Jul. 3--NEW YORK -- With a chance to sweep New York in their final regular-season series at Yankee Stadium, the Rangers found themselves constantly trying to patch holes Wednesday.
And, no, we're not talking about doing a little emergency carpentry on the 85-year-old stadium.
On the way to an 18-7 loss -- a game the Rangers led heading to the bottom of the seventh inning -- they found out that maybe their roster is just a bit short of being a full-fledged contender at the time.
The Rangers entered the game with a short-handed bullpen made even shorter by a constant workload in winning the previous three games. They simply didn't have enough arms to keep fixing leaks that sprung up.
It meant, first and foremost, that the club needed innings from rookie starter Luis Mendoza. He gave them only 4 2/3 innings.
The Rangers scrambled the rest of the night. Though they rallied to take a 7-6 lead, the scrambling eventually caught up with them.
They ended up having rookie Warner Madrigal make his major league debut with a one-run lead in the seventh inning and the middle of New York's order coming up.
"We were strapped right there," manager Ron Washington said. "We hoped he could get us one inning right there. If we could get through the seventh, I felt pretty good about the eighth and ninth. But we just didn't get there."
They couldn't go to their regular seventh-inning guy, Frank Francisco, because he'd thrown 30 pitches over the previous two nights. They couldn't go to middle reliever Josh Rupe because he threw 33 on Tuesday. They couldn't go to lefty Eddie Guardado because the club was trying to give him one more day to rest a sore shoulder.
They couldn't even go to struggling Joaquin Benoit. He'd walked in a run in relief of Mendoza in the fifth, but escaped the sixth. And they were trying to hold Jamey Wright for the eighth and C.J. Wilson for the ninth.
"If I had gone to Madrigal in the fifth and it gets out of hand, then I have nobody to go to," Washington said. "I figured I'd bring in Benoit [in the fifth] and see if he could hold them there."
Madrigal got ahead of Bobby Abreu 0-and-2, but the Yankee outfielder sliced a fastball down the left-field line for a double that fell just out of the reach of a sliding Brandon Boggs. The inning fell apart after that.
DFWPirate 
