Thoughts on a 1-0 Rangers win

Rangers 1, Orioles 0

Neither the Rangers nor the Orioles are the worst team in baseball right now, at least by record. That would be the Colorado Rockies. Neither are they the worst team by record in the American League — that would be the New York Yankees. However, I think the consensus coming into the season was that the Rangers and Orioles were among the teams on the bottom tier in MLB — we can quibble about the number, but most people would have said that they are both in the bottom N teams in MLB, with N being a single digit number.
Nonetheless, the Rangers and Orioles combined for a weird, remarkable, entertaining, and really good game today, and if you missed it because you aren’t going to waste your time watching a bad Rangers team play a bad Orioles team, it’s your loss.
First things first…Kyle Gibson was pretty remarkable today. He needed just 97 pitches to give the Rangers 8 shutout innings. He also threw six different pitches today, per Statcast. And not only did he throw six different pitches, he threw each of them at least eight times. That’s weird, wild stuff.
Gibson struck out 6 and allowed just 4 hits in his eight innings of work. At one point he retired 18 out of 19 batters.