Game 122: Three Up, Three Down.

The team that the Rangers vanquished to reach the 2023 mountaintop might have just ended their 2025.

Aug 13, 2025

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

Gutted.

Every one of Arizona’s six runs scored with two outs. And not only that — all six scored after the Rangers retired the first two batters of the inning.

The .500 Rangers have the most last-at-bat losses in baseball this year — 21 — and it’s not close.

No paywall on this one. I don’t have the strength to click the button.

Three Up, Three Down from Arizona 6, Texas 4.

Up First.

Merrill Kelly was solid against his old team, and opposite Zac Gallen, who remains one career Diamondback victory short of his good friend and former teammate. Kelly deserved what would have been his first Rangers win.

Six innings, two runs on seven hits and a walk, five strikeouts (including four the first time through the Arizona order), and he left with a lead thanks to right fielder Ezequiel Duran cutting a run down at the plate from right field — a peg that Duran literally threw harder (94.5 mph) than Kelly’s fastest pitch of the day (93.5 mph) — to end the fifth.

I was prepared an hour ago to write a whole lot more about Kelly here. Just don’t have the lifeforce anymore to do it.

He was very good today.

Up Second.

I had a lot I wanted to say about Evan Carter, too. You can scroll down to the third Down for what I planned to write about up here.

This team is so much better when Carter is in the lineup.

Even though “so much better” isn’t always enough.

Up Third.

Great to have Jake Burger back. He was instrumental today.

The first baseman broke a 1-1 tie by blasting a two-run bomb in the fourth (following a Carter hustle double), sending a middle-middle fastball 434 feet (tying Corey Seager for the team’s longest shot at home this season) at 110.5 mph and a picturesque 25 degrees (see yesterday’s gamer for a very long discussion about the significance of that kind of number) into the back of the visitors’ bullpen.

Burger came into the game 1 for 3 in his career off Gallen, with a home run. Might help explain why he got the first base assignment today even though Rowdy Tellez is the one who hits from the left side.

He’s now 2 for 5 lifetime, with two homers.

Then, with two out and nobody on in the eighth, and the team up 3-2 and three outs from winning the game and the series, Burger got new life after first baseman Tyler Locklear overran a foul pop-up — and he then drove an elevated 2-2 cutter the other way for an inning-extending single . . . after which Josh Jung did some beautiful damage on a first-pitch cutter up, rifling it the opposite way himself, a line drive to right center that Burger (clearly turned loose after babying the hamstring a bit his first couple days back off the injured list) scored from first without a throw to give the team a seemingly much more comfortable two-run lead going to the ninth.

It felt big.

Alas.

One Down.

I don’t even know the right thing to say here. It’s not about Phil Maton, who was a great and relatively inexpensive addition and who struck out the first three batters he faced today, needing to get four outs. But he then unbelievably and out of nowhere — don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this — lost absolutely all feel for his pitches:

Eight-hole hitter and career backup catcher James McCann blasts a 2-0 homer on a center-cut sweeper to cut the Texas lead to 4-3
Nine-hole hitter and 4-A callup Blaze Alexander wears a 1-1 curve in the upper back
Geraldo Perdomo walks on four pitches, none close to the zone
Ketel Marte does the inevitable, driving a meaty 1-1 curve 413 feet over a fence whose distance from the plate starts with a “3”

Ballgame, basically.

Season?

I’ve been working on a story for this week on that subject, so I will reserve the rest of my immediate thoughts for that.

They’re crystallizing quickly.

Two Down.

Before the ninth, there really wasn’t a ton to complain about.

I don’t love Kelly’s now-demonstrated habit of throwing over twice. It didn’t result in a balk today, but it did lead to a predictably bad result.

After two straight strikeouts to start the third inning, Kelly issued a four-pitch walk to the leadoff hitter Perdomo (who, after this series, I am now anointing as baseball’s most under-appreciated player). Up was the dangerous Marte (who, for me, claimed the “most under-appreciated” title before this). Kelly wheeled twice with pickoff attempts.

The chances of getting the runner out there is extremely slim.

The chances of something bad happening have to be meaningfully higher, because after two disengagements you’re basically inviting an accomplished basestealer — Perdomo was 18 of 22 this year, and 52 of 63 lifetime — to move out to a bigger lead and take off from it. With Marte up, that seemed like a dangerous risk, and you stepped right into it.

And, because of course, something bad happened.

Perdomo broke on the next pitch, stealing second fairly easily (Kelly doesn’t slide-step, or at least didn’t there) despite a perfect throw from Jonah Heim. And then Marte singled him home on a liner to left, tying the game at 1-1.

Maybe Perdomo steals second even if Kelly threw over once, or never at all. But throwing over twice made it a virtual certainty. It didn’t need to be. The upside of two pickoff attempts just didn’t justify the much more foreseeable downside.

Three Down.

Two lineup concerns — and I know there aren’t ready-made solutions on these, because you can’t bat everyone eighth.

First, Carter needs to be leading off. The quality of his at-bats are consistently the team’s best. He works counts, he draws walks, he has extra-base juice, he runs. In Josh Smith’s last 14 games, he has a meager .485 OPS (hitting .188/.235/.250 with lots of bad contact, straight up or straight down), has drawn three walks, and has attempted to steal zero bases.

Second, I doubt this will happen, all things considered, but it sure would be nice to break up Seager and Marcus Semien. Seager is Seager, and though Semien’s numbers have cooled off, he’s still hitting into lots of triple-digit outs lately. The contact hasn’t been bad.

But when the duo hits into two outs on two pitches, that can be really tough on your starting pitcher depending on what happens right before Seager or right behind Semien. Fortunately, it didn’t really seem to affect Kelly when, after he’d needed 28 pitches to get out of the third, Seager and Semien were retired on a combined three pitches and Joc Pederson flew out on two more in the bottom of the frame.

Seager and Semien are going to be first-pitch hunters, and that’s fine. It’s just tough when they’re doing it back to back.