Rangers

The Rangers are 15-9 in May and have matched their season-high with a four-game winning streak.

They went 5-4 in that stretch, the last six games of which were on the road, giving them a 12-11 road record this season. I looked it up — it is a way to tell if you got a base card or a short print (this one is a base card). Well, we have hit a bit of a snag in the Leody Taveras watch this week. For a while, the question in my mind was formulated like this: the pitching is outperforming expectations, and the hitting is underperforming; which one is going to regress toward the middle first? In the five games since the end of that Houston series, the Rangers have scored 33 runs (6.6/game), including six of them in the fifth inning on Saturday. That inning included a grand slam from Marcus Semien; it was his first home run of the year, and just so happened to come in his hometown against his old team. If White can harness the athleticism that his manager has frequently referred to as being like a “Ferrari”, there’s still hope that he can be a useful big-league player. It was his first home run off a left-handed pitcher since Sept. 24, 2021, and it came at a time when Lowe needed it — after hitting the first of May with a .313 average and a .771 OPS, Lowe had hit just .153/.206/.203 (.410) for the month before Thursday night. Andy Ibáñez: Mired in a 2-for-40 slump, Ibáñez got the call as a pinch-hitter on Friday night in a tie ballgame in the ninth inning. He’s hitting .289 on the road trip (11-for-38), though his on-base percentage over that period is … .289. He hasn’t walked since May 17, and has just two walks in May (91 plate appearances). But hey, maybe that’s … fine? And it has gotten into the habit of screaming in their ear and hitting them, which would be cute if it was a little capuchin or a spider monkey, but this thing is the size of about three silverback gorillas stacked on top of each other. The reason I bring that up is not to be a bummer, but to provide you some context for how important this month’s turnaround has been for the Rangers, and just how big a monkey they might be able to get off their back this week. The Rangers had just finished a four-game series in Houston in which they went 1-3 and scored a combined seven runs over those four games — 1.75 runs per game.