Sometimes the highs and lows of Baseball are subtle. The game can hinge on the 1-1 slider that catches the corner of the plate—or doesn’t—and tips the scale of the at-bat that can tip the scale of the inning that can tip the scale of the game. Every stolen base hangs on the nano-second reaction of a baserunner who judging a pitcher’s tiniest movements. The batted ball lands safely in a mitt or causes chaos by landing on God’s natural earth, and the crowd cheers, often unaware that the fielder’s knowledge of the coming pitch and the batter’s tendencies was the difference between leaning into the play or being too late to readjust. Sometimes, Baseball is pointillism, a Van Gogh masterpiece made of a million little seemingly insignificant dots.
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Other times, Baseball abandons subtlety in the most aggressive of ways, falling in love and cutting off its own ear.
Sunday’s game was one such case. You need not know the finer points of spin rate or count leverage to appreciate the heart-swell of watching a soon-to-be-34-year-old rookie make his big-league debut after sixteen years in the minor leagues. Watch Brandon Mann’s wife Sarah (left) and sister Candace react as Brandon is announced after a decade and a half of toiling in the minor leagues.
(Apologies for how dusty it’s about to get, wherever you may be watching this)
After 16 years, Brandon Mann finally makes his @MLB debut with the @Rangers.pic.twitter.com/wL036v7neT
— FOX Sports Southwest (@FOXSportsSW) May 13, 2018
“It was great. That made it even more special.” Mann said after the game of having them in attendance. “I wish my Mom could have been here, but I’ll see her tonight.”
The Astros got some loud outs against Mann in his debut, but they were outs, at least five out of the six. Alex Bregman got the lone hit off the left-hander, an opposite-field single.
“I definitely had nerves going, but I’d obviously been trying to prepare for this moment for a long time. I felt at peace out there, I felt calm, surprisingly. I thought I would be super-nervous, but I knew that there were no bases open, so I would have to be on top of it.”
As for the opponents, Mann said he crammed a little bit of last-minute video work in. “In the bullpen, Leclerc and I were going over some of the guys. It was actually really awesome that he did that with me.”
It doesn’t take an art critic to love the idea of the 24-year-old Leclerc helping the 33-year-old Mann study tape on the guys he’s about to face. These are the things that make baseball beautiful.
And yet, when Mann entered the game, the bases were loaded, and the Rangers had no third baseman in the game. The highest highs boosted into the air by the lowest of lows, like some haunted circus trampoline act.
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“He just walked off the field,” Jeff Banister said of Adrián Beltré. “I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye. When I brought Mann in, I was concentrated on Mann, and when I turned, I saw that he was not on the field. That’s when Buechele told me that he had walked off the field.”
Sometimes Baseball opts to tweak a hamstring instead of cut off an ear.
On the pitch before Banister made the call to the bullpen, Beltré had fielded a Max Stassi grounder and opted to try to tag the lead runner, Yuli Gurriel.
“I thought it was an easy out at third,” Beltré explained after the game. “If I would have turned as quickly as I wanted to, I probably would have gotten him out, but as soon as I turned, I felt my leg. Right now, Gurriel isn’t running well, and I thought it would be an easier play at third (…) I thought I had a chance, but it wasn’t the right move.”
The only subtlety was Beltré’s pull-up. He didn’t hop around, didn’t limp. He just stopped running at Gurriel. As Mann entered the game, Beltré said he tried to do some squats to see if he thought he would be able to stay in the game and make a play. “I saw that I couldn’t,” Beltré surmised. “So as soon as I saw skip come in to make a pitching change, I walked out.”
Isiah Kiner-Falefa shifted to third base, Rougned Odor, who is recovering from a hamstring injury of his own, came in and finished the game at second, and the Rangers were left to see what the MRI results would bring. But to hear Beltré, it doesn’t seem hopeful.
“It’s pretty similar to the other one,” the future Hall of Famer said after the game. “If I had to grade it, I would say probably a grade one, one and a half, something like that.” He did not make any proclamations about time on the disabled list, or how long he might be out of action, other than to say that he would wait until the MRI results came back.
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It was a bizarre conflation of sunflowers and sorrow. In the Beltré turn, pull-up, and walk-off, we saw another step toward the end of one of the greatest careers the game has ever witnessed. Seconds later, we saw the culmination of a lifetime of perseverance and unwillingness to ever give up. Baseball can be subtle sometimes, but today it was downright trenchant. 
The Rangers lost the game by a 6-1 score for the second consecutive night. Matt Moore held the Astros scoreless for two innings before allowing three runs in the third inning, the last two of which came on a two-run home run by Evan Gattis. When the bottom of the fourth began, Jesse Chavez was on the mound, even though Moore had only thrown 72 pitches.
Asked after the game if Moore thought being removed felt like a lack of confidence in him by Banister, he sighed and thought for a moment. “Uhhhhh, I mean– you know, look, I’m a pitcher, not the manager” he began, delicately. “I know Banny’s got his job to do, and he’s been pretty damn good at it. Whatever he saw, maybe he thought the game was going to be kept better going with the bullpen; we’ve got a pretty fresh bullpen right now with the day off, so maybe that was it. I haven’t talked to him too much about it, but getting back to the way I felt, I felt like I was going to hang up a few zeroes right there, but at the same time, I think that’s part of the player / managerial stuff; our job is to play, and his job is to tap us on the shoulder when we’re done.”
“I thought the first two innings were really good,” Banister said of Moore’s outing. “Had good angle on all his pitches, fastball down in the zone, changeup was solid, and the curveball for strikes. The third inning, he started working from behind, started missing on some pitches out over the plate, deep counts. It seemed like he lost a little bit of delivery. The execution wasn’t where it needed to be in the third inning.”
But he was clear that removing Moore was not an issue of a pitch count or any physical concern. “He’s fine. Look, we’re trying to win baseball games. It’s not just pitch count always; there are times you make a decision (based) on ‘We need to stay in this game’. I wanted to make a change to keep the game where we thought we had an opportunity.”
Asked if Moore would stay in the rotation for another turn, Banister was non-committal. “You know what? We’ll continue to evaluate that, yeah.”