Last night I was watching Baseball Tonight, and noticed that ESPN has no love for David Murphy. They were talking about how the juggling of the lineup last night produced something good for our team. Then they threw up this graphic of the lineup from two nights ago, and the one for last night.
Daniel Murphy? Man – someone obviously is asleep at the wheel over at ESPN on that one..
WHAT THE …………..
P.S. Shut up, Dave.
I didn’t get to see any of this game. It started at 11AM, and by the time I realized it was on, it was mostly over. Normally I’d TiVo delay that, but since I forgot it was on so early, I saw the score in the middle of the game, and decided there was no point in watching then. :)
Scott Feldman got his eighth road victory of the season, and his 12th overall. That’s 12 wins in mid August. At that rate, he could quite easily get to 17. I can’t recall the last time the Rangers have had a pitcher with that many wins in a season. Anyway, Scott went 6 innings, seven hits, two walks, and six strikeouts. One run allowed – pretty solid outing for sure.
Hamilton keeps making moves offensively. 4-4 with a couple more doubles. His average is now up to .260. Andruw Jones also had a double, and Elvis Andrus homered. David Murphy had the last RBI on a sac fly.
As I didn’t see this one, I’m not saying a lot, but it’s nice to get out of there with a series win, altough I thought we should have swept Cleveland, tell you the truth. We come home to play Boston for the Wild Card lead in a three game series just half a game behind Boston.
GO RANGERS!
Edit: I looked it up. The last time someone had that many wins was Kenny Rogers in 2004, who had 18 wins. Kevin Millwood was close in 2006 when he had 16, though.
Tommy Hunter does it again. 7.2 innings pitched, 98 pitches thrown, six hits, no walks, five strikeouts, and NO RUNS! Tommy looked awesome again, and wow, is it refreshing having this much quality pitching from young guys. Always we had to grow our own, and man, 2009 makes it feel like we’ve finally got the message across. It’s exciting. Man, it REALLY is exciting.
Offensively, Josh Hamilton led the way with three of the nine overall Ranger hits. He definitely appears to have found his groove again, right around the time he said he was coming off his ADD medicine. Josh had two doubles, and two RBI’s in the game. Pedro Borbon also doubled, and the rest of our hits were singles. The other RBI’s were pretty spread out (Blalock, Vizquel, & Andrus).
But this night was about the pitching. Tommy Hunter was really great, and CJ Wilson came in and threw 1.1 innings of scoreless relief, not allowing his one interhited runner to score.
All was good this game. Kind of amusing though that this is the third straight game the Rangers have been involved in where one team was shut out. It’s also the second straight game with a 5-0 score, although not in the same direction. :)
Squeee indeed. :)
Well, this game was pretty much defined in the bottom of the third, when Dustin Nippert couldn’t get anyone out. Cleveland scored five runs that frame. That was also all the scoring for the entire game.
Neither team was exactly pounding the ball. Of the six hits Cleveland had, only one was anything but a single (it was a double). Of the seven hits Texas had, only one wasn’t a single (it was a triple). But enough of them came together in the third for Cleveland to push across five runs in one inning .
Dustin went six innings, despite that, and managed to strike out ten Indians in just six innings, so that was good. He only walked two, so overall he wasn’t too bad. Except for the third.
When your team loses 5-0, and the other pitcher doesn’t pitch a one hitter or something like that, there’s not much to say in recap. Not unless you’re getting paid to write about baseball, in which case you make the loss stories a bit more padded. heh :)
I got bored tonight. Got into Photoshop. :)
Last time Derek Holland pitched this way, I saw Hannah Baugh squeee herself into a fit of excitement. If Holland does too many more of these, poor Ms. Hannah might have her head explode! And then Derek will feel bad.
Seriously, most Ranger fans don’t know what to do with repeated awesome pitching like that. I mean this was fantastic. I was talking to my wife about it when it was happening, and found myself referring to his stuff as “Nolan Ryan like”. It was impressive, to be sure. His total line:
Nine inning complete game
Just 96 pitches
Three hits (all singles)
One walk
Eight strikeouts
It was fantastic to watch. I mean WOW. When I watch games in a hurry, I normally fast forward through the Rangers in the field to get to them batting. This time it was not that way, I wanted to watch the pitching.
I think I can stop saying things like “Derek Holland on paper won’t beat John Lackey”, because now we feel he can beat him. I’m not going to act shocked in my commentaries when that happens!
Not that Holland needed the help, but he definitely was helped out by the Angels in the field. They had three official errors, and at least one more that should have been. Here’s a summary of their gaffes:
Shutting out the Angels 7-0 and also by the score of 11-6 (with four in the first inning) is a statement, I think. It’s nice to go there and win 2-3. If we could just beat some other team this reguarly. :)
For some reason I don’t even feel like getting into the Rangers offense this game. We scored seven, had a few home runs. We’ve sen that before. We haven’t seen this kind of regular pitching from a Ranger guy in recent memory. It’s exciting!
Squeee indeed, Hannah!
I wasn’t able to see any of this game, although I did hear the Rangers scoring on the radio when I was driving around. Took a trip with the wife and kids to a restaurant we had never been to before. Was good, but not really worth the time and drive.
The Rangers still have a problem with Jered Weaver. In the past he’s shut us down a lot, and this game was no different. In fact, other than the fifth inning, we weren’t able to do much of anything.
The fifth had a two run home run by Hank Blalock, which accounted for all our scoring. There wasn’t a ton of hitting, either. Six hits in all, spead out over four Rangers. Weaver went into the eighth inning, throwing 100 pitches, five hits, the two runs, and eleven strikeouts. Millwood wasn’t bad, either – 6 innings, also only two runs. He had a few too many hits (nine), but they didn’t seem to affect him too much.
Eddie Guardado followed, and gave up just one hit, but it was a big one – the game winning home run to Erick Aybar. Sigh.
I’ll say this again about the Angels. When you lose to them, at least you don’t have to see the stupid rally monkey.