Thoughts on a 4-3 Rangers loss

Royals

4, Rangers 3

• Another one run loss.
• That’s 25 on the season, if you’re keeping score at home.
• Texas is 17-25 in one run games this year. They are 20-13 in blowouts. If you are wondering why their record is seven games worse than what their run differential would suggest, there you go.
• One of my favorite movies of all time is The Usual Suspects. One of the scenes that sticks with me is where the crew in the movie meets up with McManus’s fence, a guy named Redfoot (who, coincidentally enough, played Zed in Pulp Fiction, one of my other all time favorite movies). At the end, Dean Keaton approaches Redfoot and tells him he shivved a former associate of Redfoot’s. When Redfoot asks if it was business or personal, Keaton says, “A bit of both.”
• When I think about what went wrong for the Rangers in this game, the hitting or the pitching, in my mind I see Gabriel Byrne’s half smirk and hear him say, “A bit of both.”
• Four runs isn’t a bad performance, per se, by the pitchers. But it was a four run performance that could have — should have, really — been much worse.
• We got the bad Jack Leiter Experience, with Leiter’s command being particularly poor and featuring an awful lot of uncompetitive pitches.
• Per Statcast, Leiter threw 34 pitches that were not in the zone. The Royals swung at only three of them. That’s a problem.
• Leiter started off the game by allowing a homer to Mike Yastrzemski on a 3-1 pitch, and followed it up with a six pitch walk to Bobby Witt Jr. He then struck out the next three batters. A very Jack Leiter inning.
• He reversed the order in the third inning, issuing a 3-2 walk to Witt to start off the inning, and then allowing a Vinnie Pasquantino homer on a 2-1 pitch to make it 3-0. Leiter ended up getting pulled with two on and two out in the fourth, after 81 pitches.
• Leiter has, of late, avoided the blowup games that bedeviled him last year. He’s allowed three or fewer runs in his last ten starts. The problem is he has only thrown 47.1 innings in those ten starts. Averaging fewer than five innings per start is not great.
• Luis Curvelo gave up a homer to Maikel Garcia to start the fifth to make it a 4-1 game. And it highlights the problem with your starter not being able to work, I’m not even going to say deep, but just a moderate way into the game, because then you are turning to Luis Curvelo in the fifth inning.
• Curvelo, Robert Garcia, Phil Maton and Caleb Boushley combined to keep the Royals off the board the rest of the way, which was helpful. It would have been more helpful if the Rangers could have scored more than three runs.
• Texas got a bunch of hits — 11 of them, in all — but did not draw any walks, and the only extra base hit was a Corey Seager double in the eighth inning that put runners on second and third with one out and the Rangers down two. One of the runners scored, the other didn’t, and that was that, as far as the Rangers’ chances went.
• Especially vexing in this game was the ending of the bottom of the second. Two singles, a fly out, and a single brought a run home and put runners on the corners with one out. Josh Smith hit a fly ball to right field. Joc Pederson was sent him on the play. He was called out. Replay seemed to show, pretty clearly, he was safe. However, New York apparently determined it was not clear cut, because the call stood, and instead of the Rangers being up 2-1 with a runner on first and two outs, the inning was over and it was a 1-1 game.
• That one run, of course, ended up being a big deal.
• Jack Leiter’s fastball hit 99.0 mph, averaging 96.8 mph. Luis Curvelo hit 96.9 mph on his sinker. Robret Garcia’s fastball touched 96.2 mph. Phil Maton touched 90.0 mph on his cutter. Caleb Boushley’s sinker maxed out at 93.0 mph.
• Corey Seager had a 106.5 mph line out, a 102.8 mph single and a 100.0 mph single. Joc Pederson had a 105.4 mph single. Josh Smith had a 103.3 mph ground out. Rowdy Tellez had a 101.1 mph single.
• Three more games in Kansas City. What happens, happens.