Week 6 Recap: The Rangers are .500 and a Giants Series Preview

Season record: 18-18

Week 6 record: 5-2

Series record: 6-5

After a winning week, the Texas Rangers are a half game behind the third place team in the A.L West, the Seattle Mariners. Taking a four game series from the Twins and winning the weekend series against Seattle, Texas is now at .500 heading into the seventh week of the season.

Not only did they improve their overall record, the greatly improved it at home. Now one win away from being .500 at Globe Life, their run differential is now just -6, up from -14 last week. They’re 9-8, +2 run differential on the road.

Thanks to the series win in Minnesota, Texas is now 3-0 in four game series in 2021, which is important heading into the back half of this week and next because they’ll play four games in Houston before coming home to play four against the New York Yankees.

They’re in San Francisco for a quick two game series against the second-place-in-the-National-League Giants. They’ll play a night game tonight, starting at 8:45 p.m. CDT and an afternoon game tomorrow at 2:45 p.m. CDT tomorrow before taking an off day on Wednesday.

Kyle Gibson and Alex Wood will matchup tonight. Wood is 3-0 in four starts with a 1.96 ERA and 0.78 WHIP in 23.0 innings pitched. He’s faced the Rangers twice in his career, in 2014 and 2018, and has an 0.64 ERA against them. Joey Gallo has one walk in one pinch-hitter situation against Wood and Isiah Kiner-Falefa is 1-for-3 with an RBI. However, although all small sample sizes, Charlie Culberson is .500 in six at-bats, David Dahl is .600 in five, and Khris Davis is batting 1.000 in two at-bats with a home run, against Wood.

This will only be Gibson’s second time facing the Giants in his career. In 2014, he pitched five innings and gave up five runs on five hits and struck out four.

Tuesday afternoon’s match up will be Jordan Lyles and Logan Webb.

Webb is 1-3 in seven games this season with a 5.34 ERA and 1.56 WHIP in 32.0 innings. In 2020 he faced the Rangers for the first time and gave up two runs, one earned, on four hits and four walks in 3.2 innings.

This will be Lyles’ 22nd game against the Giants in his career. He’s 4-4 with a 5.46 ERA and 1.34 WHIP in 57.2 innings pitched.

Most importantly [read with sarcasm] is both Gibson and Lyles will both have to take a couple at-bats as they’ll be playing in a National League ballpark and MLB did not keep the universal DH. Gibson has a career .211 average, has scored three runs and walked twice in his career. This will be his first time batting as a Ranger.

Lyles has a career .115 batting average, he’s walked 11 times, has 15 RBIs, and two home-runs on his hitting career.