The Strikeout plague of week five

Season record: 13-19

Week 5 Record: 2-5

Series Record: 3-7

I know just a few weeks ago I said I could stay pretty optimistic about this team for a good portion of the season. That’s still true but week five definitely tested that.

Who else is sick of two win weeks?

The bullpen pitched a lot of innings this week, with the last minute spot start for Claudio after losing Hamels and then the 13 innning game to start the series in Seattle. It’s going to be another long week since their next off day isn’t until May 15.

I would give the bullpen 45% of the blame for how week five went, of the 41 runs Rangers opponents scored, 21 of those were credited to a relief pitcher. I definitely don’t expect the bullpen to be perfect every outing, which is why I’m not giving full blame to them or even half. Yes, breaking that down, they gave up three runs a game this week but it’s hard to get a win when the bats are also fairly quiet.

Pitching obviously keeps you in the game but pitchers can lose a no hitter. So scoring runs of kind of really important and if you’re team is striking out 10 or more times in seven straight games, does it really matter how well the bullpen is pitching? At least a fly out or ground out gives you the possibility to score, there’s really not much you can do about a strikeout... unless you’re Napoli in that who struck out on a wild pitch and eventually scored in the last game against Seattle.

For those keep track at home, Rangers struck out 77 times in their seven games this week.

At this point it’s not all that realistic to expect 2 or 3 early runs to hold long enough for a win.

Rangers were outscored 41-28 in this weeks game, they only scored more than 3 runs in two of those games. One game was an 8-7 loss and the other was a 10-4 win, both against the Astros. Ranger opponents scored more than 3 runs in all but one game this week, that was the extra innings 3-1 win the Rangers had against Seattle on Friday.

I hate talking about the negative, which I feel was something I made clear in the first few recaps but this week was beyond frustrating to watch, it was kind of hard to find positive things to really focus on when the week was basically crap.

I’m still holding out hope that Beltre will come back in a few week and magically the Rangers will turn it around but It’s getting difficult to hold on to that hope. Especially now that Cole is going to be out until after the All Star break. I refuse to listen to any trade/sell talk this early but this week didn’t do anything to make me feel better about hearing less trade talk.

So while I feel like this about week five and this current week of play coming up:

I’m going to include some happier gifs because we could all use a hug right now...

or a head touch!

So let’s pray to the baseball Gods for happier Ranger things this week, ok?

p.s. I really enjoy Rougie’s bat flip and skip