Swing Along With Mitch

The Catbird in the Nosebleed Seats ^ | October 31, 2010 | Yours, Truly

[BluesDuke]

Somehow you just knew things were going to be a little different in Game Three when a rookie who hails from the mutual hometown of a legendarily raunchy blues woman and an angel of death puts the Texas Rangers back on the scoreboard while a suddenly-savvy fellow who thought his career would end in Japan does what everyone assumed Cliff Lee was supposed to do right out of the World Series chute.

Mitch Moreland won't be anthologised on any future collections of some of the raciest blues ever shaven dry---which, by the way, was sort of the title of one of fellow Avory, Mississippi native Lucille Bogan's signature songs. But he may yet have a chance to be seen the way his fellow Avory native John Dye was seen for nine years, as Andrew, the genial, gentle, empathetic angel of death on television's Touched By an Angel.

On Saturday at least, and perhaps for longer, depending upon the rest of the Series, into which the Rangers stepped back with a handsome 4-2 Game Three win, the San Francisco Giants had plenty of reason to think of Moreland as an angel of death who was more likely to shave them dry than to speed them genially and gently into the World Series hereafter.

There was neither geniality nor gentility in Moreland's epic plate appearance against Jonathan Sanchez in the bottom of the second, an inning after Vladimir Guerrero forced Pat Burrell to make a near-circus catch at the corner of the left field wall for the side. Two balls, a foul for a strike, a called strike, and four more fouls, all with first and third (Nelson Cruz: leadoff double; Bengie Molina, walk), most on off-speed pitches, and two out.

Finally, Sanchez reached back to the wrong side of Giant history. It may not yet prove to cost the Giants what the comparable precedent, minus one pitch, cost them. Or, specifically, reliever Felix Hernandez, when a different manager lifted a different starter and handed him the game ball ceremoniously enough, with the Giants eight outs from the rings.

Sanchez threw Moreland a fastball tailing down and in. Again. He'd gotten away with one when Moreland sent it to the second deck but foul by a few hairs. He didn't get away with the second one. Moreland hit that one about fifty feet further in from the foul pole, into the lower right field seats, than Scott Spiezio had done to Hernandez in a different ballpark.

Spiezio's drive sent the Anaheim Angels back into the game and in position to do just what they ended up doing, overthrowing the Giants' ring hopes in Game Six and then assassinating them in Game Seven. Moreland didn't get the Rangers anywhere close to that kind of near-finality Saturday evening, not with what's now a 2-1 Series deficit, but nobody's assuming the Giants are going to smother them without a breath now.

"We're still down one game," said Josh Hamilton afterward, "but [the momentum] shifted." Hamilton was in perfect position to know. He received a hanging slider from Sanchez in the fifth and hung it just off the rim of the second deck in right.

Last year, Colby Lewis had to be figuring the only way he'd get into a Series, by his own admission, was if he pitched his way into the Japan Series. This year, he's the Rangers' most impressive postseason pitcher who isn't named Cliff Lee. A 3-0 postseason record, a 1.17 postseason ERA, and a remarkable ability to turn the Giants' plate aggressiveness against them, standing on its head their insistence on making the other guys keep throwing pitches, throwing strikes early enough to let him stay in his groove as the Giants continued swinging fast, soon, and futilely enough.

Lewis could afford to be as generous as he was with two Giants' hitters Saturday. Granted that one, Cody Ross, has more or less forced pitcher generosity most of the postseason, and the top of the seventh was no exception, hitting a one-out, full-count service into the left center field bleachers. Andres Torres, however, didn't wait that long, finding the screws on a one-out, 1-1 pitch, one inning later, and sending it into the right field seats.

When at last he ran out of petrol, later in the inning, the evidence a down-diving breaking ball that caught Aubrey Huff on the leg, so it seemed, he yielded to Darren O'Day with Buster Posey coming up. Posey wrestled O'Day to a full count, during which Posey thought he might help himself toward the inner half of the plate on behalf of going the other way with something and O'Day thought he might teach Posey a little lesson in property rights straight from the Bob Gibson Primer, buzzing the kid with a pitch that should have been marked Shavemaster for its slice beneath Posey's chin.

Then, O'Day lured Posey into a meek inning-ending grounder to shortstop. And Neftali Feliz---who was beginning to resemble the Ranger bullpen's forgotten man for his week-plus absence, part of which proved fatal to one game's chances---finished with a flourish in the top of the ninth, sandwiching a ground out between two pounding swishouts for the game.

"I was just really excited to come back home," Lewis said after the game. "I knew with these fans out here we had a definite advantage."

Oh, the Rangers' partisans were handy and dandy, even if you may be starting to think that the claw-and-antlers bit is destined to become as mechanically uninteresting as the Atlanta Braves' longtime tomahawk chop. That aside there's no question but what the Ranger Ballpark in Arlington audience handed the Rangers was comparable to what the AT&T Park audience handed the Giants in the first two contests.

"It was just a thing of comfortability," Lewis said.

That thing of comfortability is what the Rangers want sending Tommy Hunter to the mound Sunday. Hunter pitches better at home than he does on the road on the available evidence. He'll need it against Madison Bumgarner, a San Francisco rookie who doesn't seem to let the venue faze him very much. But if the Giants should end up looking back and deciding Moreland indeed will have proven their uncomfortable angel of death, his position in Saturday's batting order should look huge.

Nine.