Welcome to the first in-season edition of “oh, great that Mike guy is at it again”.
Obviously, the Rangers’ season opener didn’t quite go as planned. A 4-1 loss to the reigning World Series championships in a frustrating game isn’t ideal, but the team did see some promising things, primarily from the bullpen.
Game 2 of the series vs. Houston went a lot better for the Rangers. Nomar Mazara broke through with the Rangers’ first home run of the 2018 season, Doug Fister confounded the Astros’ hitters, and the Rangers’ bullpen held their own in a 5-1 win.
But the game also featured a few things that were less than ideal. For one, fans were treated to about 28 replay reviews (the Rangers lost all of them). Ok, maybe it was actually like 27 replay reviews but the Rangers still lost all of them.
The other thing that no doubt angered the fanbase was the outfield wall. Yes, the outfield wall AT HOME. You’d think the wall would have the home team’s back but no, not this wall. It denied Joey Gallo a home run on a 45 degree, 116mph laser shot in the 7th inning. And for an encore, the wall also denied Shin-Soo Choo a home run in the 8th inning by a mere 0.0000000000009 millimeters (I have independently verified this measurement).
All this led me to want to investigate the wall. Something was off. Why would the home field wall keep denying the home team a chance at dingers? Why would the home field wall deny the home team fans a chance at fun? Something was off!
I worked my sources late into the night and it paid off: the wall in the outfield was born in Humble, TX, basically in Houston. Now, I’m not saying the wall was trying to cheat in favor of the Astros out of some misplaced allegiance to the geographical area where it was made, but I’m also NOT not saying that.
At the end of the day, the Rangers are at .500 with 160 games left. The offense showed up and that’s good. The pitching, particularly the bullpen (Alex Claudio is worth a billion dollars), is performing solidly, and the defense, while shaky at times and something to keep an eye on this season, did manage to turn some nice double plays. Speaking of defense, the 1-2-3 inning were Delino DeShields fielded all three outs was a nice development as the defense builds some rhythm.
By all accounts, the fans at the ballpark had a blast tonight. Winning tends to evoke that from fans.
Let’s hope the wall sees how happy the fans were and decides to play ball because if the wall had seen how angry Joey Gallo was after just missing that home run, it’d definitely think twice about denying fans a chance at fun.