Game 115: Rangers can’t solve Kuroda

On Tuesday night, despite 6.1 shut out innings by Matt Harrison, the Rangers (67-48) dropped their eighth straight game at Yankee Stadium. Yankees (69-47) right hander Hiroki Kuroda frustrated the Rangers’ bats all game as he flirted with a no-hitter, giving up only two hits through nine innings pitched.

The Rangers recorded their first hit of the game in the seventh inning when Elvis Andrus grounded a ball to a diving Jayson Nix at short, who got up and made a throw to first that was too late to retire the speedy base runner. Josh Hamilton then hit one off the end of the bat to deep right-center, advancing Andrus to second. Kuroda retired Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz to end the threat.

Harrison struggled early with command issues, giving up hits in his first four innings and worked his way out of a bases loaded jam in the third.

After retiring the first batter in the bottom half of the seventh inning, Derek Jeter was on with a base hit. Just as he did in Sunday’s game with the Tigers, Ron Washington went to the bullpen early. This time it came back to bite the team. With fireballing Alexi Ogando on the mound, for the second game in a row Nick Swisher put the Yankees up with a go-ahead home run. The following batter, former Ranger Mark Teixeira, also went deep to put the Yankees up 3-0.

Catcher Luis Martinez, who was called up when the Rangers placed Mike Napoli on the disabled list, got his first start and went 0-3.

On the bright side, amid speculation of the call up of prospect shortstop Jurickson Profar, right handed reliever Tanner Scheppers made his case to stay with the Major League club as he threw one scoreless inning, striking out two.

The Yankees take a 2-0 series lead and lead the season series 3-2.

This is only the third time that the Rangers have been shut out this season.

The Rangers are now 6 games ahead of the A’s and 7.5 games ahead of the Angels in the AL West as they await the results from Anaheim.

The third game of the series in New York commences at 6:05 p.m. with Scott Feldman (6-7, 4.64 ERA) on to face Freddy Garcia (6-5, 4.85 ERA).