What A Pleasant Surprise

It had to wait until 16 games into the season, but the Texas Rangers finally have a winning streak. Sure, it’s just three games. But when you consider the Rangers are putting out a daily starting line-up with no Adrian Beltre; guys at the bottom of the order like Donnie Murphy, Josh Wilson and J.P. Arencibia; a slow-starting Prince Fielder sitting at .164 with just one home run and 4 RBI; a pitching staff that started the season with ZERO pitchers who had started for the Rangers the year before; a catching tandem hitting a COMBINED .113 on the season; and a surprisingly porous defense sitting at the bottom of the league with more errors than anyone, then sitting at 2 games over .500 16 games in is really a miracle.

Yu Darvish is the ace of the staff. When he starts, the Rangers are 3-0. What’s unusual about that 3-0 is not that Darvish himself is only 1-0. What’s unusual is Darvish has thrown 22 innings and has yet to take the mound with a run on the Rangers ledger. The only game in which he got credited with the win, Texas scored in the bottom of the 7th and a new pitcher came on in the top of the 8th. A 1-0 record in three games with what is literally ZERO run support.

If you had told ANY Rangers fan that 16 games into the season the most valuable player on the team would be Kevin Kouzmanoff, you either would have gotten laughed out of the room or asked how much money you were willing to bet on it. Yet here’s Kouzmanoff, not even on the team for the first seven games, hitting .414 with five doubles, a home run and six RBI since replacing the injured Adrian Beltre in the line-up 9 games ago.

The Rangers are averaging less than four runs per game and have gotten outscored by five runs thus far, yet they have four walk-off wins and lead the league in shutouts with four. Prince Fielder is only hitting a buck-64, yet he leads the league with six intentional walks. According to Baseball Reference, Texas should have been 6-9 entering the finale of the Seattle series instead of 8-7.

It’s still at least a week before Adrian Beltre is back on the field. Matt Harrison wants to return to Texas by April 24th but is likely out at least a week longer than that, despite the poor performance by Tanner Scheppers in Thursday’s outing. Jurickson Profar and Geovany Soto are still at least six weeks away and Derek Holland maybe ten weeks. The spare parts currently outperforming their expectations have to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. They may not sustain their current production.

For now, though, I plan on savoring what they’ve accomplished so far.

 

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