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Well, that a big steaming pile of….

I mean, I should have heeded this warning, but I didn’t. I actually watched part of this mess.

Taking a mulligan. No time to write today, too many things going on. Really nice to see Eddie Guardado chirp at Jim Leyland after a minor beanball war broke out.
https://www.rangerfans.com/images/eddiechirps.gif (Thanks to Jamey Newberg & Drew Shepard for that pic).
I also missed seeing the entire game, as my wife and I were watching the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, which had just come out on Blu-Ray on Tuesday. Since the kids were born, we don’t get a ton of time just to ourselves, so I chose that over watching another Rangers game. :)

I don’t think anyone expected Tommy Hunter to be the person to finally stop our 2009 slide against Detroit. If you’re reading this, you know that we were 0-6 against Detroit this year going into Monday night’s game.
But he was. I’m running out of time to write about this, but he was impressive looking out there.
Nelson Cruz & Michael Young both had really impressive home runs to almost the same spot in the ballpark.
Michael Young had three more hits – now at 123 for the season. At that rate, he’ll end up with 318 hits. :)
Nice to get the win, and even better that the Angels lost, so we’re now just 2.5 games back behind them. That’s the same amount we’re behind Boston in the wild card standings, too.

Kevin Millwood started the game, and you felt good about it, based on his performance this season. Felt like we’d be able to take the game and the series heading back home. Kevin went out there, and threw two innings, allowing a single hit. Struck out two. Then that was it. He was out after two innings, replaced by Dustin Nippert. At the time, you didn’t know what was going on, but later in the game, it was announced that he was out with tightness in his left gluteus muscle. Doesn’t sound like any fun.
So Nippert followed up with a pretty good performance. Nippert went 4.1 innings, and allowed just a single hit, two walks, and one run. In fact, all the Rangers pitching was pretty good. In all, the Royals got just four hits.
In fact, for the most part, the pitching was pretty good. The Royals trotted out there Sidney Ponson. Capt Aruba pitched like the guy that was with the Rangers for awhile. Six innings, five hits, NO earned runs. When you get that from Ponson, you thought – uh-oh. Perhaps they were going to outdo us. The game after all was scoreless through six innings.
Then we hit the seventh. Rangers led off with a double, a single, and steal, a fielding error, a couple more singles, you get the idea. We plated three in the top of the seventh, which turned out to be all we needed. The Royals scored one in the bottom of the seventh against Dustin Nippert, and another in the bottom of the ninth against Willie Eyre, but that was it. We also had a four spot in the top of the eighth, which was highlighted by an Andruw Jones home run.
Ian Kinsler had a fielding error, his seventh of the season in all.
In all, every Ranger starter had at least one hit except for Elvis Andrus. Michael Young had another three hit game, he’s been on fire lately. In all, he has 120 hits for the season, well on page for another 200 hit season.
Coming home.

One of the other young pitchers for Kansas City stepped up and kept the Rangers mostly in check. It wasn’t a dominating performance, but Luke Hochevar went seven innings, gave up three runs on five hits. One of the runs was unearned, but the big deal with him was that of the 21 outs he recorded, 13 of them were strikeouts. The Ranger bats were definitely flailing against Mr. Luke. Whether or not he was helped by the strike zone? Well, that’s a job for Questec. :)
Anyway, it didn’t stop there. Joaquim Soria got a two inning save, and of his six outs, three of them were strikeouts. So that was sixteen strikeouts by Ranger batters. We had three guys (Hamilton, Jones, Blalock) who struck out three times each. Three more guys (Cruz, Teagarden, Vizquel) who struck out twice. Marlon Byrd also jumped in the pool once. Only Ian Kinsler & Michael Young did not strike out. That was pretty ugly up there.
Offensively, the big deal for us was a first inning home run by Michael Young. That’s about it. In fact, Michael Young had three of our six hits. He pretty much *WAS* the offense. Nelson Cruz had a double, and there were singles by Blalock & Byrd.
Derek Holland was meh. 4.2 innings, seven hits, four earned runs. Actually, “meh” is too good for that. He was “Mark Clark”.
Not a good night for us. But so far it’s better than recent years in Kansas City have been this series. Normally we would have lost all the games, so 1-1 after two is an improvement.