Thoughts on an 11-3 Rangers win

Rangers 11, ChiSox 3

• Blowout wins are fun.
• Yovani Gallardo had a surprisingly good start today, albeit against the Chicago White Sox, who haven’t been good this year. Gallardo retired the first ten batters of the game, gave up a triple, then retired the next ten batters he faced. He actually made it into the eighth inning, retiring a batter to give himself a 7.1 IP line, walking just one and striking out 7. The two runners he allowed in the 8th both scored, so he got dinged for three runs in all, but by that point the lead was so big it didn’t really matter. Very nice work from Gallardo.
• The Sox had Matt Davidson, a position player, pitch the bottom of the eighth. The Rangers brought in Matt Moore to pitch the top of the ninth. It seems like kind of a bad thing to be the guy your team asks to go out there and pitch after the other side has used a player to pitch.
• The Rangers blew the game open in the 2nd with three home runs — a solo shot by Rougned Odor, and three run blasts by Robinson Chirinos and Nomar Mazara — totaling seven runs. Texas scored three more in the third with home runs by Joey Gallo and Shin-Soo Choo. The Mazara, Gallo and Choo blasts were all over 440 feet. The Rangers were teeing off early on today.
• The final Ranger run of the game came in the sixth. Nomar Mazara laced a ball to left that outfielder Charlie Tilson dove for, but missed, and it rolled to the wall. Mazara, nursing a bad hamstring, jogged to second, looking kind of like Adrian Beltre in his overall gimpiness, and while he could have maybe gotten to third if he had run hard, in a 9 run game with a bad hammy you don’t want him running hard. Mazara scored when, with two out, Jurickson Profar lifted a routine fly ball to left field, which Tilson got under...and then just missed, with the ball bouncing off his glove. Tilson, however, thought he caught it, and started jogging in before realizing the ball wasn’t in his glove. Bizarre.
• Every Ranger hitter who started except AdrIan Beltre got a hit tonight, which is good. But the Beltre part, but the other eight guys part.
• Texas is now back to nine games under .500. That’s not good, but given the awful start the Rangers got off to, it could be much worse.