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Got a little behind with some real life stuff, going to take a break from updating for the Tigers series. See ya early next week.

Well, there were two innings worth talking about in this game. The first one is the third inning, and the other is the ninth.
The third was notable because of the big huge 8 spot we put on the board. This was capped off by a grand slam by Ranger outfielder Nelson Cruz. This apparently was the first time that Cruz ever came to the plate with the bases loaded as a major leaguer, and he hit a line drive grand slam over the left field wall. That wasn’t the only run Cruz scored that inning, as he was driven in on a two run home run by Ian Kinsler. Kinsler’s home run was interesting because it came a pitch or two after what would have been a caught stealing for Cruz, which was negated when home plate umpire Sam Holbrook nullifed the play on his own umpire’s interference. That was a very good inning for us.
The top of the 9th was set up by some fun in the bottom of the 8th. Mike Young was hit by a Kevin Gregg pitch. Brandon Donnelly relieved Gregg, and immediately hit Freddie Guzman with a pitch, and was ejected. In the top of the ninth, the Rangers brought on Scott Feldman to pitch the ninth, and the submarine pitcher was later discovered to be a submarine puncher, too. This was when Adam Kennedy was plunked, charging the mound, clearing the benches.
The brawl wasn’t a really long drawn out one, in fact, as bench clearing brawls go, it was pretty tame, not a lot of those secondary and tertiary fights you usually see. But it’s always entertaining to watch these things. Best moment of the fight for me was Mark DeRosa’s football style tackle of Adam Kennedy who got plunked pretty well by Scott Feldman, who punches sidearmed too. It wasn’t quite the pasting that Nolan Ryan gave to Robin Ventura, but Feldman’s pounding of Kennedy can pretty much be seen in the photo here. Kennedy didn’t get much (if anything) on Feldman before being tackled to the ground by Mark DeRosa.
Of course, all this was set up by Vicente Padilla yesterdaay, and also Adam Eaton a week or so ago, so there’s been a lot of beanball between the teams lately. Will make for an interesting end run of the season, if this stuff is still hanging around.
On to Detroit where we meet Kenny Rogers & Pudge again tomorrow.

I didn’t see much of this game, so I won’t have a lot to say, just a couple of the bullet points.

• Vicente Padilla was ejected for throwing at Angels batters. I honestly didn’t realize that, as I had missed that bit of the game, and for some reason never caught any mention of it in the bits I did see. Word came down on Wed that the Rangers aren’t happy with the way it came down and are talking about suspending Pidente over that.
• We added four more doubles to our doubles pile.
• We had four home runs, including Matt Stairs’ first as a Ranger.

That’s about all I have for this one. Better hit the official recap link below for further details.

Here’s an image I haven’t been able to break out in awhile; my sweep image. But it was a good sweep, as it was four games against an opponent inside our own division. This is always good. Now it was just the Mariners, who were behind us, but it’s always good to put some room between you and anyone in your division. Although I don’t think anyone’s worried about the Pittsburgh Pirates or Kansas City Royals sneaking up on them in the standings. Mariners are a little closer than that, so four games helps.
Behind a freshly shaven Kevin Millwood, the Rangers gave up a two spot in the second, but took the lead back straight away with a 3 run bottom of the inning. This was fueled by a bases loaded double by Gary Matthews (who was thrown out trying to strech it into a triple). But it was enough to give us the lead. Millwood gave up another run in the top of the third on a sac fly, but that’s all he would give up for the game.
After that we got to Felix Hernandez for three more in the bottom of the fifth, and after another in the bottom of the sixth on a wild pitch, Felix was gone. However, that wasn’t it. We scored again in the seventh and eighth to widen our lead to 9-3.
Rick Bauer, who seemed a lock awhile back to have the 8th inning setup role has become shaky lately. He gave up three more runs in his 1.2 innings of work. In fact, I think I remember seeing Aki get up becaue of Bauer’s performance. But we got the win, and the sweep, no matter how rocky the 9th looked.
We had five more doubles as a team to load on top of our massive mound of them this year. Mike Young had a triple. Nobody had a home run. But Millwood went 6 and got a win.
More imprortantly we’ve shown we can handle the Mariners, which will be helpful as we go down the stretch.

After the first two games of the series, I was feeling pretty good about our team vs the Mariners. But then I remembered that Edinson Volquez was pitching. Now I don’t have anything against Volzquez – he’s a wonderful talent. In the minor leagues. While he’s shown flashes of brilliance in the majors, he’s not had the same kind of success up here – yet.
So I wasn’t expecting a lot when he took the mound Saturday night. He proved me wrong, going seven innings, giving up no runs on just four hits. He did walk three, so it wasn’t as “crisp” as that line showed. But you can’t argue with seven innings of shutout ball. Benoit came in and stunk up the joint – all four runs the Ms have were on his ledger. Bauer & Otsuka had zeroes up there, which kept it a win for the Rangers. But Volquez had a great outing, something that I agree with Mike Hindman on.. It didn’t get a lot of coverage locally.
Offensively, we continued our pile of extra base hits. We got doubles from Gary Matthews & Ian Kinsler. We got home runs from Gary Matthews & Gerald Laird. We had 12 hits in all, so most of them were just singles. Tex was 3-3, Matthews was 2-4, Laird was 2-3. Was a fairly balanced attack. Seven of our nine starters got at least one hit (Blalock & Cruz did not).
There was a 20 minute rain delay in this one. I did not go to the game – I didn’t miss the rain, I hate rain delays. I would have liked to have seen the 1996 “reunion”, however.
Still, we go into Sunday with the possibility of doing something we haven’t done in ages, that being sweep a team in a four game series.

