Lance Lynn had more strikes thrown than words used post-game to describe his major league-best 12th victory, one that got the Texas Rangers off to the kind of start their manager had hoped for coming out of the All-Star break.
The short answers have become as common for the big right-hander as his impressive outings on the mound.
Lynn on Thursday matched his season high with 11 strikeouts in seven strong innings as the Rangers beat the American League West-leading Houston Astros 5-0 in the only game as Major League Baseball resumed its schedule.
Photo: AFP
“It was a good game. We scored runs, played good defense. They didn’t score any runs, we won,” Lynn said in one of his longer responses to five questions in his post-game talk with reporters that lasted about 75 seconds.
Lynn (12-4) won his fifth consecutive start and is 8-1 over his past 11. He scattered six hits (five singles and a double) and walked two, while throwing 75 of 110 pitches for strikes.
“He’s going to fill the zone up, keep everybody on their toes and try to get them to put the ball in play by throwing strikes,” Rangers catcher Jeff Mathis said. “That’s what we’ve come to expect of him and he’s been doing it lately.”
Houston (57-34) still has a seven-game division lead over Oakland, with the Rangers (49-42) eight games back in third place.
Astros lefty Framber Valdez (3-5) did not make it out of the first inning, when Texas jumped ahead with four runs.
Jose Leclerc and Chris Martin each pitched an inning to wrap up the fourth shutout for the Rangers this season.
Texas were up 1-0 before sluggers Nomar Mazara and All-Star outfielder Joey Gallo had strange hits.
Mazara had an infield single when the ball spun off his shattered bat and barely got past the mound, then Gallo drove in a run with a double that ricocheted hard off second baseman Jose Altuve and never got out of the infield.
Rougned Odor made it 4-0 when he drove in two runs with the first of his two doubles. Odor doubled again in the third and then scored on a single by Jeff Mathis.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier