ARLINGTON, Texas – The Rangers will be beat often enough this year. Despite their offseason investment, they are still short of much of the American League when the game comes down to talent vs. talent. That is known and accepted.
It’s one thing to get beat; another thing entirely to lose.
In Round 2 against Houston Tuesday, the Rangers certainly teetered on the latter in a 5-1 loss. Not that a ton of people noticed. The paid crowd at Globe Life Field was 16,469, the smallest ever in Arlington to watch a game between the teams to which tickets were sold. It beat the previous record, which lasted, let’s see here, 24 hours: 17,420 showed up on Monday. The ol’ Silver Boot doesn’t quite draw them in the way it used to.
About giving away the game, we only say “teetered,” because it is hard to win when you get one hit, which is what the Rangers had for most of the night. Adolis García, who tortures the Astros the way Kyle Seager did the Rangers, hit a bases empty homer in the second. Their second hit was a seventh-inning dribbler off the bat of Corey Seager against a shifted infield.
It came a half inning after García misread Yordan Alvarez’s liner, which became a double and eventually Houston’s first run. García may not have been able to haul in the 103 mph scorcher, but nor did he give himself a chance. Alvarez went to third on a wild pitch and scored on a two-out, two-strike single by Jeremy Peña.
The Astros retook the lead on a ground ball originally ruled a double play, but, on review, was overturned. Then they expanded it when Taylor Hearn left a 2-0 sinker smack dab in the middle of the hitting zone to Kyle Tucker. Tucker hit it 426 feet to right field.
The Astros essentially put the game away in the sixth. Reliever Albert Abreu walked the first two batters he faced, which is problematic. After Corey Seager charged a grounder to get the first out, the runners moved up. And then, against a drawn-in infield, the Rangers made a rather curious choice to pitch to Tucker with a base open.
Only to have it work out for them.
And then against them.
With three infielders on the right side, Tucker grounded sharply to first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, he fielded it, took a quick step and fired home, but his throw was offline allowing the Astros’ fifth run to score.
They were unforced errors in virtually every phase of the game that either contributed to or led directly to Houston runs. This has been the biggest “disappointment” to the Rangers’ slow start. They knew the early part of the schedule was rough. They knew they were a bunch that had to learn each other on the fly. They knew there were shortcomings on a roster that is still in the growth stage. They will come up short on the talent side often enough. They can’t afford to exacerbate the issue with mistakes.
Had the Rangers won on Tuesday, they would have tied a struggling Houston team, which doesn’t sound like much 17 games into the season. Then again, the Rangers are a team trying to build momentum. They had won four of their last five entering Tuesday, including the series opener with the Astros. It would have given them two chances to put away a four-game series against the defending AL champs, essentially making this homestand against World Series opponents a relative success even before the Braves come to town for the weekend.
Alas, they are not there yet.
Before they can learn how to win, they must learn how not to lose.
