In three of Hamels’s four starts so far this season he has allowed a first batter home run. Twice on the very first pitch. So three of the fifteen games the Rangers have played have been over after the very first batter. When you win four games out of […]
Thursday was an off day for the Rangers. A cynic would suggest they have had ten off days so far. The Rangers were the only team to have not had an off day yet. They desperately needed yesterday to take a breath. But mostly to hide. After fourteen games, […]
A bad season just got worse. Elvis Andrus breaks his elbow after being hit by a pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning of a worthless game. And just like that the best hitter in a lineup desperate for offense is lost for a significant amount of time. […]
If the Rangers hit the ground with a thud but there was nobody there to hear it, did they make any noise? Unfortunately yes. It made the sickening sound of a really bad baseball team. On Monday night, the Rangers announced attendance was 16,718. According to the Dallas Morning […]
Forget the defensive shifts. Forget the righty-lefty matchups. Forget the analytics about facing the Rangers. If you want to keep Texas off the scoreboard, try something really unconventional: put Rangers on the bases. They will politely leave them stranded. Time after time the Rangers have loaded the bases and […]
Baseball is all about stats. Stats are really just patterns. And the early patterns this year for the Rangers are they cannot come back once they are down in a game. If they are losing, they will lose. But they also don’t blow leads. If they are winning, they […]
Mike Minor earned two Ws last night. One for dominating the Toronto Blue Jays, giving up just two hits and one run in a Jeff-Banister-complete-game six innings of work. He walked two and struck out seven. But it was how he did it that earned the other W. He […]
At least the Rangers made it interesting. After spotting Toronto eight runs, Texas chipped away at the lead. They got within three. Even getting a runner on in the ninth to offer a sliver of hope. But in the end, it’s difficult to undo Matt Moore. In two starts […]
I hope Jon Daniels was paying attention to yesterday’s game. And the game before. He would have seen the value of defense. And, more specifically, how detrimental bad defense is to a team. He doesn’t seem to get that. Year after year his teams are near the bottom in […]
Maybe this is the way it’s going to be with this motley crew of discount pitchers. Maybe we need to expect one good start, one bad start. Hamels went bad-good. Fister went good-bad. Last night, he was a victim of too many pitches and a cutter that wasn’t cutting […]
