Rodriguez, bats do enough as Rangers end skids, beat Padres

Eight games had passed at Globe Life Park since the Texas Rangers had seen the combination of quality offense and quality starting pitching come together over the same nine innings.

Granted, 5 1/3 innings from Wandy Rodriguez doesn’t qualify as a quality start. Six hits alone from an inconsistent lineup won’t do much for the Rangers’ offensive numbers, but they were a good offensive team.

Both performances rated as an improvement for a team that had lost eight consecutive home games and five games overall. Both performances were just enough to snap those skids in a 4-3 victory Friday over the San Diego Padres.

Rodriguez took a shutout into the sixth inning, the Rangers used their speed to manufacture two early runs, and Adrian Beltre continued to show signs of a turnaround when he followed a Prince Fielder fourth-inning homer with one of his own.

“That’s what speed can do for you. It allows you to manufacture runs,” manager Jeff Banister said. “And then a couple big boys put a couple of quick points on the board for us. And then we hung on. A really nice job by Wandy.”

The Padres nearly came back from a 4-0 deficit, scoring once in the sixth against Rodriguez and twice more in the eighth against Tanner Scheppers. They pushed the tying run to second base with one out in the ninth, but Shawn Tolleson left him there.

The win extended the Padres’ skid to six games. Rodriguez got the win, the first by a member of the rotation since Colby Lewis beat Baltimore on June 30.

The Rangers hadn’t held a lead since the final games of that Baltimore series July 2.

“They know what’s at stake, and they know where we’ve been at home,” Banister said. “Look, they want to get it right here, too.”

Delino DeShields got the offense going with a leadoff walk in the first, a steal of second base and an advancement to third on a passed ball. After Shin-Soo Choo struck out, Fielder lofted a pop fly into shallow left-center field, where third baseman Will Middlebrooks camped under the ball and caught it.

But the catch came as center fielder Melvin Upton Jr. was racing in and narrowly avoided bumping Middlebrooks, who paused in apparent relief that he wasn’t plowed over. The pause, though, gave the speedy DeShields the opening he needed to tag from third and score the game’s first run.

“If the infielder caught it I was going to go regardless,” DeShields said. “If Melvin caught it I was going to hold up because he had momentum coming to home plate. The infielder caught the ball. I thought that was kind of odd. I thought it was a great opportunity to try to score and make something happen.”

Rougned Odor started the third inning by racing to third with a triple and scored as Carlos Corporan muscled a broken-bat grounder to second base with the infield back.

The Rangers tacked on two in the fourth as Fielder opened with a 415-foot shot to right field and Beltre followed two pitches later into the left-field corner.

It was only Beltre’s seventh homer of the season and his first since coming off the disabled list June 23. He’s batting only .231 (15 for 65) since, but of late has been hitting into some tough luck.

“I think he’s doing great,” Fielder said. “Any time you have a hand injury, it’s not easy. It’s already hard enough.”

Rodriguez, who pitched his between-starts bullpen on-field to get a better feel for the Globe Life Park mound, allowed only two hits and a walk through five scoreless innings and had retired eight straight before Upton Jr. started the sixth with a homer.

Rodriguez (6-4) was gone two batters later after a walk to Yonder Alonso, but the performance rated as a significant upgrade from a rotation that had a 7.31 ERA in its past 15 games and a 13.06 ERA in the first five games of the homestand.

The victory was Rodriguez’s first at home this season.

“I feel very excited and happy,” he said. “Today I felt a lot better. I got better angle, and the ball was low in the zone.”

On the day that Neftali Feliz, the Rangers’ closer from their World Series teams, chose to be come a free agent, Tolleson remained perfect in career save opportunities with his 13th consecutive conversion.

“He doesn’t get caught up in the moment,” Banister said. “He makes good decisions. He makes good pitches. He’s got good stuff.”

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 11:19 PM with the headline "Rodriguez, bats do enough as Rangers end skids, beat Padres."