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Well, after last night’s rainout, Jeff Fassero got pushed off to game 2 of the double header. The starter was Rick Helling.
After an extremely quick top of the first, we blew out to a big lead in a hurry. After a passed ball that let Alicea score (and Juan to first on strike three), Jim Parque plunked Raffy in the hand to load the bases. Todd Zeile came up, and smacked one over the center field wall. It wasn’t a monster home run, it didn’t get up onto Green’s hill, but it was enough to get over the fence for a grand slam! That put us up 5-0 after the first inning, and it was 6-0 after the start of the second when Royce Clayton belted one over the 407 sign in right center field – the deepest part of the park. We also got two more in the 6th when Pudge doubled home two runners. However, the runs in the first and second seemed more dramatic to me. – It was nice to get Rick Helling some run support, though – something he’s not gotten all year, and has kept his win loss record down.
Rick Helling was doing really well – his only mistake through 6 innings was a solo home run ball in the fifth inning to Chris Singleton, and another solo shot by Carlos Lee to lead off the seventh. After the start of the seventh, Rick seemed to lose it a bit, allowing a few more hits, and two more runs. Venafro came on to finish out the 7th, and start the 8th. After a triple, Zimmerman came on, and would have gotten out of the inning unscathed, but an error by Royce Clayton allowed another run to score.
Scarborough Green came into the game as a pinch runner and was promptly picked off first. D’oh!
That closed out the scoring at 8-6. This is a game where we let the White Sox get back in it by small stupid things, when they shouldn’t have. We outplayed them for the most part, and let ’em creep back into the game. Fortunately, we had enough going offensively to overcome it. Wetteland came in and allowed only a single to get his 38th save of the year.

Well, my wife and I got out there, and it had been raining all day. It didn’t rain during our drive to the ballpark, but once we got there.. boom. Rain! We sat there through the two hour rain delay (that’s nothing for us – we sat through two 3 and a half hour delays in 98), until they called it. There were two things to see during the delay…
The usual thing the Rangers do on Sunday before a game was still done. That was the bit where they picked a family (although I’ve not seen anything other than a father and a son) play catch out in left field in front of the scoreboard. They did that in the rain. At first I thought “Oh man, you get picked, but what crappy weather”. Then I thought it would still be cool to do that, even if it was in the rain. The other thing was a pre-game show by some frisbee catching dogs. It was fairly cool, especially since there was nothing else going on.
This was the Beanie Baby night for the Rangers this year. The giveaway was “Luke”, a black Lab (shown here). This was tied into Rusty Greer, who has a few of them himself – in fact, there was a card given out with the beanie that had a pic of Rusty in uniform with his dogs. Looked cool. I wish it wasn’t limited to just kids 13 and under. I would have liked one, and not to turn it around and sell it, I would have liked one myself! There was a pretty cool article over on the Arlington Now web site about the beanie promotion at the Ballpark – check it out (thanks Lynn!)
After the game was called, they said that you could exchange each ticket you had for two for the double header tomorrow. Well, Lynn & I walked down to the ticket area, but it was mobbed beyond belief! And out into the rain. We blew that off, we’ll go another game. :)

Back to putting my head in the sand. Blech! What exposure on national television. :(
And Jeff Fassero is starting tomorrow and I’ll be at the game. I can’t hide my head in the sand, I’ll have to watch it. :)

A good win, with decent pitching (although not great), and a bunch of offense – lots of home runs, they were all over the place again! – Sorry, an extremely abbreviated commentary from me.
A day game tomorrow – that doesn’t fit well with me, we seem to keep losing these.

I just want to cry – what happened in Detroit? I don’t like bashing teams, but hey, we were supposed to beat up on Detroit, not lose three out of four to them. Yeesh – I hope it wasn’t a matter of overconfidence. I grew up in Philadelphia, the legend of the ’64 Phillies comes to mind here.
Didn’t get to see it, since I was at work when the game was on, but from the radio guys, it seemed like a really sloppily played game. Juan Gonzalez was particularly ragged on by Nadel/Cotroneo (“What’s this rookie league guy doing up here?”). Goody & Rusty did one of those “I got it, I got it, I got it”, and then no one got it as it fell between them.
We hit something like four home runs, and still didn’t win. Yuck. :(
We ended up 70-93 lifetime in Tiger Stadium, and 5-5 against the Tigers this year. That second one is sad.

Much better – this is what we should be doing to the Tigers. The power stroke was working for us today. Gregg Zaun hit his first “official” home run as a Ranger, too (not counting his “called shot”). Not going to say much about this one, don’t have time.

Ugh – This is not happening! This is not happening! (Hiding head in sand)