ARLINGTON — You want accountability? We give you Jacob deGrom.
“This one is on me,” the Rangers ace said through clenched teeth on Saturday night.
Very stand-upish and all that. Second time in a week, too, that a Rangers starter stood up, verbally slashed his own wrists and took the fall for a loss. Both losses had something else in common. The Rangers scored zero runs each time. Last we checked, pitchers don’t hit anymore.
On Saturday, it was an embarrassing 11-0 loss to Houston that got out of hand late. The Astros scored eight runs in the final two innings, enough to get the heavily Houston-flavored sellout crowd of 38,332 at Globe Life Field to offer up a pretty full-throttled “Let’s go Astros.”
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Even more insulting than the chant were the consequences. The Rangers entered the day with a chance to draw closer in the AL West than they’ve been since May 18. They ended it, five games back with 19 to play. The math is getting hard to math, as the kids say.
In the wild card race, things took a sinister turn, too. Kansas City won its third straight game to move ahead of the Rangers for the stalking spot behind the final wild card holder, Seattle. The Rangers trail in that race by 1 ½ games. And they don’t hold the tiebreaker against either team.
Now, about the offense. Perhaps you’ve heard this once or — checks notes — 14 times this season, but winning, no matter how good the pitching, still takes runs. It was the 14th shutout for the offense. Only once in the last 40 years have the Rangers been shut out more often. It’s one shy of the MLB lead this season.
And it’s not like the Rangers didn’t have opportunities. They had nine of them, if you are counting runners in scoring position. Not only did they not get a hit in those nine at-bats with RISP, they didn’t even advance a runner on any of them. Over the last four games, three of them losses, they are 1 for 37 in those situations. The one hit was the walkoff winner on Friday.
“We had good opportunities,” manager Bruce Bochy lamented. “Bases loaded, one out and couldn’t cash in. First and second, nobody out. Couldn’t cash in. Nobody could cash in. [Houston starter Hunter Brown] was tough when he had to be, but you do what you have to create those chances and couldn’t get somebody to come through.”
Also: “We took some called third strikes. We were thinking some looked a little wide at times. But you do what you have to do battle and put it in play.”
About that, the Rangers took six called third strikes on Saturday. Through five innings, in which they got a runner at least as far as second every inning, they struck out six times, five of them on called third strikes. Perhaps most egregious was Ezequiel Duran, with one out and the bases loaded in a scoreless tie in the second, striking out on three pitches. The third was on a fastball in the upper middle quadrant of the strike zone. This came one pitch after he swung at and fouled off the same pitch in almost the same exact spot. Josh Smith, in a second-half spiral, popped out to end the threat.
Houston scored on a Christian Walker homer in the third. And on another homer by Yordan Alvarez in the fifth.
In the bottom of the fifth, the first two Rangers reached base, then Joc Pederson took a called strike on a sinker on the inner third after Brown had worked away from him earlier in the at-bat. The next batter, Jake Burger, bounced a ball to second for an inning-ending double play. The Rangers had one more baserunner the rest of the night.
“I think all losses are the same: They suck,” Pederson said. “We definitely had lots of opportunities. I didn’t come through. I should have at least gotten the runners over to make things a bit easier for Burger. I ended up striking out, and playoff teams can’t do that. We didn’t play good today.
“Baseball has its ups and downs. I think it’s better to lose like this. It’s easier to wash this one off, saying they had a better day than us. We didn’t blow a save or do something late when it felt like you really had a win right in your hands. I think a loss last night would have been a lot worse than this one, if that makes any sense.”
Well, it makes as much sense as anything, considering the Rangers entered the day a half-game back in the wild card race and started a lineup that, by the end of the night, included eight of the nine starters holding OPSs of .710 or lower; four of them lower than .650.
So, sorry, Jacob, you can take the blame all you want for the loss, but it can’t wash away the fact that a team that can’t score, can’t win.
Twitter:@Evan_P_Grant
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