ARLINGTON, Texas â The Texas Rangers would like to retract the statement they made with a three-game sweep in Oakland last week.
The statement they made against Oakland in the three-game set that wrapped up Wednesday at Globe Life Park served as proof that the club is still a huge work in progress.
At least after Wednesday's awful performance in a 12-1 loss to the Athletics, the Rangers have nowhere to go but up.
Texas put together its worst all-around showing to cap April, failing to deliver offensively, defensively or on the mound as its losing streak jumped to four games.
It was a bad end to a bad series in which the Rangers never led a game, were outscored 25-4 and failed to get five innings from any of their three most reliable starters to date.
"They beat us, beat us soundly," said Rangers manager Ron Washington, whose club has been outscored 41-6 in its last four home games.
At least after Wednesday no one in the Texas clubhouse that could point fingers. How could they after an everyone's to blame showing?
Defensively the Rangers made four errors, with Elvis Andrus committing two, Adrian Beltre one and Alex Rios another.
If the plays were made behind Robbie Ross, maybe he would have retired more than nine batters. But he didn't do himself any favors either by allowing 11 hits in 3 1/3 innings of work. He was charged with 10 runs, six of which were earned.
And if you were looking for the offense to try and help out, you could forget about that. Texas had just one hit against Oakland right-hander Jesse Chavez. That hit was of course a single as the Rangers had two extra-base hit in the series.
The game unraveled Wednesday in the third inning as Oakland sent 10 batters to the plate. Josh Donaldson's single got the run parade started. Yoenis Cespedes made it 3-0 with a double to center and then Alberto Callaspo's routine grounder to short rolled right under the glove of Andrus, upping the score to 4-0 after Andrus' second error on what he called a "Little League error". No. 9 hitter Eric Sogard, who came into the game hitting .196, capped that frame with a two-run single that put the Athletics up 7-0.
Andrus, who also committed a throwing error in the second inning and was pulled after five innings, wasn't pleased with his play Wednesday.
"It was one of those days you just want to get over," said Andrus, who now has seven errors after his first two error game since the 2012 season. "It's not a fun game. There's nothing else you can do for me but turn the page, have tomorrow off, clear my mind and get ready for the next series."
The Ross start followed bad ones by Yu Darvish and Martin Perez. The trio had a combined 14.29 ERA in the three games and combined to be the first Texas pitchers to put together a string of three-consecutive starts of less than five innings since Derek Holland, Scott Feldman and Perez did it in 2012.
While the defense didn't help Ross, he wasn't pointing fingers because he had chances to make pitches too and didn't.
"I really didn't make good pitches when it did start to snowball," said Ross, who became the 15th pitcher in club history to allow at least 10 runs. "It's on me and obviously you have to go out there and try to battle in those situations and I tried to but I missed here and there and it was unfortunate to that many runs in a short amount of time."
As bad as the seven-run third was, the three-run fourth may have as difficult to watch as Oakland scored twice on a play that featured a wild Beltre throw to first and a bad Rios throw home on the same play. That play evoked images of a Little League team, not a club that was in first place after its sweep in Oakland a week ago.
The series was bad, but Washington is confident his team can get back to its winning ways.
"Right now I'm thinking about Anaheim," said Washington, whose team starts a three-game series at the Angels Friday. "We didn't play well enough to win. You don't play well enough to win you've just got to keep going. We'll get back to where we were but tonight we just didn't do it."
