Why is this update coming at 5:29 a.m.? Well for one reason, the smoke alarm in our play room went off 50 minutes ago and nobody can figure out why.
But secondly, and vastly more important, I've recently learned that Joey Gallo was removed from Wednesday's game with right groin tightness and is listed as day-to-day. Now look, we've all had our fair share of groin tightness. I experienced it for the first time at age 9 in 1983 when my parents took me to see National Lampoon's Vacation and this came on the screen.
Now Joey Gallo probably got his groin tightness because he's the only guy on the Rangers with balls big enough to go after a record like this strikeout deal. After criticizing him the last few days, I realize he's been in agony trying to swing and miss and as a result he's in a bit of a K slump. So I'm going to need some able-bodied Ranger fan to get up there and give the guy some groin relief STAT.
The K race has its third leader in three days. Matt Chapman is suddenly pulling a Katy Perry and coming at you like a dark horse. He piled on 2 strikeouts in 4 at-bats last night in a loss to the Royals to up his ante to 82, taking the lead from the also slightly-injured Javier Baez.
The good news is that Joey should be back at it tonight, and the Rangers are in LA to play the Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw. If he can stay healthy, this is the kind of weekend where Joey gets back to business.
He's currently sitting on 751 strikeouts in 638rd place all time, one behind a guy named Kiki Cuyler. That's not pronounced "Kee Kee" like in that Drake song from a few years ago that made me want to punch people in the face, but actually "Ki Ki." See back then, your baseball nickname didn't come from something clever or silly, but rather to make fun of what was wrong with you.
Thus, you had a guy named Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown because as a kid he was feeding materials into the thresher on his farm, slipped, and accidentally fed his hand into the thing as well.
And that also produced Hazen "KiKi" Cuyler who had a stutter his whole life, and back in the 1920s and 30s, what was funnier than giving a guy a nickname based on his massive speech impediment?