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Chris Young showed the form that was having folks talk about rookie of the year today. He’s slid a bunch the last month or so, but today it was early season Chris Young again. He went 7 innings, giving up no runs on five hits. A masterful performance that was marred by the appearance of Kevin Gryboski in the 8th who gave up all three runs the Orioles scored. Doug Brocail finished things up with a scoreless ninth.
Once again, Sidney Ponson continues to show why the Rangers would have been absolutely insane to trade for him. He leaves the second game in a row against the Rangers with an injury, and to hear Tom Grieve talk about him, he’s a fat slob who doesn’t care about himself and his team by not being in baseball shape. He just strikes me as an major career threatening injury waiting to happen. In fact, it wasn’t just Ponson, the Orioles sent out four pitchers today, and they all gave up runs. Ponson gave up 3 in 2.1IP, Williams gave up 1 in his 1.2IP, Bydak gave up 3 in his 2IP, and finally Jorge Julio gave up 2 in his 2IP. Not a good day for the Orioles in regards to pitching.
It was a good day for Ranger bats. We had 14 hits, and pushed across nine runs. The charge was lead by Tex, Gary Matthews, & Kevin Mench who all had home runs. Tex and Matthews also accounted for 2/3 of the runs themselves driving in 3 apiece. Mike Young continues to make one think that he might take a run at the batting championship as well as the hits lead, as he’s batting .331 and went 3/4 last night, raising his total hits for the season to 151 with 52 more games to play. I say 200 is pretty much a lock unless he gets hurt.
We move on to Boston, which could be bad for us, as we tend to never do good in Fenway.
You can view my full update for this game here, or you can leave a comment about this game below.

This was the game that The Rangers retired Johnny Oates’ number at. I’m going to avoid talking about that for now, as I’m planning on writing something larger about Oates in it’s own article.
We got out early in this one. We put up a six spot in the second inning, and never looked back. Orioles starter Daniel Cabrera had some major control issues that led him to give up four walks in the second inning. The inning was capped off by a David Dellucci grand slam to left field to cap the scoring that inning. We also put up a four spot in the fourth behind two home runs and a fielding error (Roberts). So we’re up 10-1 after four.
John Wasdin turned in a pretty good pitching performance this day. He went six innings, giving up 6 hits and two runs with 2 walks and 3 strikeouts. Overall a pretty decent pitching performance. Following him for 3 innings was Kameron Loe, giving up no runs, and earning a save – something I don’t understand, the score was 10-1 when Loe came in, so I don’t get that at all.
Still, nice to see a good pitching on a day where Ranger manager Johnny Oates was paid tribute to. Nice to have a good game to go with a good ceremony.
You can view my full update for this game here, or you can leave a comment about this game below.

Mark Teixeira had a home run, his 29th of the season. So did Hank Blalock. So did Alfonso Soriano. So did Mark DeRosa for cryin out loud! All five of our runs came on the longball. Was a power night, although with a power night sometimes comes not much else. Which is the case, because outside of the home runs, we had just three other hits in the entire game. Most of this off of Bruce Chen, a journeyman who seems to have found some consistency with Baltimore, not unlike John Wasdin with us.
But that’s not really the story of the game. Why did we lose this one? Oh yeah, C.J. Wilson really stunk up the joint. I mean, we’ve had some bad pitching this year, but wow, that was a steaming pile of… well, you know. His line was 2.2 innings pitched, 9 hits, 8 earned runs, two walks, no strikeouts. That’s just positively atrocious. James Baldwin also gave up two runs, but over 4 plus innings, which isn’t too awful. However, the surprise of the night was Steve Karsay, who went two innings, giving up nothing in his Ranger debut. That’s something we need to see more of out of the pen.
We also put Mark Holtz & John Wetteland into the Rangers HOF this night. As per usual, local TV coverage totally botched it and didn’t show us the ceremony. We saw pieces of it, but they cut away in the middle of people talking. Once again, local TV management needs to be shot, as I don’t need to hear how Ford is the Best in Texas, and I don’t need to hear how Dodge things I should be grabbing life by the horns. I should be watching the pre-game ceremony, you twits!
You can view my full update for this game here, or you can leave a comment about this game below.

I’m busy trying to wrap up a project today at work for the weekend, so I likely won’t have time to update for the last two games in the Devil Rays series.
Was nice to see us find the can of whoopass and unleash it last night against the Rays. Too bad we couldn’t actually do that regularly, we might have a shot at making a run at it, but this team is just too inconsistant for that.
Good to see Phil Nevin get in the groove last night going 3 for 4, scoring four times. He had a homer, a double, and a single. Good night for him. Hopefully the first couple of games were just jitters.
Baltimore comes in this weekend, minus Rafael “Giambi” Palmeiro. I’m also really annoyed that the Oates ceremony isn’t on TV before the game (if you get the Newberg Report, I was the the reader he was talking about who told him it won’t be on TV). Thanks Fox. By picking this game for national, we lose not only our own coverage guys, but we don’t get the pre-game ceremony. That’s doubly annoying as I can’t go – even though I have a ticket, so I was hoping to see it.

I didn’t have any time to write an update on this today, but even if I did, there wasn’t much good to talk about. Blech.

Uh, hello? Do we have any pitching? I didn’t think we’d fall apart this badly with Kenny out on suspension. Wow.
Chris Young seems to have hit a wall, and that’s bad since there’s two months left in the season. He went and gave up 7 earned runs on 8 hits (with one BB and 1 HR) in his 3.1 Innings pitched. He also had 82 pitches over this time frame. That’s the mark of a really struggling pitcher. James Baldwin wasn’t much better, giving up 2 ER on his 2.2IP. Brocail, Gryboski, & Loe weren’t bad, but the first two did a bunch of damage.
Offensively, we tried to stay in the game. Was one of those “no pitching, score a bunch of runs back and forth” games. We pulled to within 9-8 after 6 innings, but that was it for scoring save for a lone run the Rays got in the top of the 9th. Carl Crawford was the start of this game – man can this guy fly. Was nuts watching him get triples to the left field corner.
Also, I see where there was a fireworks problem at the ballpark – a minor fire issue on the roof, and the Kids park in center field was evacuated. I wonder if that’s what those two sets of fireworks that went off in center field was about during the game last night. When they showed the smoke, it seemed like a different kind of smoke than we normally see for fireworks (meaning the smoke is normally up in the air, not right off the roof like that shot was on TV).
You can view my full update for this game here, or you can leave a comment about this game below.