Welcome to the Majors Mr. Tepesch!
Glass Half Empty / Afternoon Cloud: The 4-8 batters in the Rangers' lineup were a combined 0-fer through 7. Not good. (Although Beltre did have a ground ball out, RBI in the 5th)
Aggressive base running got Kins thrown out at 2B trying to stretch a single into a double behind Martin going from 1B to 3B on Kins' hit.
Glass Half Full / Silver Lining: Rangers' rookie starting pitcher Nick Tepesch gave up only 1 run on 4 hits in 7.1 IP. Not too shabby. And his ground balls to fly balls ratio was 16-2. Excellent, especially in the hometown park.
Oh yeah, the Rangers won 6-1 behind young Mr. Tepesch's pitching and good offense from the 1-3 (Kins, Elvis & Fat Elvis) & 9 (Leonys Martin) hitters in the Rangers' lineup.
Thoughts / Observations / Sidenotes: I, as others have done, compared Joe Ortiz to Everyday Eddie Guardado yesterday. So today I'm going to compare Nick Tepesch to another lanky right handed starter that didn't have an overwhelming fastball but did induce a lot of ground balls and looked calm, cool and collected on the mound. Yup, I'm going to compare Tepesch to Orel Hershiser. At the very least Tepesch sure did remind me of Hershiser tonight. Bulldog, Jr.???
The Rangers have won the first 3 series of the year. You know what that means? Yup. They're on pace to win each series this season.
Speaking of on pace...what's it about batting in the 3-slot for the Texas Rangers in the beginning of a season? Berkman is batting .480 in the young season.