Athletics pound Darvish in rout of Rangers

Reuters/Oakland, California

Oakland Athletics pitcher Jerry Blevins releases the ball during the ninth inning of his MLB American League baseball game against the Texas Rangers in Oakland, California on Thursday

Japanese pitching sensation Yu Darvish allowed a Major League Baseball career-high six runs in a losing cause on Thursday as the American League-leading Texas Rangers were trounced 7-1 by the Oakland Athletics. Darvish, who was looking to become the American League’s first eight-game winner of the year, allowed six hits and six walks in 5-1/3 innings and fell to 7-4 in his rookie season after starting the campaign 4-0. The host Athletics blew the matinee game open with a four-run fourth inning, highlighted by Coco Crisp’s three-run triple, and ended Darvish’s day in the sixth inning after the 25-year-old pitcher walked two of the first three batters he faced. “I felt very good in the first three innings, and I felt I could maintain that the whole game,” Darvish told reporters. “But in the fourth inning ... it just went south. Mechanically, that inning, it went very off.” Athletics manager Bob Melvin said the team had learned from a May game against Darvish, which the Rangers won. “Last time, we were probably a little too aggressive early in the count,” Melvin said. “This time, we made him throw the ball over the plate and got into some good counts.” The Rangers have now lost seven of their past nine games and are 18-21 since April 26. “It was walks that hurt Darvish, and we didn’t supply enough runs,” Texas manager Ron Washington said. Oakland took the lead in the first inning when Seth Smith hit a run-scoring single and then added another run when Crisp belted a homer off Darvish in the third inning to end an 0-for-16 slump. “I didn’t know if (Crisp) was in a slump or not, but today he looked like an incredible hitter,” Darvish said. “He looked like our (Josh) Hamilton.” An Adrian Beltre single in the fourth scored Hamilton but that was the only run the normally potent Texas offense could generate. Brandon McCarthy, who picked up his fifth consecutive win after starting the season 0-3, allowed three hits, one run and struck out five batters in seven innings.Revised anti-doping plan has All-Star ban Major League Baseball players who violate the league’s anti-doping program will be ineligible for that season’s All-Star Game under one of several revisions to the program announced on Thursday. Human growth hormone blood tests were added during pre-season training, the off-season and for reasonable cause, with the league and players union agreeing also to study ways to have HGH tests given during the six-month regular season. League and players union officials announced the changes, some of which were approved before last year’s negotiations for a new contract. Others came after an overturned suspension this year involving Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun. The Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program between the league and the union would now ban a player from the All-Star Game if he were suspended at any time from the end of a season up until the start of the All-Star break in July. More detailed instructions involving delivery of doping samples to couriers and how such samples should be stored, key issues in Braun’s cases, were outlined in the revisions. “These modifications to expand upon the comprehensive nature of our program are consistent with our efforts to ensure we are running the highest quality drug testing in professional sports,” said Major League Baseball executive vice president Rob Manfred.