I don’t suppose anyone reading this has an extra Sundberg bobblehead they wouldn’t mind trading for the Mike Young bobblehead from earlier this year, would they? I have a new one of that in the box, and would like to trade. If you would like to do this, drop me an email.
Why did I miss my bobblehead? Well, I left work promptly at 6PM. I work over near Northwest Highway & LBJ in Garland. So it’s a bit of a drive for me, but with a 7:30 game, there shouldn’t have been any problem. Then I got past the downtown Mixmaster after the usual slowdowns before it. I hit the wall. It took me about 45 minutes to go from the main post office outside of Dallas to Cocherel Hill. That’s what, two miles? It was 7:20 when I got past the accident, and fortunately, I got to 30 & Six Flags right as the first pitch was thrown. I parked my car right when the Mariners finished batting in the top of the first, and got inside the ballpark right after Carlos Lee flied out to right, so I saw all the real fun. But yikes, I detest being late for a game with a passion, and right up until the point I broke through the traffic jam, I contemplated turning around. However I was 2/3 there already, and I ended up not missing much.
Good thing I came, as I saw a whale of a game. This game was “over” after four innings. But those first four innings were highly eventful. Kip Wells put up a zero in the top of the first, but a couple of key errors in the bottom of the first kept the Mariners from doing the same. A Ben Broussard throwing error could have been a double play, and then a Betancourt throwing error could have been out three, had the Broussard one not happened. As it was we put up a big crooked line in the first inning; a seven. In all we got seven runs on just TWO hits, as Gil Meche was just abysmal, walking four in the first. In fact, here’s the play by play for the first inning:

• G. Matthews Jr. walked
• M. Young walked, G. Matthews Jr. to second
• C. Lee flied out to deep right center, G. Matthews Jr. to third
• M. Teixeira walked, M. Young to second
• H. Blalock reached on fielder’s choice, G. Matthews Jr. scored, M. Young to third, M. Teixeira to second on B. Broussard’s throwing error
• M. Stairs flied out to shallow left
• I. Kinsler walked, M. DeRosa to second
• R. Barajas safe at first on shortstop Y. Betancourt’s throwing error, H. Blalock and M. DeRosa scored, I. Kinsler to third, R. Barajas to second
• G. Matthews Jr. singled to shallow right, R. Barajas and I. Kinsler scored
• M. Young flied out to deep right

Quite an eventful first inning. Kip Wells was a little wobbly in the top of the second, but didn’t allow anyone to score. Then came the bottom of the second. Gil Meche walked the first two batters of the inning, which prompted Grover to take him out. Gil Meche faced only 13 batters, and walked 6 of them. He threw 54 pitches to get his three outs, 30 of them were balls, only 24 strikes. Again, abysmal.
Blalock then singled loading the bases. Mark DeRosa doubled to right center, but it wasn’t your traditional double, it hung up a bit, prompting the runners to hold up to see what happened. When it landed, it forced the always amusing to watch bit where two baserunners are right next to each other rounding the bases (BLalock & Teixiera). Tex scored, but Blalock was tagged out, denying DeRosa a three run double. Instead he just had two. DeRosa scored a minute later when Matt Stairs singled him in.
The Mariners broke the shutout in the top of the third with a double (Beltre) and a single (Ibanez). Still, we’re doing OK. One run through three is not bad. Then we came up in the bottom of the third, and got the run back immediately, as Carlos Lee annihilated the first pitch of the inning way WAY over the left field fence, past the seats and almost down the walkway behind Section 8 in left. Very impressive looking home run. A couple of batters later, Mark DeRosa had another home to almost the same place, it too was very impressive looking. That gave DeRosa just the triple needed for the cycle, which he didn’t get unfortunately. But he still had a pile of RBI’s, can’t complain about that.
The wheels fell off a bit in the top of the fourth, the Mariners put up their own big ugly squiggly number on the linescore, a 6. Here’s how they did it:

• K. Johjima doubled to deep left
• Y. Betancourt singled to left, K. Johjima to third
• A. Jones doubled to deep left, K. Johjima and Y. Betancourt scored
• I. Suzuki safe at first on second baseman I. Kinsler’s fielding error, A. Jones scored
• J. Rupe relieved K. Wells
• J. Lopez singled to right, I. Suzuki to third
• A. Beltre grounded into fielder’s choice, I. Suzuki out at home, J. Lopez to third, A. Beltre to second
• R. Ibanez homered to deep right center, A. Beltre and J. Lopez scored
• R. Sexson singled to right
• B. Broussard hit by pitch, R. Sexson to second
• K. Johjima struck out swinging
• Y. Betancourt flied out to right

Kip Wells came out in this inning with what we’re told is a foot injury. That’s two injury issues since he’s been here, which has been just a couple of weeks. That’s rather troubling. Not sure what to make of that now, but Wells did get dropped on the one fantasy team I had him on.
In the bottom of the fourth, we got one of the runs back on a Gary Matthews home run into the Rangers bullpen. And that would be it for the scoring, save for a sac fly by DeRosa in the seventh. That was a total of 20 runs in the first four innings for both teams.
I was glad I went, nice to see an offensive explosion in person again, but I did miss getting my Sundberg bobblehead. Bummer. When I was walking out after the game, Sunny was still signing his bobbleheads. I heard he was doing that before the game; I wonder if he was there the whole game or not. If so, he was there for quite awhile.
And as a final kicker, when I was coming home, I was just getting to Reunion Arena, and saw Rt 30 backed up as far as I could see. I shot up onto 35E North and took it to 635, and over to 30. I spent a lot more time driving back and forth to the Rangers game than I would have liked tonight. We need a high speed rail line that goes to the Rangers games, dammit!