A lonestar in california

All of a sudden, the Texas Rangers are the comeback kids. Make it two nights in a row now that they’ve come back from a 5-1 deficit, and this time they did it in thunderous fashion, with a 7 run 7th inning, highlighted by David Murphy’s first career grand slam, stunning the Royals and sending the Rangers to an 11-5 victory.

Early on, it things almost looked the same as Tuesday night’s game: Kansas City pulled ahead early in the game, taking advantage of a somewhat erratic Vicente Padilla, who allowed 5 runs (4 earned) on 7 hits, 3 walks and two HBP’s in his 6 innings of work. For the second game in a row, KC”s starter, this time right-hander Kyle Davies, held the Rangers to just one run for the first 6 innings, although the Rangers helped him out a bit by hitting into 3 double plays in the first 5 innings.

Davies, who now has allowed just one run in all three of his starts this season for Kansas City, left at 109 pitches after 6 innings. That was when the Royals decided to bring in rookie Jeff Fulchino, for just his third big league appearance, and second this season. That was the beginning of their undoing.

Ramon Vazquez hammered a leadoff triple to greet Fulchino, and then Royals shortstop Mike Aviles made a throwing error on Ian Kinsler’s ground ball, throwing it in the dirt where it skipped by Mark Teahen and into the photo well. That scored Vazquez and sent Kinsler to second. Fulchino walked Michael Young to make it first and second before he was finally lifted for lefty Jimmy Gobble to pitch to Josh Hamilton. Unfortunately for the Royals, Gobble didn’t have it, either.

Hamilton, who went 3-6 to break out of his recent slump, knocked an RBI single up the middle to make it 5-3, and Gobble then walked Milton Bradley to load the bases with nobody out for David Murphy. Gobble missed with the first two pitches, and then tried to throw a get-me-over 89 MPH fastball to the Murph, who turned on it and jacked it to right for his first career grand salami. 7-5 Rangers. Later, Murphy would reveal exactly how bad a mistake Gobble’s pitch was:

“I was fortunate enough to get into a 2-0 count,” Murphy said, “and bases loaded 2-0, I’m pretty much looking dead-red fastball. That’s what I got right where I wanted it.”

The Rangers picked up another run off Gobble before Yasuhiko Yabuta was brought in to finally get three outs. Jamey Wright and Eddie Guaradado pitches scoreless 7th and 8th innings to keep the score at 8-5, and the Rangers tacked on 3 more in the top of the 9th off Brett Tomko, including a second home run by David Murphy that gave him a career-high 5 RBI. Frank Francisco pitched a sharp bottom of the 9th, throwing 14 of his 18 pitches for strikes to polish off the Royals, and the Rangers pulled back above .500 a 34-33.

About the only downside of this win was that Michael Young’s hitting streak was snapped at 23 games, as he went 0-5 with a walk – other than that, the Rangers pounded out 16 hits all total, and four guys (Kinsler, Hamilton, Murphy and Byrd) all registered 3 hit games in another excellent display of resiliency.

After the game though, where some some strange near fireworks involving Milton Bradley. Bradley apparently took exception to something he had heard Royals announcer Ryan Lefebvre say on the clubhouse TV during the game, and afterwards, decided to head up 4 flights of stairs to the broadcast booth to confront him. Ron Washington and Jon Daniels set off in pursuit, and escorted him back down to the clubhouse after a security guard stopped Milton from entering the booth.

It was an emotional Bradley that re-entered the clubhouse, as he nearly broke down, saying “all I want to do is play baseball, and make a better living for my kid. I love you guys. I’m strong, but I’m not that strong.” Afterwards, he stood at his locker with his head down, where an undetermined number of his teammates tried to console him – according to Richard Durrett of the DMN, it was “many” while Mark Dent’s of MLB.com story strangely differs, saying “most stayed away”.

What evidently had offended Bradley was some comments Lefebvre had made while contrasting Bradley and Josh Hamilton:

“From what I remember, we were complimenting Josh Hamilton and how he’s turned his life around and been accountable for his mistakes,” Lefebvre said. “Frank [White] and I were just having a conversation that it’s a shame it doesn’t appear Milton Bradley is doing the same in his life.”

….

“This wasn’t a Milton Bradley rip session,” Lefebvre said. “It was just based on the pictures we’ve seen of him in the series walking from the dugout all the way to right field. Dropping his bat. Making gestures to the fans in right field and above the dugout, taunting them. He’s the only person in baseball I know who does that kind of stuff.”

Lefebvre also insisted he had complimented Bradley as well, but suggested Milton had not heard that part in the clubhouse. 

While nobody seems to know exactly what Lefebvre really said, whatever it was apparently made Bradley feel deeply insulted - of course, considering how emotional Milton can be, that’s usually not too hard to do. It does seem though that the KC announcers are not fans of the way Bradley has been carrying himself throughout the series so far, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they where indeed holding a miniature rag session on Milton, who can be a popular target (although the reason for that is because of incidents just such as this).

I don’t know what to personally make of this incident one way or another, but this is the risk you run by having Bradley on your team - it seems we’ve just had our first “Milton Bradley moment” of the season. Fortunately, this was stemmed before it had a chance to get out of hand, although we don’t know for sure that it would have - but even so, this won’t be something that will be forgotten by the media anytime soon.

In other news, Eddie Guardado has officially been promoted to the 8thinning role, with Joaquin Benoit moving back to the 6th-7th inning. According to Ron Washington, Benoit is “still catching up” after coming to spring training out of shape, and needs to work on his command, but believes he’ll return to form. Hopefully that’s the case, and we’ll see a whole different Joaquin in the second half this year - but I’ve wondered if perhaps maybe the 2007 Joaquin Benoit was a mirage, and we’re back to the old wildy inconsistent Benoit again. Such can be the tendencies of a relief pitcher from year-to-year.

Quick hits: Josh Hamilton says he’s found his swing after a 2-28 start to May, and said the problem was overthinking his swing mechanics: “I don’t know why I started doing that all of a sudden, but that’s the frustrating and challenging part of this game. You should think about your swing in practice, but not in a game”… Jarrod Saltalamacchia apparently did not start Wedensday’s game because of a sore wrist, but is scheduled to be back out there to catch Eric Hurley’s Major League debut today. The two have worked as a battery previously this season in AAA.

That’s right, today’s the big day - you can catch Eric Hurley’s Major League debut at 1:10 PM central time. Brian Bannister, who the Rangers have previously knocked around this year will oppose as Texas goes for the sweep. I’m half expecting Hurley to get knocked around, but we’ll see what happens.