+1.
David Price, with his insanely strange career mark against the Rangers (3-5, 5.52 in 13 regular season games, plus 1-6, 5.48 in six playoff starts and one relief appearance), by far his lifetime nemesis among teams he’s faced more than a couple times, served up a Shin-Soo Choo home run on his second pitch of the game, followed by an Ian Desmond line drive single and an Adrian Beltre line drive single and a (cleanup-hitting) Ryan Rua line drive single and, after a Prince Fielder double-play ground ball, an Elvis Andrus ground ball single that plated Beltre and Rua and gave Texas an early 3-0 lead.
Nick Martinez, who had held Boston off the scoreboard in the top of the first in what was just his second Rangers start of the season, threw a scoreless second and a scoreless third, and in the meantime his teammates pushed across another run in the second frame and two more in the third, ending Price’s night before a Friday night sellout crowd after just 2.1 innings, the shortest outing of the season for the five-time All-Star or for anyone else facing Texas this year.
The Red Sox (Hanley Ramirez) and Rangers (Fielder) traded home runs in the fourth, though Boston’s came with a runner on base. It was Texas 7, Boston 2, heading to the fifth.
Same score going into the sixth, when Jackie Bradley Jr.’s two-run shot tightened things a bit.
That 7-4 margin held up through the seventh, when both teams were retired in order neatly (four of six hitters on strikes), and in the eighth, when once again both clubs went three-up, three-down.
And then came the ninth inning, an outlier of epic proportions.
Jake Diekman (walk-strikeout-popout) surrendered a two-out, run-scoring double to pinch-hitting 4A catcher Sandy Leon, on the 11th pitch of the at-bat, Diekman’s 29th of the inning. Texas 7, Boston 5, one out to go, Matt Bush on for Diekman.
Mookie Betts home run. Tie game.
Dustin Pedroia walk.
Xander Bogaerts ground ball single, Pedroia to third.
Wild pitch. Boston 8, Texas 7.
David Ortiz flyout.
Koji Uehara on for the bottom of the ninth. (The great Koji Uehara, who, for me, occupies a very lightly populated category, along with Mike Napoli.)
Fielder strikes out swinging.
Elvis Andrus strikes out swinging.
Rougned Odor strikes out swinging.
Boston 8, Texas 7 (F).
F.
It was a brutal game to lose, in its self-contained context, but in the larger scheme all it did was drop the Rangers from a season-high 10-game division lead to nine.
I don’t mean to harsh your mellow this morning. I really don’t. In fact, to make up for it momentarily, here’s a really good hi-def clip of Jonathan Lucroy doing exceptionally bad things to his own batting helmet after Odor ended Tuesday night’s baseball game by doing exceptionally bad things to 98 from Edwin Diaz with one majestic swing.
And I’ll try making your morning even a little better by suggesting to you that the best news about Texas including 21-year-old lefthander Yohander Mendez yesterday in its initial set of moves to expand the active big league roster in September is that, as a result, we now know he’s not the player to be named later in the Lucroy deal with the Brewers.
No, the reason I dug up one ugly inning from more than two months ago was that, on June 24, Texas lost a junk-kick to Boston, 8-7, and there’s something insanely remarkable about that game.
It’s the only one-run game at Globe Life Park the Rangers have lost in 2016.
They’ve won 18 of those.
Now, that’s completely unsustainable (says Hugh).
That’s right. And that’s OK.
Because it doesn’t need to be sustainable with the cushion it’s helped the team build as September play gets underway.
Past is prologue but it’s not always statistically reliable. Rosters change.
Maybe the Rangers will play four more one-run games over these last 15 at home that we now know about and maybe they’ll lose three of them.
OK.
But for now, they’re 18-1 in that discrete split, helping lead to 80-54 (a 96.7-win pace), the best September-entering record in franchise history.
None of which matters nearly as much as the effort to establish the best October(/November) record in franchise history.
Or, in the meantime, the effort to stack the odds that most of those games will be played at home, where this team, with its really weird run differential, has proven to be insanely successful in one particular type of game that, while it does little to boost that run-diff number, does a whole lot to boost confidence that the club is equipped to win the most intense battles this game has to offer, perhaps a whole lot more often than not.