Angels score five in ninth inning to top Rangers
The Angels pulled off a shocker on Saturday. (USATSI)
Going into the ninth inning in Arlington on Saturday, the Rangers had a 10-6 lead over the Angels and were three outs from the AL West title. Then this — all of this — happened …
Angels 11, Rangers 10. Remarkable. Here’s video footage of that road half of the ninth, via MLB.com:
And here’s how it looked in terms of win probability:
Source: FanGraphs
As you can see, the Rangers at a couple of different junctures had a 99 percent chance of winning the game. Update: They did not win the game.
Let it also be noted that the triumphant Angels at one point in the early innings were better than 90 percent to win, but they wound up blowing a 5-1 lead in the fifth.
On the retrospect front, Rangers manager Jeff Banister almost certainly shouldn’t have let closer Shawn Tolleson pitch for a fifth straight day. To Banister’s credit, though, he had a fairly quick hook with Tolleson, as three of the five Angels runs in the frame wound up being charged to Ross Ohlendorf.
To compound Texas miseries, the Rangers in the bottom of the ninth were an over-slide away from having the potential tying run in scoring position …
So the Angels moved to 35-17 in one-run games on the year and 12-1 in such contests since Sept. 9 (to pick an admittedly convenient endpoint). As a consequence, the Angels moved to with a half-game of the Astros in the AL wild card chase (pending the outcome of Houston’s night game against the Diamondbacks), and the Rangers are stuck on a magic number of one. An Astros loss on Saturday night gives the Rangers the AL West title and creates a tie with the Angels for the second AL wild card berth. An Astros win keeps the division title in play heading into the final day of the regular season.
The bright spot for the Rangers was that Josh Hamilton homered twice (MLB.com video) against the team that in essence paid lots of money to make him go away. That would’ve been the story had the Rangers won the game. Update: They did not win the game.
Anyway, the weirdest part of all? Check out the Angels’ pitching rundown for the game …
So Jo-Jo Reyes got the win by throwing one pitch, and said pitch was his first pitch in the majors since … 2011.
Baseball is amazing, you know.
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