, one walk, one run. Didn’t strike out many (two), but had a pretty decent, if not dominating outing. Can’t argue with one run over seven innings, no matter what the rest of the numbers were.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention a catch by David Murphy (which is in the video highlights on the MLB Game Recap link above) later in the game. I missed it live, but I did go back and watch it a few more times. Nice rolling, diving catch. I’ve said it a few times already, but I really like the acquisition of this kid. I expect the emergence of David Murphy has really kind of negated the acquisition of Frank Catalanotto, who hasn’t done a whole heck of a lot since his return. I know Cat is signed through next year (with an option for 10), but it wouldn’t surprise me if Murphy keeps going like this if Cat isn’t moved or released after this season.
Funny thing is with ten runs, you’d think we’d have a boatload of hits. We didn’t. The Rangers only had eight hits all evening. Granted, two were doubles, and two were home runs, and the Mariners pitching staff gave up 10 walks (all the walks came early, too), but still – you’d think we’d have like 17 hits or something. Nope, just eight.
Very efficient evening, very nice to see a night like that. It also keeps the Mariners with us tied for last place. Two more games in Seattle – be nice to take both, and not leave Seattle still tied for last place.