Around the West: Rangers Lose Offensive Battle

Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports

This is the first of many articles called “Around the West” in which I take relevant news that has happened around the AL West that affects the Oakland Athletics. This first piece will be about the Rangers losing their offensive battle with the Philadelphia Phillies.

The Rangers opened up their season at home against the Phillies, and it didn’t go well for them. With their ace Yu Darvish on the DL, Tanner Scheppers was given the nod, and he didn’t deliver. He allowed 7 runs, including a grand slam in the second inning. It was a back and forth battle in which the teams kept switching the lead. In the end however, the Rangers lost 14-10.

I won’t spend time on little details of the game, I’m giving the basic impact of this. First of all, the Rangers start the season off with a loss, which is always a help to the Athletics. But it also shows the big flaw in their team. Pitching.

They can have a stacked up lineup that will score them 10 runs, but it won’t get them a win if they can’t stop the opposing team from scoring even more against them. The Phillies aren’t considered contenders, but they were still able to beat the likes of Prince Fielder and Shin-Soo Choo. Now it may be too soon to tell, one game is too small a sample size, but I believe the Rangers are going to have a lot of games like that, where they score a lot of runs, but the other team will score even more.

If this is a sign of things to come, the Oakland Athletics won’t have much to worry about in Texas as far as any threats to their division title goes. The Rangers are a good offensive team, but a team with good enough pitching to shut them down will be able to overcome them. Especially with the makeshift rotation they have to start the season with. We’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the week turns out, but so far it isn’t looking so good for Texas.