I’m not going to write a ton about this one.  Mostly because I’ve been writing now for over an hour, and I’m starting to burn out on writing about baseball tonight.  But I will say this:

Up 2-0 after one.  Up 5-0 after two.  Up 9-0 after three.  The game was over.

The home run by Mitch Moreland in the second inning was a monster shot.   Justin Morneau had one that looked longer to my eyes, but the “distance report” had it shorter.

But seriously, Dempster looked good again.  Rangers bombed the Twins.  That’s pretty much it, folks!  :)

Sunday we go for the four game sweep.  Given the way the first three have gone, I expect the Twins will want out of town in a hurry.  The combined scores of the first three games give the Rangers a 27-9 run differential.  :)

There’s two things that will dominate any discussion of this game, but that’s not a surprise at all.   That’s Matt Harrison’s completely dominant start, coming close to a no hitter.   And of course, Adrian Beltre hitting for the cycle.  Both are worthy of much discussion on their own, but we got two of them in the same game.   But the most important thing is that it happened on a Friday night, so I got to see the game!  :)  First off, the cycle..

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This game was a good back and forth game for quite awhile.   The lead changed or tied four times through the first 7 innings.  Those kinds of games are good for fans.  The pitchers probably don’t like them, because it means that nobody can hold a lead.  But I’m not a player.  I watch the games, so I like these back and forth games.   However, it certainly didn’t end up that way.

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The Rangers are leading all of baseball with big innings this year.  We have something like 25 5-run or more innings in 2012.  This game we almost did that twice in the same inning.  We put a major hurt on the Orioles tonight with a five spot in the fourth inning.  If you let a team back from a pounding like that, then you deserve to lose the game.  Fortunately, however, the Rangers didn’t do that, and kept the Orioles down on the way to a 12-3 stomping.   The biggest highlight was Adrian Beltre, of course.  Why?

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Scott Feldman has been quite odd this season.  He was horrendous early on, and then lately he’s been like the 2009 version.  His last 2-3 starts have been somewhere in the middle.  Like this one – he wasn’t awful, but he wasn’t that great version of Scott Feldman, either.   Thing is, he was doing OK through the first four innings.  Gave up just one run – not too bad. Then the wheels fell off in the fifth, he gave up a four spot, and that was pretty much it.   The Rangers made an effort to get back into it later in the game, but couldn’t come all the way back, so Feldman and the Rangers lost this one to The Flying Showalters, 5-3.

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On Monday, I got to keep up a tradition my mom started back before I was 10 years old.  That’s to go to my birthday game.  If the team was in town on my birthday, I went to the game.  If not in town, go to the closest game on the calendar.  This year, they were in town on August 20th, so I went.  Ended up going with a friend of mine, Jeff.  The same guy I took to the World Series game a couple of seasons ago.  Guy knows his Rangers, so it’s always a pleasure to go to a game with someone who knows the game.   He lives not too far from the park, actually, so I went to his house, and we drove over together.   I originally thought I was going myself, and completely forgot I asked him, so I ended up intentionally buying seats in the last row of Section 325.  I like sitting up there.    So Jeff and I hit the last row of seats, and settled in to enjoy the game.

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After yesterday’s game that was a 2-1 Rangers squeaker win, I was wondering if we’d score more than that for Matt Harrison.  Matt’s easily been the most solid starting pitcher this year, but even guys that can win 2-1 games deserve some run support.   Plus, after a squeaker like that, you want a blowout to cleanse the palette.  Too many close games in a row aren’t good for the nerves.  They’re especially not good for the fingernails, especially someone like myself who has a lifelong habit of biting their nails.   As a short digression, the most tense filled series in baseball I’ve ever seen was the 1980 NLCS between the Astros & the Phillies.  Of the five games in the series, four of the five went extra innings, and the one that didn’t, had a 3-1 score.   But I digress…

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This is one of those low scoring games, that because we won the thing, I don’t have to use the phrase “hard luck loss”.  However, I bet if I poked around in the coverage of this game from Toronto’s perspective, I’d probably find that phrase being used for Carlos Villanueva.   The Jays starter went 6.1 innings.  Allowed just four hits, one walk, and only two runs, but both of them coming on a single swing of the bat.  “Hard luck loss” indeed, that one.

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Yu Darvish pitched this one, and while I wouldn’t quite call it a “hard luck loss” (those are usually scores of 1-0, or 2-1), he did pitch well enough for a win, and didn’t get it.  The loss lowered his record for the season to 12-9.   Not exactly stellar, but not exactly awful, either.  I suspect most people are willing to give him a pass in the first year.  Probably will increase the pressure in 2013 for him to do a lot better.   Anyway, about this one..

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I have to say, after three straight losses against the Yankees, I wasn’t feeling good about the finale, or the state of the team, to be honest.  It just felt like a slide backwards to the era we were in before 2010.   Then the Yankees put up a five spot in the bottom of the 6th in this game, putting them up 5-4 in the game.  I was feeling that I’d have to write another “I don’t write about the Yankees” and be really disgusted.  However, it didn’t end that way.

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