Final Score in Arlington: Rangers 5, Angels 3
The Texas Rangers play in the nation's 4th largest media market and it is obvious that MLB wants to get the ratings going to bring in baseball dollars amidst Footballville. They have the umps completely getting in the way of player's establishing their game and a first inning ejection of John Lackey was the most obvious indicator that baseball intends to hand a mediocre organization a competitive edge thru treachery in order to more firmly take on the NFL deep in the heart of Texas.
The terrible Vicente Padilla was given a strike zone slightly deeper than the average Texas oil well, forcing Angels hitters into desperate hacks, many of which went for singles, but plenty of which doomed any chance of them competing (in the comments below, an economist takes issue with my description of Texas Oil Wells, showing Padilla's zone was not recorded as it appeared to me. Probably one of those spoiled brat heirs to an Oklahoma oil fortune wanting daddy to join OPEC or something, but okay, Padilla attacked the zone, the Angels hacked the zone and that was that).
May the farce be with you, MLB, the Rangers are 6 games over .500 for the first time since steroids were banned by baseball and are one urine specimen and a Tim Donaghy-style investigation away from their rightful place... and that would be fighting for third with Seattle.
Lackey was ejected after hitting Ian Kinsler. The plate-crowding cheat ended up scoring that inning to tie the game 1-1. Lackey's ERA now stands at: INFINITY. That is kind of awesome when you stop and think about it, which is better than spending another ten seconds thinking about this miserable excuse for a point shaving scandal.
Of course, the real pox on baseball in all this obvious slanting toward Texas is that every Jim-Bob and Joe-Ellen Cro Magnon Redneck Horseturd around the country starts to crawl out from under their hunting dogs to chant YEE-HAW in a Texan version of the harmonic convergence with a visionary figment of Billy Carter floating in the barbecue smoke to encourage the good old boys in their patriotic self-strokage.
