Rangers beat Angels 8-5 on eve Dallas metro area completely forgetting about baseball

Angels 5 Rangers 8

Cole Hamels and David Wright. Trout and Odor. Pujols and Beltre. Baseball is in the air, and a division rivalry nonetheless. This Texas Rangers team came to play, though, and god bless ‘em, they got themselves yet another win.

They’re having quite the season, good for them. The sad part is that, with the start of NFL season tomorrow, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is about to shift their sports focus for a few months. This great Rangers team will keep being good, but nobody will care. That’s kinda sad, if you ask me.

Anyway.

David Wright’s Halos debut really didn’t go quite as bad as the box score would lead you to believe. Yeah, he gave up four runs in his 6.0 innings pitched, but he only gave up six hits...and two of those were Carlos Gomez homers.

Gomez was definitely the fly in the Wright ointment tonight, as his two home run blasts, plus an RBI double from catcher Jonathan Lucroy, accounted for all of the four runs the Rangers put up on the newly-acquired pitcher in those first six innings.

When Wright was pulled from the game, the score was 4-1, that lone Angels tally coming from a Mike Trout sac fly in the bottom of the 3rd. Things looked kind of stale and dead, but then a jolt of life was shot into the team and they decided to make a contest of it.

A Jett Bandy groundout in the fourth brought in one run, making it 4-2 Rangers, and then in the seventh, Kole Calhoun dropped the hammer and drove a two-run, game tying homer off of Cole Hamels’ reliever Keone Kela. Then, a Mike Trout single, followed by a stolen base (25 on the year) put him in the right place to score when C.J. Cron hit a ground-rule double. Just like that, the Halos had a 5-4 lead and the stadium was actually in full on party mode.

It was short-lived. In the eighth inning, Jonathan Lucroy hit a two-run homer off of reliever Jose Valdez, putting the Rangers back on top 6-5, and things just sort of slipped away even further from there. A slew of singles off of the Halos’ bullpen raised it up to 8-5 and that was that.

The Angels lost yet another one, backsliding into their bottom feeder ways, with the slapdash spattering of cool plays or hits here or there.

And here’s the real bad news, folks. The Angels, with this loss, are now eliminated from the AL West division race. Yep, all your dreams for 2016, now crushed. Who would have saw it coming?