CLEVELAND — Eli White was at it again Tuesday night. For the second time in as many weeks, the outfielder made the catch of the year. Maybe two of them.
A week ago, White won MLB’s Electric Play of the Week Award for his home run-robbery of Tampa Bay’s Ji-Man Choi in which his glove was extended a good six feet above the six-foot wall in center field at Globe Life Field.
In Tuesday’s second game, after the Rangers fell to the Guardians 6-3 in Game 1, White didn’t scale any walls, but he went deep into both the right- and left-field gaps to steal extra-base hits from Cleveland’s José Ramirez with sliding catches. Ramirez drove a ball to right center in the first on which White lunged with his back mostly to the ball to make a grab on the warning track. In the fourth, he went towards the left field gap to make a similar catch.
Perfectly good pitches
Now here’s a new one where Rangers pitchers are concerned: The team would be perfectly happy if Matt Bush would simply throw a few less strikes.
Take his blown save Sunday for example. Bush fell behind the first hitter he faced 2-0. After that, he threw eight of the next 10 pitches over what is considered the heart of the plate. By the time that stretch was done, the Rangers had blown a 5-2 lead. In that outing, Bush allowed his fifth homer of the season in 20 1/3 innings. None of the five homers have come when Bush was behind in the count. He didn’t need to throw heart-of-the-zone strikes in those situations. “He’s just made too many mistakes in the zone,” co-pitching coach Doug Mathis said. “We’ve talked about getting guys to chase more. He’s working on it.”
The biggest challenge for Bush is the relative “straightness” of his fastball. While he has elite upward movement on the four-seamer — it ranks as the highest vs. league average among all pitchers — he has below average horizontal movement. It ranks in the bottom third of the league.
So, he’s got to start to pitches more on the outer edges more or move pitches above and below the zone. Of the five homers he has allowed this year, all have been at or above the waist. The only one above the strike zone was a high fastball to Shohei Ohtani.
Walker, Texas Ranger
Steele Walker collected both his first MLB hit and homer with one swing only to have the bat give way in the next. Walker homered inside the right-field foul pole in the seventh inning of the first game, but then batted against former Ranger Emmanuel Clase with one out in the ninth.
Clase, the hardest thrower in the majors, fired a pair of cutters at 99 and 100 mph to Walker. He took the first for a ball, but then shattered his bat on the second while grounding out to second. Oh, well, he was able to keep the remnants of the bat and also retrieved the ball, meeting with a pair of fans after the game. He traded a signed bat for the ball.
“I was going to ride that bat out as long as I could,” Walker said. “You feel a little more accomplished when you hit that homer, but the next thing you know you are standing in the box again and a guy is firing 100 mph cutters at you.”
