Another Rangers win, another solid piching performance. I definitely can get used to this.
Jeff Wilson has praise for Scott Feldman, who dropped his ERA down to 4.04 on the season, and who says that his command is improving in each outing.
Evan Grant has praise for Nelson Cruz, who has broken out of a recent slump with three homers in the past two games, and who may be replacing Hank Blalock as the team's regular cleanup hitter. Grant suggests that Blalock's approach suffers when he's hitting cleanup, resulting in bad at bats and bad performance, and dropping him in the lineup could result in less of the all-or-nothing approach he's exhibited of late. And Blalock responded to the move with three hits yesterday...
T.R. Sullivan's game story includes this quote from Ron Washington about the first-inning replay that resulted in Miguel Tejada's home run being upheld:
"They went in and checked it and said home run," Washington said. "I had nothing more to say about it. It was just one run. I figured if we couldn't score more than one run, we didn't need to worry about that."
I realize such a level-headed approach isn't likely to gain Washington much support from the segment of fandom that wants him to go out there and scream and yell and get ejected all the time, but...well, his explanation makes sense to me.
Washington said that Ian Kinsler was showing signs of mental fatigue, particularly in going 0 for 5 on Friday, which led to Kinsler getting the day off yesterday. Without checking the numbers, my sense is that Kinsler has tended to be pretty streaky, so while this bad stretch is not a good thing, I'm not too worried about him snapping out of it.
Some more praise for Mike Maddux -- Darren O'Day says that an adjustment to where he stands on the rubber has been key to his performance since coming to Texas.
Jim Reeves wrote yesterday about how the Rangers need to take a more patient approach at the plate, and today writes that this isn't necessarily at odds with Rudy Jaramillo's teaching an aggressive approach. Rudy says that it is a matter of balancing working the count with swinging at hittable strikes.