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Left on left.

By Jamey Newberg | Thursday, June 18, 2015

What do Adrian, Delino, Mitch, Josh, Derek, Martin, Matty, Yu, you, and me have in common?

We all watched one heck of a baseball game last night.

Left over from that group was a lineup that featured Adam Rosales hitting fifth and Joey Gallo hitting third against a lefthander, one who happens to be in the discussion annually as baseball’s best pitcher.

Adam and Joey did just fine.

It was actually a night for lefties, as Clayton Kershaw had strikeout stuff but was touched for runs in three of his six innings, each off a left-handed bat, as Rougned Odor 8-4’d a fielder’s choice to score Prince Fielder in the second and singled Rosales home in the fourth, in between which Gallo followed a Wandy Rodriguez ducksnort and two strikeouts by hammering a Kershaw slider into the Chavez Ravine stratosphere, a 439-foot blast that, according to ESPN, checks in as the second-longest home run (by two feet) that Kershaw has surrendered in his 1,471.1 big league innings.

I’ll understand if “Captain Marble” doesn’t settle in as one of Gallo’s nicknames going forward, but you ought to take a minute and take in Vin Scully’s call of the Gallo bomb, starting at 1:20 in on this video.

“This is probably the most frustrating game I’ve ever pitched,” Kershaw said afterwards, having given up more than three runs at home for the first time in 31 starts and losing an interleague game for the first time in four years.  It probably didn’t sit well with the man with three Cy Youngs in the last four years that all four runs Texas put on him were driven in by 21-year-old hitters, from the left side.

Or that, in his first game to ever pitch against his hometown team, he lost to a club that put that lineup out there behind a 36-year-old who had been released twice in the last 13 months.

The lefty Rodriguez started 20 of 27 Dodgers off with a strike but pitched through a lot of stress, managing to wiggle out of it regularly until single/homer/double/screaming-lineout-comebacker/single chased him in the sixth, and suddenly the 4-0 lead built by a shocking lineup and a scrap heap starter was 4-3 and the underbelly of a beleaguered bullpen was being entrusted with the final 3.2 innings.

Jon Edwards, Sam Freeman, Tanner Scheppers, and Keone Kela held Los Angeles hitless the rest of the way.

The lefty Freeman (five batters, five outs, two on strikes) was especially good, and Scheppers induced a huge double play to close out the eighth, before the Dodgers tried getting in Kela’s head by asking the umpire to remove his compression sleeve but then succumbed relatively meekly as the 22-year-old recorded the first of what will probably be a large number of Major League saves.

A kid from LA recorded the save, a kid from Dallas recorded a hold, a kid from LA recorded a hold, a kid from Dallas was tagged with the loss.

All of which the box score revealed about two hours after Vin Scully was wowed by a majestic shot off the bat of a kid from out of this world.

Texas has now won three straight against the Dodgers, slated to face Zack Greinke tonight — with temporary call-up Anthony Ranaudo getting the start to give the rest of the rotation an extra day of rest — before drawing Chris Sale and Carlos Rodon in Chicago the next two days.

If the Rangers end up splitting these four against the Kershaw-Greinke-Sale-Rodon gauntlet, that would be a result I’m sure we’d all be just fine with.

At this rate, though, it almost feels like it would be a good result for Kershaw-Greinke-Sale-Rodon to claim a split from this really, really good baseball team.

Baseball, man.