Game 105: Three Up, Three Down.

That's one way to take offense to getting hit in the head.

(Photo by Gunnar Word/Texas Rangers/Getty Images)

There were a handful of heroes tonight, none of whom — in a massive plot twist — pitch.

My streak of saying this probably rivals Corey Seager’s on-base streak:

This team is playing winning baseball right now.

Three Up, Three Down from Texas 6, Atlanta 5 (F/10).

Up First.

It was pretty flippin’ scary, seeing a 94.6-mph Grant Holmes riding fastball blow Marcus Semien’s helmet off his head.

As Semien crumpled to the ground, he immediately shot his hand to his left eye. Scary. The game was halted for several minutes, as Matt Lucero and Bruce Bochy stood over Semien and talked to him to make sure he was OK, physically and neurologically.

Semien is about the last player on the team you’d expect to be chased from the game — Michael Young may be the last Ranger you could say that about with as much confidence — but head trauma is no joke. But Bochy said after the game that you can’t take Semien out, as hard-headed as he is (said unironically).

Semien looked upset, of course; Holmes looked shaken. His six pitches to Adolis Garcia once play resumed were outside, one wildly so, and Semien came around to score at the end of that at-bat (which we’ll discuss in a bit).

In his next at-bat, in the fourth — on what would be Holmes’s final pitch — Semien lined a base-loaded, full-count, low-and-away cutter, ironically off of Holmes himself, careening off the back of the pitcher’s shoulder and near his face right to second baseman Ozzie Albies, who threw Semien out, after which Semien slammed his helmet to the ground with more velocity than the Holmes pitch or the Albies toss to first. He was pissed.

Semien later popped out to end the seventh, at which point he was 0 for 3.

The entire Rangers offense was shut down, as a matter of fact, after the third inning, until getting the game tied with a run in the ninth, and it set things up for Semien in the 10th. With Josh Smith on second as the zombie runner and the game tied, Seager was perfunctorily put on first.

That probably pissed Semien off even more. Obvious baseball move or not, great players can manufacture extra edge when they need to. The way tonight had gone for Semien, though, he hardly needed the added motivation.

Swing mode: an Enyel De Los Santos four-seamer right over the plate, and Semien swung through it.

De Los Santos surprisingly came back with the same pitch in the same location, and Semien didn’t miss that one.

Shot up the middle again, but this time not right at the pitcher: 102.7 mph on the ground, and backup shortstop Luke Williams couldn’t reach it. Smith scored without a throw, and made a quick left turn toward first base.

Semien once again shot his hands to his face, but this time to shield himself from the bottled water showers and the dugout-emptying scrum around him.

Awesome. That’s a dude.

Or, as Shawn Armstrong more appropriately put it after the game: Marcus Semien is a Dawg.

Up Second.

I want to shine a light on three other players — each of whom has been beleaguered at one point or another this year — but who all came up big tonight both at the plate and on defense.

Start with Adolis Garcia. The first half of his game tonight was brilliant.

His first time up, leading off the second, he did something I can’t ever remember him doing in his six seasons as a Ranger: he took six pitches. Four of them were pitches he routinely offers at (and even the other two, from time to time, fool him). But he spit on all six Holmes offerings, and took his free 90. He then got a good jump on the ninth pitch of Evan Carter’s at-bat, a triple into the corner, motoring around the bases and narrowly sliding ahead of the 9-3-2 throw to the plate to cut the Braves’ lead to 2-1.

Garcia’s next at-bat, an inning later, broke what was then a 2-2 tie. After Seager hit a one-out single and Semien was drilled in the helmet, Garcia took Holmes’s first three pitches, the third of which eluded catcher Drake Baldwin and allowed both runners to advance. Garcia then fouled off a 3-0 pitch (that would have been ball four) and took a second strike that nicked the zone, but he shortened up beautifully on the 3-2 pitch, a well-placed slider just beneath and just outside the zone, poking it to center at a mere 75.3 mph for a two-run single.

The reason Garcia untied the game right there was his doing, in more ways than one. Atlanta would have had three runs by that point if not for his prowess in right field.

In the first inning, Kumar Rocker was on the ropes. There were two outs and the game remained scoreless, but the bases were loaded and he’d thrown 16 balls and 12 strikes. His 29th pitch of the frame was a first-pitch cutter well beneath the zone that Albies reached down and got, shooting it into right field on the ground, to Garcia’s left.

Jurickson Profar trotted home and Matt Olson was sent behind him — and for the first of two times tonight, failed to score. The second time, in the 10th, was due to Olson’s own indecision. The first time, on Garcia’s one-hop missile to the plate, took a replay challenge to end the inning.

I’d love to know the velocity on Garcia’s throw to the plate. Artistry.

It was a great tag by Jonah Heim, who had to backhand the ball and bring it across his body, managing to clip Olson’s leg to record the Secaucus-aided out.

It took a while for Heim’s offensive contribution tonight, but it was pivotal. In the ninth, with Raisel Iglesias two outs from securing a 5-4 win for the Braves, Heim doubled in Sam Haggerty, who had entered to run after Josh Jung walked and promptly stole second base. Heim had been hitting .174 in his last 160 plate appearances, but the game-tying hit was obviously massive, reminiscent of a bunch of hero moments the 30-year-old had in 2023.

