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Easily Explained: Brandon McCarthy Loses Command; Rangers 5-Game Win Streak Ends In 9-4 Loss To Oakland

D-tails: Boxscore (A’s 9, Rangers 4); Standings; The Depot live game blog; Post-Game show comment thread

OAKLAND, Calif. - There have been a handful of Rangers losses in this young season that have been hard to explain. Thursday’s loss was not one of them.

After three sharp innings, RHP Brandon McCarthy slipped back into his old self and fell apart under a hail of walks and a grand slam. And a long reliever, a name nobody had ever called RHP Kris Benson in his previous seven years as a big leaguer, couldn’t keep the Rangers within shouting distance.

Oakland 9, Rangers 4.

But you don’t care about the score as much as you do this: The Rangers remained in first place in the AL West for a second consecutive day thanks to Seattle’s fourth straight loss.

On Thursday, McCarthy was crisp and efficient through the first three innings, which has recently become a standard for the Rangers rotation. Since April 28, the Rangers have allowed just two runs in the first three innings. Since then, most of the starters have also carried that effectiveness, at least to some degree, into the middle innings.

McCarthy did not.

After a leadoff single by Kurt Suzuki, he threw eight balls in a nine-pitch sequence to Jason Giambi and Matt Holliday to load the bases. Then, after throwing a decent changeup to all-or-nothing hitter Jack Cust, McCarthy threw a fat, 90 mph fastball over the heart of the plate. Cust drove it into the empty cement benches beyond right field.

“I threw a bad pitch to start the inning and some poor quality pitches after that,” said McCarthy, who fell to 3-1 for the season. “It was unacceptable. And then the pitch to Cust was awful. The game just got to fast and I didn’t slow things down enough.”

McCarthy’s more in-depth explanation: Once he fell into an old bad habit on the mound, he couldn’t identify it quickly enough to fix it before the inning fell apart.

At 6-7, and still pretty skinny despite a winter of 7,000-calorie a day intakes that included “basically pouring syrup all over everything,” McCarthy has a lot of moving parts to his delivery. One wrong herk here or one wrong jerk there and it can come apart. The key for McCarthy is to identify the problem quickly and get things back under control. The difficult part is figuring out if one bad pitch was just that – a bad pitch – or if some mechanical adjustment must be made.

McCarthy said he felt like he fell into a practice of “pulling off the ball,” which makes his fastball either run way too far inside against left-handed hitters or drift too far over the plate against them. The walk to Giambi was the product of what happens when he comes too far inside; the homer was the product of the other problem.

“I needed to make a quick adjustment and make quality pitches and I didn’t,” McCarthy said. “Last time out, I was able to identify the problem, minimize the damage and fix it quickly. This time, I didn’t. I have to diagnose it and immediately fix it. There simply can’t be that wide a variance from one inning to the next.”

What really bothered the Rangers was not just that McCarthy gave up a big inning, but that he didn’t recover after the grand slam emptied the bases or after finally escaping the 32-pitch inning.

After the grand slam, he allowed another fourth-inning run when No. 9 hitter Jack Hannahan doubled in Bobby Crosby with two outs. The Rangers still sent McCarthy back out for the fifth and he allowed successive singles to Suzuki and Giambi before manager Ron Washington pulled him. He replaced McCarthy with Benson, who threw a couple of very average four-seam fastballs to Holliday. The four-seamer doesn’t sink much and so a pitcher must either have overpowering stuff or lots of deception to get outs. When Benson threw a third 90 mph four-seamer, Holliday drove it to left for a three-run homer to make it 7-1.

It wasn’t difficult to explain how it got that way.