Thoughts on a 6-0 Rangers win

Rangers 6, Marlins 0

• Congratulations to Yu Darvish on his first major league complete game shutout.  One less thing now for his detractors to bitch about.
• What might be most remarkable about Yu's outing tonight is that he wasn't the transcendent, how-does-anyone-hit-this-guy Yu that we see when he's at the top of his game.  Not to go all Tiger Woods here, but Yu didn't seem to have his "A" game today.  In the second inning, with Yu struggling with his fastball command and his pitch count approaching 40, I was concerned that he wouldn't make it past 6 innings.  But Yu settled down, did work, and shut down the Marlins.
• The final line:  9 IP, 6 hits, 3 walks, 10 Ks, 116 pitches, 76 strikes.  Oh, and 0 runs.
• For the fifth straight game, the Rangers scored a run on a wild pitch.  At least, that's what someone said on Twitter.  I'm not going to fact-check that, because if you can't trust something you read on Twitter, what can you trust?
• For the second straight game, a Ranger scored from second on an infield single.  I'm not fact-checking this one, either, but that's because I'm pretty sure I remember when this happened, both last night and this night.
• I will predict that, if the Rangers continue each of these streaks through the end of the season, they will make the playoffs.
• I will also predict that both of those streaks will not last the rest of the season.
• Elvis Andrus went 3 for 4 tonight.  Shin-Soo Choo and Adrian Beltre had two hits apiece.  The Rangers scored 6 runs.  Its almost as if, when the middle of the Ranger order does well, the team scores runs.  We might want to give this further study.
• Rougned Odor went 2 for 4 tonight.  He's now hitting .312.  His OPS is over 800.  And he's the youngest player in the majors.
• For that matter, I'm pretty sure Odor is younger than anyone in either of the two AAA leagues right now.  There was only one player in all of AA at the start of the season who was younger than Odor on Opening Day.  And he's currently playing in the majors, and performing like a legitimate major league second baseman.
• No Rangers game tomorrow, but the Frisco/Corpus game will be on the national CBS Sports channel.  We'll put up a Game Day Thread tomorrow evening for that game, as part of our morphing into a Roughriders/Handball blog.