Nick Solak’s hitting, Mike Minor not hitting a wall push Texas Rangers to victory
Wednesday is a big day at the Wilson household, as well as for others around the area, as some school districts start the new school year.
At 8 a.m. sharp, the boy and the girl will be in front of a computer ready to tackle online learning. It will be a little more advanced for the boy than at the end of the last school year, and it’s a crummy way for the girl to begin kindergarten.
But, like many other families and the all teachers, we’re going to weather this one until schools reopen.
And for the boy, it’s his eighth birthday, which kind of stinks. No, having a birthday on the first day of school really stinks.
He’ll survive.
Kind of like the Texas Rangers did Tuesday night.
Here’s some Rangers Reaction from a 4-2 victory over the Seattle Mariners.
Solak’s day
Nick Solak didn’t get the home run or the RBI on Tuesday he thought he had been gifted Sunday when Los Angeles Angels right fielder Jo Adell managed to let Solak’s flyball to the warning track hop out of his glove and over the wall.
The ruling was a four-base error, which MLB upheld after the Rangers appealed the official scorer’s decision. It took guts for the official scorer to judge it an error, but he was absolutely correct in doing so.
Solak didn’t seem remotely bothered by the appeal’s outcome.
“There’s nothing I can do at this point,” he said. “We appealed it. In all honesty, as soon as it got changed to an error, I had a gut feeling that it was going to stay an error.
“Scoring can be weird. People can argue and argue both sides of it all day long. At the end of the day, a four-base error and we won the game, it’s time to move on. I’m sure I’ll see that highlight forever. I guess it’s cool that I can say, ‘They took a homer away and I got a four-base error.’ It is what it is.”
Solak drove in the Rangers’ first three runs and collected singles in his first three at-bats, giving him multiple hits in three straight games and five of the past six.
A lineup that lacks punch needs quality hitters. Solak has been considered a bat-first player since he was drafted by the New York Yankees out of Louisville, and that’s why the Rangers went after him.
He’s living up to the billing.
“He’s been real good,” manager Chris Woodward said. “Here lately he’s been more aggressive in the strike zone, and he’s been hammering balls. What we saw last year, we knew he had power to all fields, and now we’re starting to see those balls come off hot.”
The Rangers loaded the bases with one out in the first, and Solak delivered a single up the middle to score two. They had two on with one out in the fifth when he singled sharply to left to make it 3-0.
Willie Calhoun followed with an RBI single to score Joey Gallo, who had an interesting game. He was hit in his first two plate appearances, and he walked in his final two to push his on-base percentage to .371.
Those are the kind of at-bats teams need when they aren’t hitting home runs.
“I can think of Joey’s at-bat in the first inning, how important that at-bat is in the whole scheme of the game,” Solak said. “To work his way to first base to load the bases, I come up with the bases loaded and one out rather than some other situation.”
The Rangers will take what they can get at this point.
No Minor outing
Mike Minor pitched well enough for his first win of the season. He just didn’t pitch long enough.
It was by design, though, as the Rangers held to their word of keeping his pitch count around 75. The left-hander was lifted after four scoreless innings on 76 pitches, 28 of which came in the first inning.
He had been dealing with a dead arm/arm fatigue all season, somewhere around the 75-pitch mark. His velocity would dip, and along with it so would his effectiveness.
But Minor saw the velocity on his four-seam fastball tick higher, up from 90.5 mph to a season-best 90.9, but it also had more life to it. The pitch generated five swings and misses after generating only five in his first three starts.
The best news for the Rangers is that he exited with nothing bothering him physically. He said he did not hit any kind of wall, and he wasn’t pleased to be pulled after four.
“I wasn’t happy with Woody not letting go out there for the fifth,” Minor said. “But it was better coming out tonight. We stuck with the fastball more than usual. It’s something to build off.”
The Rangers viewed the start, Minor’s fourth of the season, as the first step back toward his 2019 form. It’s not clear how many more steps are needed to rebuild his arm strength, but it will likely be a few more.
Minor hopes he will be allowed to keep pitching based on how he feels from inning to inning rather than be held to a pitch count. He’s a starter, and said three or four innings just aren’t acceptable.
“He was begging me to let him go back out for the fifth. That’s a good sign,” Woodward said. “He talked me in to letting go out for the fourth. He said he felt fine.”
Angst still growing
No Rangers player makes Rangers fans Twitter scream more than Rougned Odor, whose continued struggles have now spilled over into my email inbox.
The feedback on Twitter comes with any mention, and sometimes with no mention at all. The emails have started coming in-game as well.
The basic message — and I’m paraphrasing here — is to get him the heck out of the lineup. That usually takes the form of benching him, designating him for assignment or trading him, as if some other team wants him and that contract.
Odor had a hand in stopping Rangers rallies in the first and third innings, as he grounded out to end the first and popped out for the second out in the third against Mariners lefty Marco Gonzalez.
The Rangers were threatening in the fifth with runners at first and second and two outs, and Odor tapped one back to Gonzalez. Odor struck out in his last at-bat, and the 0-for-4 night dropped his average to .116.
Elvis Andrus is struggling, too, with his average down to .164 after an 0-for-4.
“They’re grinding. It’s not like they’re not trying,” Woodward said. “The at-bat quality, they didn’t give in. Sometimes things don’t go your way as a hitter. I’ve been there.”
If there’s any good to take from those three empty Odor at-bats with runners in scoring position, it’s that he took Gonzalez to a full count in the third and fifth. He fought off some good pitches to extend the at-bats, but then missed fastballs he should put in play.
But that’s nothing compared to the damage he did, or didn’t do. Rather than extending the Rangers’ leads, the game remained relatively close. Failing to bury the Mariners early helped breathe life into them.
Though they would never admit it, some the Rangers probably feel a bit of life sucked out of them when Odor bats in key situations.
“He wanted to get the job done,” Woodward said. “You could tell he was upset when he didn’t come through in those moments.”
