Monday, September 30, 2013

163 and That's the Season...Crap

Glass Half Empty / Afternoon Cloud: The umpire gave David Price a GENEROUS strike zone and squeezed Perez's strike zone, that was huge, especially early on.  That said, the Rangers had to play the game the ump was calling and they didn't adjust and they left their bats on their shoulders a lot.

Rangers had 2 runners (of course they were Elvis and Kins) picked off early (2 of the first 9 outs) on the base pads, can't give up easy outs on the bases in a playoff game and hope to win.  The only thing almost as precious in baseball as runs are outs.  And the Rangers gifted two outs to the Rays in a playoff game.

Speaking of playoff games, the announcers said about 199 times that this was a regular season game because the stats count towards the regular season and the teams are allowed expanded rosters and it's a tie breaker game to decide who gets to play in a play-in, "one game playoff series" versus CLE.  Whatever, it's a win or go home game, it's a playoff game for all intents and purposes.  And generally the TNT announcers sucked.

Perez had retired 8 straight when Wash pulled him for Ogando.  I disagreed with that move at the time.  Pitch around Longoria and unintentionally intentionally walk him and leave Perez in.  And if Wash had Perez on such a short leash why wasn't Ogando on a short leash?  Wash let Ogando give up 2 doubles and a walk (aside from an intentional walk) before Ogando got out of the inning.

As soon as Longoria hit the 2 run homer to put the Rays up 3-0 I thought that that would be enough for the Rays to win given how bad the Rangers' offense had been against good pitching.  3 runs turned out to be enough with the Rangers losing the game 5-2.

Nellie had nothing.  And fittingly he made the last out of the Rangers' season.

Glass Half Full / Silver Lining: Perez did great except for 2 pitches to Longoria.  Even with those 2 bad pitches, he had only given up 4 hits and 3 ER's when he was lifted by Wash.

Thoughts / Observations / Sidenotes: That's the season.  Lots of injuries, lots of different stating pitchers and they got to this point.  Pitching was not the problem this year.  Offense was, especially after they lost Nellie.  Berkman (Fat Elvis) was a complete bust.  They had waaayyyy too many games where the offense put up 0-2 runs and the starting pitching was plenty good enough to get a win with just some half-decent run support.

Even if the Rangers had managed to win this one I really don't think that with the offense struggling they would have made any noise in October.  That said, I would have of course loved to see some October Rangers baseball.  As the saying goes, there's always next year.

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