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Season record: 40-42
Week 13 Record: 2-5
Series Record: 11-13, 3 splits
Bullpen woes continued and the Rangers started the week with a blown save, as well as bookended the White Sox series with blown saves.
Their first game of the week started off with a 9-3 leaded going into the bottom of fifth inning, 12 runs later and the Rangers lost 15-9. Claudio got the blow save while Scheppers got the loss.
This was the same game Elvis Andrus hit not one, but two home runs and took his total for the season beyond his career leading 2016 total of eight. Elvis now has 11 homers, tying with Mazara, and is now one of the eight Rangers with 10+ homers.
Rangers won just one game in the four game series against Cleveland, a 2-1 game in which Chirinos and Beltre hit solo homers. Beltre now has 450 career homers and 2971 career hits.
In Friday’s game against the White Sox, the Rangers took a 7-5 lead into the 9th inning. And just like you’d expect a game that started out with the Rangers loading the bases in the first inning with no outs and no runs scored, Matt Bush blew a save for the fifth time this season.
In their final game of the week Rangers had a 5-4 lead going into the 8th, Leclerc got the blown save for this game. This makes the 17th blown save of the season for the Rangers.
In the series against the White Sox, by my count, the Rangers had the bases loaded nine different times and scored just seven runs. Four times the bases were loaded, not one run was scored. The Rangers have proven time and time again that there is no such thing as having “enough runs.” The goal of baseball is simple, score all the runs you can at any opportunity you get. And the Rangers simply didn’t do that.
The Rangers are now going with a ‘closer by committee’ strategy with the bullpen until they get Matt Bush “back on track.”
Since there wasn’t much fun to talk about for this week, here’s a gif to make you smile.
Also, Yu Darvish is the only Ranger going to the All Star game at the moment. Elvis Andrus has been a consistently solid player for the last season and a half and more than deserves to be in the All Star game this year.
Elvis is second in OPS and RBIs for AL Shortstops, only behind the ASG starter Carlos Correa.
He’s currently on the Final Vote ballot, which (I think) you can vote an unlimited number of times. Or you can text A1 to 89269. Twitter votes don’t count until Thursday so wait to use the hashtag. But please, for the love of the game, JUST GET ELVIS TO THE DAMN ALL STAR GAME!