Now, let’s talk about Jung. That walk was huge, and capped off a fantastic night for the third baseman — who has now reached base 10 times in 17 plate appearances since being recalled from Triple-A.

In the second inning, after Carter’s run-scoring triple with no outs, Wyatt Langford rolled over softly to third on an outside cutter and Rowdy Tellez struck out. It felt like the Rangers were doomed to strand another run that they absolutely should have gotten in — until Jung stayed on a 1-1 slider down and smoked it to left to tie the game.

His next time up, in the fourth, Jung followed a Tellez single by jumping on a first-pitch cutter in the zone and lining it to center for another single. He was stranded later in the inning on the Semien comebacker off of Holmes.

Maybe Jung’s biggest contribution of the night was in the next half-inning, when Jacob Latz had created a one-out, bases-loaded mess — but when Albies rapped a 91.2-mph skimmer down the third base line, Jung smartly backhanded it and, in stride, stepped on third and fired on the run to first, perfectly hitting Tellez in the numbers for an inning-ending, Braves-soul-crushing double play.

Jung hammered a Dane Dunning cutter to center on a 102.9-mph line in the sixth, but it was right in Michael Harris II’s tracks.

Then he battled Iglesias for the eight-pitch walk in the ninth, refusing to swing at one, if not two, balls that he normally swings through. Haggerty pinch-ran for him, and Heim delivered.

Big night on both sides of the ball for Garcia, Heim, and Jung.

Up Third.

It was an interesting, up-and-down night for the Rangers’ pitchers. Rocker (more on him shortly) battled his command all night and was chased after four — but did well to limit Atlanta to three runs in that time.

Latz also had trouble locating, walking the first batter he faced (just as Rocker had) and another batter later in the inning, each on 3-2. But he managed to get Albies to hit a ball on the ground on an elevated changeup, and Jung did the rest.

Jon Gray’s stuff was electric, but Harris — the second batter he faced — got him on a poorly located 2-0 slider for a home run that tied the game in the sixth, 4-4. Gray, however, settled down in a big way after that, retiring the next eight Braves, including three straight on infield pop-ups at one point and three straight on strikes to finish his night.

Armstrong took over for Gray in the ninth, and immediately left a 1-2 cutter up that Harris, a single short of a cycle, shot to left just under Langford’s slide for a triple. Armstrong then probably got more plate than he wanted on an 0-2 sweeper to pinch-hitter Sean Murphy, who flew out deep to left, bringing Harris in to give Atlanta its second lead of the night. But Armstrong ended the inning quietly after that and — with Bochy and Mike Maddux already determining that he would not pitch again tomorrow afternoon — came back out for the 10th after Heim had tied things in the bottom of the ninth, even though he’d thrown 18 pitches in the ninth.

Ronald Acuna Jr. finished off a seven-pitch battle that ended in a very deep fly to left that Langford caught, but the zombie runner Olson was able to easily move up to third. There was one out.

Armstrong then got ahead of Baldwin, 0-2, and jammed him with an inside sinker that Baldwin pounded into the ground to first. With Tellez playing in, Olson held his ground — and hesitated when Tellez fumbled the ball, not taking off for the plate as Tellez gathered the baseball and tagged Baldwin out.

With two outs, it took another seven pitches, but Armstrong ultimately punched Austin Riley out to end the threat and drop the Braves to a 3-for-14 night with runners in scoring position (after a 1-for-10 on Friday) — and set up Semien’s heroics.

This wasn’t the normal crisp effort on the mound for Texas, and on the rare occasions the staff hasn’t been sharp, those have typically ended in losses.

Not tonight.

One Down.

Rocker pitched at home like it was road game. Coming into the game with a 3-0, 1.84 mark at Globe Life Field in 2025, with an insanely great opposing OPS of .461, the rookie needed 29 pitches to get through a very sloppy first — a mound visit six pitches into the game is not a great sign —and another 20 in the second, when he again demonstrated a complete lack of attention to keeping runners close.

The third was better, but the fourth was not — leadoff walk (right after the Rangers had broken a tie game with a two-spot), steal, groundout, run-scoring ground-rule double, strikeout, flyout. It took 28 pitches.

When you throw 95 pitches, you hope to get through two-thirds of the game. Rocker didn’t even complete half of it. Five hits and three walks in four innings — but again, only three runs. It could have been much worse.

Two Down.

Josh Smith is really fighting it right now. He’s swinging early and often, and pounding a lot of balls directly into the ground.

I have a lot of trust in that guy, and expect he’ll break out of it soon and probably in a big way. But he’s in a 3-for-26 right now, and isn’t exactly hitting into hard luck.

Three Down.

This was a grind-it-out win, much needed, and I don’t have a lot more to pick at.

We’ll end with this — I guess?

Due Up.

Another series is won, a fourth straight for the first time in 2025. But things are teed up for more.

Jack Leiter vs. Bryce Elder.

A chance for another sweep. I’m greedy.