Rangers 6, Angels 4
Rangers 6, Angels 4
- A late inning rally to turn a loss into a win. We like those!
- Jack Leiter had, one might say, an outing where he looked better than the box score might indicate. Or at least the end result of three runs in five innings of work.
- Leiter hung a slider to Taylor Ward that Ward deposited in the bleachers to start the game. He hit Zach Neto next, and Neto stole a base, advanced on a wild pitch, then scored on a sac fly.
- So two runs in right away. Not ideal.
- Of the next seventeen batters after the Neto HBP faced by Leiter, however, only two reached — one via a walk and one via a single. He didn’t give up a lot of hard contact, and was in control.
- Start of the sixth Leiter issued a walk and got the hook, and that runner ended up scoring on an Andrew Chafin wild pitch on a ball four that was so wild he made it in from second. Wacky stuff, that.
- But Leiter pitched well overall. Perhaps most impressively, he generated a whopping 20 swinging strikes out of 82 pitches, 12 of them coming on his fastball. This was his best outing in the majors.
- Andrew Chafin, as noted above, allowed the run he inherited from Leiter to score, as well as one of his own, and that gave Anaheim a 4-2 lead that, well, I didn’t think the Rangers would overcome. The two runs already on the board came on an Ezequiel Duran double, and one was unearned because Wyatt Langford had reached on an Anthony Rendon error. Scratching across three more runs? It seemed well nigh impossible.
- And yet they did, with two outs in the seventh, going walk-walk-single-stolen base-single, getting three runs home, with Marcus Semien and Josh Smith being responsible for the hits.
- And doubles by Josh Jung and Wyatt Langford an inning later gave the Rangers an insurance run. It was a six run explosion, a runucopia, a runapalooza.
- Jack Leiter’s fastball topped out at 98.5 mph. Andrew Chafin’s sinker touched 92.2 mph. Matt Festa reached 92.5 mph with his fastball. Jose Leclerc threw a sinker that hit 96.5 mph. David Robertson’s cutter got up to 94.4 mpg. Kirby Yates’ fastball reached 94.2 mph.
- Nathaniel Lowe had a 108.2 mph groundout. Ezequiel Duran had a 106.7 mph double. Josh Jung had a 106.6 mph double. Josh Smith had a 104.3 mph single and a 101.6 mph doubles. Wyatt Langford had a 103.2 mph ground out. Jonah Heim had a 102.3 mph line out.
- Now to build on this win and win a few in a rows.