CINCINNATI — Another trip to Cincinnati for the Rangers. Another nightmare trying to figure out how to finish a game.
It’s just that the circumstances were completely different.
The last time, in the final days of the first month of the 2023 season, the Rangers were grasping about trying to find a closer and getting swept on three losses in the Reds’ final at-bats. On Monday, they didn’t have to worry about protecting a lead; they were merely trying to find available bodies to clean up a 14-3 mess that in Bruce Bochy’s words “started bad and got gradually worse.”
That could be disputed.
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It got bad pretty quickly for Kumar Rocker.
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In his first start of the season, Rocker allowed a single on an 0-2 pitch to the first batter he faced, then allowed a two-run homer two pitches later. Both were over the heart of the plate. There are bad misses. There are also bad strikes. These were two. And it was the story of the night for him.
He fell down by six runs through two innings, was gone after the third and a Rangers bullpen left thin by a heavy workload over the weekend couldn’t clean things up. It got so bad, Bochy had to turn to Ezequiel Duran to pitch the eighth. Of course, the Reds went in order, flailing against his 41-mph “heat.” Hey, it’s a relative term. It matched the temperature at the end of the game.
“Our guy just made some mistakes down the middle with the fastball, and had trouble getting the breaking ball over at times, and we made too many mistakes ahead in the count too,” Bochy said. “We just didn’t pitch well.
“He [Rocker] has a good fastball, but if the location is better, they don’t quite get hit like that. You can’t live in the nitro zone. If you miss, you’ve got to miss where you’re trying to go. Those are those mental mistakes more than anything.”
To Bochy’s point about the nitro zone: The Reds averaged 96.6 mph in exit velocity on Monday. It was the fourth-highest average exit velocity of the 110 pitchers who threw at least 50 pitches in a game over the season’s first four days. The point: The Reds hit the ball hard.
It was similar, Bochy said, to the problems that followed Rocker early in spring training. He seemed to make gradual progress, but backslid Monday.
Just consider the first at-bat of the bottom of the first. Against TJ Friedl, he got a called strike on a fastball at the top, outside corner, then got a foul ball on a changeup at the bottom of the zone. His next pitch: A fastball dead center, which Friedl lined to center. He fell behind Matt McLain 0-1 with a non-competitive fastball way above the zone, then brought the next one down — to the heart of the plate. McLain drove it eight rows into the left-field seats.
The inning was not done either. Elly De La Cruz singled on a 1-1 fastball that was at the outside corner … of the heart of the zone. Stole second, which the Rangers were worried about, given De La Cruz’s speed and Rocker’s relatively slow times to the plate. And then Gavin Lux, ahead 3-0, swung at — you guessed it — another fastball dead center for a run-scoring double.
It was more of the same in the second, though the Rangers found an effective way to keep De La Cruz from running. They held him to a pair of trots the rest of the game, a homer against Rocker and another against Gerson Garabito.
“I’ve just got to be better when it comes to mixing, earlier and more often,” Rocker said. “I’ve got to be better. I didn’t put the team in position to win tonight.”
Nobody did. The Rangers were down to Marc Church and Garabito in the bullpen after the bulk of their high-leverage relievers worked two or three times over the four-game series against Boston. By the fifth, Church was done and Garabito was left to try to mop things up. After he allowed a six-run sixth and De La Cruz’s second homer of the night in the seventh, sending him out for the eighth became impossible.
Through one turn of the rotation, the Rangers with the highest total pitch counts: Nathan Eovaldi (87), Jack Leiter (82), Jacob deGrom (73) and Garabito (70). Not exactly the way they drew it up. But Bochy said afterward the bullpen should be in decent shape on Tuesday when Eovaldi makes his second start of the season.
Maybe they can get back to more pleasant issues: Like trying to figure out how to get through the ninth inning, rather than struggling to get through eight.
Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant
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