HOUSTON — Already bruised and bloodied from four months of lethargic offense, the Rangers wobbled into a make-or-break series with both their biggest rival and the team they are chasing and lost the first bout in the worst way possible: Via decision.
Actually, decisions.
As much as anything, decisions decided the series opener, a 6-3 Houston win. Decisions about the roster. Decisions on the lineup. Decisions on the basepaths. Players are supposed to decide games. There is currently nobody on the roster that goes by the last name of “Decision.”
Put it this way, after the loss, there were so many questions about decisions, manager Bruce Bochy had to interrupt one.
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“I consider a lot of things,” he said before allowing the question to continue just so you know how that went.
The loss dropped the Rangers three games behind Houston for the final wild card spot with 11 to play. It also dropped the Rangers into a tie with Cleveland, which did not play, for the stalking spot (the first team out).
To be clear, there were plenty of player failures that made decisions play a bigger role. The Nos. 3-5 hitters in the lineup went 0 for 12. The Rangers allowed two first inning runs partly because of a walk and a throwing error by Jack Leiter. They allowed two in the fifth because they couldn’t complete a double play.
All that said, it set the stage for a ton of decisions to at least raise questions. Bochy decided to go with a lineup without his hottest bat (Michael Helman) for the second straight day and stuck with Adolis García, now 0-for-8 since returning from the IL. The Rangers decided to go with an extremely short bullpen, down three arms for workload rest and one (Chris Martin) to an injection to combat an irritated nerve, with a rookie starter on the mound.
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Bochy decided not to pinch run for his extremely slow catcher, repping the tying run, in the seventh and instead ran for his extremely slow pinch hitter at first, who repped the go-ahead run. Third base coach Tony Beasley decided with two outs he needed to push the issue and instead sent Jonah Heim into a ring of Hellfire at home plate for the final out of the inning. And Bochy decided to try to squeeze a little more out of starter Jack Leiter by having him start the seventh for only the third time this season. You could see this whole game was lost to the seventh inning stretch … of decisions.
Perhaps the most egregious of those decisions was Beasley’s call to send Heim home on Wyatt Langford’s two-out single to left field. Left field is shallow at Daikin Park and can cause some tough calls. But Heim had little chance if Jesús Sánchez fielded the ball cleanly and made an accurate throw home. As it turns out, catcher Yainer Diaz had to wait for Heim’s slide.
“I don’t know if anybody would have scored on that ball,” Bochy said. “I don’t want to second-guess. He had the read and he made the call. He’s been aggressive. And give them credit for making the play.”
Beasley made the decision partly because Joc Pederson, a left-handed hitter was on deck as the next hitter to face a left-handed reliever. In his previous at-bat against a lefty, Pederson had a feeble swing on a strikeout. He figured he had no great options, and his scouting report suggested some tendency for Sánchez to spray throws.
“It was not a perfect scenario,” Beasley said. “If it’s a normal situation, I’m not sending the runner, but I figured with two outs, tying run, let’s take a shot. It didn’t work out. I stand by that.”
All made in a split second. And then in another split-second, he saw Sánchez field the ball cleanly and release it home and had another thought.
“Lord, help me,” Beasley said.
What Beasley didn’t know at the moment: Though Pederson had hit against a lefty earlier when the Rangers had a brief 3-2 lead, Bochy had planned to hit Kyle Higashioka for him had the inning continued.
In the bottom of the seventh, down a run, Bochy turned to Leiter, already at 90 pitches, to start the inning. By the time he’d allowed three straight two-out hits and was removed from the game, he’d run his pitch count to a professional-high 102. By that time, Houston had a 6-3 lead.
“It wasn’t our cleanest game,” said Bochy, whose team made two errors and is 1-9 when making more than one error. “A couple of errors really cost us today. We had some chances to break it open and didn’t.”
And because of it, decisions became a factor.
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