About Last Night: Small Signs Of Progress From Rangers Offense In Big Loss To Arizona?

D-tails: Diamondbacks 8, Rangers 2
• Rangers lose sole possession of first (AL standings)
• Boxscore; game blog; Daniels: Bullpen help is most realistic trade target

PHOENIX – These are the longest days of sunlight in the calendar year. For the Rangers they are simply the longest days.

They start with players and coaches trying to find clues from the past game’s performance to solve a most uncommon problem for this team – a prolonged offensive slump.

It continues right through early batting practice, video work, a round of individual meetings and pep talks between hitting instructor Rudy Jaramillo and his frustrated hitters, regular batting practice, another game and then, if the game is anything like Tuesday’s 8-2 loss to Arizona, another round of introspection and analysis.

Tuesday was even longer than unusual. About an hour after the Rangers lost, the Los Angeles Angels finished off a come-from-behind win over Colorado to pull into a tie for the AL West lead.

Amid it all, the Rangers thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a little progress to build on.

“I saw better at-bats,” Jaramillo said. “It can go from day-to-day, but the at-bats were better tonight. They were calmer at-bats. We’ll keep battling and working on it.”

Progress? From a team batting .172 and averaging less than 2.5 runs a game on its current road trip? From a team batting an AL-worst .219 in June. From a team that has seen its batting average dip to .258 for the season and its on-base percentage fall to .317, both of which rank among the bottom five in the AL?

Yes, progress.

You had to look hard to see it and it might be nothing more than a mirage here in the desert, but, as fruits of another long and frustrating day, they had to suffice. Among those small signs of progress:

(bullet) Chris Davis: The struggling first baseman reached base twice on a single and a walk. It was the first time in nearly two weeks he’d reached base twice. Perhaps most significant, though, was one of his outs. He battled Max Scherzer for nine pitches before lining a ball the opposite way to left field.

(bullet) Marlon Byrd: The most impatient Ranger this year, based on how often he has swung at the first pitch (45.2 percent of the time entering Monday) was moved into the No. 4 spot to take some pressure off Nelson Cruz. Manager Ron Washington had cited Byrd’s success with runners in scoring position and two outs as part of the reason he was the cleanup man. Byrd gave credence to that reasoning with a two-out, run-scoring double that would have scored a second run had it not ricocheted off the wall and right to Eric Byrnes.

(bullet) Jarrod Saltalamacchia: After a frustrating weekend in San Francisco in which he had a half dozen balls hard, but had only three hits in 11 at-bats to show for it, Saltalamacchia had a pair of singles. He and Davis had back to back hits in the fourth inning, the first time they’d reached base in the same inning in 10 days. Saltalamacchia ended up scoring on Ian Kinsler’s two-out hit. It was the first time in three weeks either Davis or Saltalamacchia, who have hit back-to-back for the entire season, had scored in any fashion other than on one of their own bases-empty homers.

“I felt like I made big-time progress,” Saltalamacchia said. “I was seeing the ball a lot better and everything seemed like it slowed down. I wasn’t rushing as much. I know I put solid on the ball in San Francisco and I know everybody goes through this, but you don’t want to have to go through it for two weeks at a time.”

To be sure, they were small little snippets of progress. And they were muted largely because starter Matt Harrison fell behind early in the game and just kept digging a bigger hold for the team.

“I thought we worked Scherzer pretty good,” manager Ron Washington said. “We made him throw 120 pitches in six innings. But we were playing catch-up the whole night. And the way we’re having trouble putting runs on the board, you can’t get into that situation.”

Because if you do, whatever small steps a struggling team may make at the plate is going to be overshadowed by a lopsided score.