Saw this story on the Rangers site tonight..

The Texas Rangers today announced that the team will honor the memory of Bobby Bragan by wearing a uniform patch during all games in spring training.
Bragan, who spent over 70 years involved with professional baseball, passed away on January 21 at the age of 92 in Fort Worth. The former major league player, coach, manager, and executive was a long-time front office employee for the Rangers, serving in public relations and community capacities.
The oval patch contains the red and blue lettering, “BOBBY BRAGAN, 1917-2010” with a white background and red border. It is located on the right sleeve of the Rangers’ blue jersey tops, which the club will wear for all spring training games in 2010.
Following spring training, the jerseys will be available for purchase with a portion of the proceeds benefitting the Texas Rangers Baseball Foundation. The team also plans to donate a number of the jerseys to the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation, which has provided over 500 scholarships to Dallas-Fort Worth area students since its inception in 1992.
The Rangers will wear the Bragan patches for the first time on Tuesday.

I have to confess. When I saw the story, I didn’t remember who he was. :(

While the official schedule of HD programming for the 2010 season hasn’t been posted yet, I read something tonight that gives me hope. You see this will be the third (and second full) baseball season since got an HDTV. Baseball looks so much better in HD, that when they have just an SD feed, I frequently will not watch the game and listen on the radio instead. Snob, perhaps, but after you go HD, you don’t want to go backwards.
Anyway, last year there were 120 games in HD, covering Fox Sports Southwest, Fox 4, and KDFI Ch 27. In 2010, almost all of them are Fox Sports Southwest. Here’s my count of what channels have how many games for the Rangers in 2010:
Fox Sports Southwest: 131
TXA-21: 25
Fox 4: 5
ESPN: 1
That’s a total of just 30 out of 162 to be on free over the air TV (which I believe is a first for the home opener not being on free OTA TV), 132 are pay cable. That’s quite a percentage shift. If you’re just over the air TV, you’re getting screwed. But you should get cable or satellite anyway if just for MLB Network – they are awesome.
Anyway, of the games produced, I would think the bulk of them would be in HD. ESPN is guaranteed HD, and The Fox 4 games are national, so that’s a guaranteed 6. I’m not sure about TXA21, as they’re new in 2010.
But what follows is why I posted this. Saw this news story about the Brewers games on Fox Sports Wisconsin being 100% in HD for 2010. Makes me think if the Brewers can do it, we can too. If it comes out we can’t, I’ll want to know why.

Washington, D.C. (February 24, 2010) — For the first time, all Milwaukee Brewer baseball games will be in high-def this season on Fox Sports Wisconsin.
That’s according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
The regional sports channel will broadcast 136 Brewer games in high-def this season.
Of the remaining Brewer games on TV, six will be televised nationally on Fox or ESPN, which will also cover them in HD, and 15 will be broadcast by the local station WMLW, according to the newspaper. (Apparently five games will not be televised this year; there are 162 regular season games.)
Fox Sports Wisconsin’s coverage of the regular season will start on Monday, April 5, when it airs the Brewers-Rockies game at 1:10 p.m.

Well, I haven’t written much lately, despite the start of camp as a few projects have opened up for me that could lead to full time employment again. Something I still don’t have since last May, so that is by far my #1 priority. To that, I’m gonna add a thoughts on recent events.

First off, Jamey Newberg’s quote from this past week is something I want to answer. Jamey asked this.

“Does it mean anything when Bobby Valentine says on ESPN on February 18 that Ron Washington is on the hottest seat of any manager in the league?”

Perhaps it’s just my sarcastic nature, but it could be viewed as he’s doing a passive aggressive thing to perhaps get his old job back? He was there when Nolan Ryan signed on to Texas back in 1989. Now that Nolan’s running the show, perhaps Bobby V is looking to play the same card only backwards? :)

C.J. Wilson’s mouth: CJ took some heat right as camp was opening when he said this..

“It’s no secret I don’t think I should be limited to the set-up role. I have too many weapons,” Wilson said. “Here is the reality. It is real simple. There are not very many guys that have the stuff that I do that would be willing to sign here if they were free agents. There is no experienced pitcher that has my stuff that would sign here, historically.”

It’s an interesting scenario, as one feels he lost the closer’s job much the same way that happened between Rod Barajas & Gerald Laird a few years ago. Got hurt, someone else stepped in, didn’t get it back. On one hand, I can understand his frustration. On the other hand, you don’t go mouthing off about your employer and why nobody else would want to sign here. Yikes. Nolan Ryan handled it well, but I wonder if that stuff will factor into the subconscious of those making decisions around here. I don’t have any desire to see CJ out of here, but think for a minute if he was paired with Ozzie Guillen. hahaha. :)

The Catching Situation:

What happened? We were stocked with catchers, who were backlogged behind Laird. We move Laird to Detroit and now we find ourselves looking for bottom of the barrel free agent catchers to shore things up? Saltamacchia hasn’t worked out, Teagarden hasn’t shown he can be a #1, and Max Ramirez? Dunno. Where’d our big glut go? A bit scary there.

Endy Chavez signed:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. See Joey M’s commentary for more on that.

Rangers miss payment:

It was announced that the Rangers missed a close to $40 million payment into an MLB fund that helps fund – I don’t remember exactly what, but references to deferred money to Arod, Juan Gonzalez, and Rafael Palmeiro came up. It was said that the payment could be something the union could file a grievance over, but have decided not to, leaving it to new management to figure out. Apparently it was factored into the price of the sale of the club, so it’s probably a non issue. Amusing how well Tom Hicks is trying to screw the pooch on the way out the door.

Josh Hamilton predicts 96 wins:

That’s a lot. When you realize it’s just 9 more games over last year it doesn’t seem like a lot, but 96? I’d love for that to happen, as it pretty much means we’d be in the playoffs. Come on Rangers!

Brad Wilkerson:

Brad Wilkerson signed a minor league deal with the Phillies today, which does NOT include an invite to camp . He supposedly retired last spring after being released by the Red Sox. This isn’t a big deal, but I just wanted an excuse to post this picture again:

In my quest to get the site in shape for the new season, I started working on the schedule pages. The first thing I did was check out the Rangers site to see what the schedule looked like. Looking for weird events that I need to keep track of, etc…
For the last few years, the Rangers deal has been with Fox TV. Certain really high profile games (like opening day) were on Fox 4. The majority of the games are on Fox Sports Southwest, as the team makes more money with them on cable. Since the deal was with Fox, the free OTA games were on KDFI Channel 27. That is not a surprise, since they’re all Fox.
However, today when I went to look at the schedule I noticed that the OTA games were on KTXA-21. It’s not a huge deal, but that’s a CBS station. Did something change with the TV deal that I’m not aware of? There wasn’t any sort of announcement that I recall.
Does anyone have any information on this? I wonder if there was some unannounced deal where the TV contract was renegotiated in order to help Hicks get some more coin.
Additionally, while it hasn’t been said, I’m hoping we can get a “100% of the games in HD” this year. Last year there was a huge deal made out of the fact that they had a rather large percentage of the games in HD. I’d love for all the games to be in HD. It’s so much sweeter that way.

As we creep closer to the start of spring training (it’s THIS MONTH!), I’ve finally started bringing my website up to speed. I’m unfortunately still unemployed from last May, and I found, despite the free time, I wasn’t always in the mood to work on my websites. That’s a feeling that only recently returned to me, and to that, I updated my website’s uniform number history section for 2010. The Rangers finally posted their roster for spring training, and with it come all the uniform number assignments for the 40 man roster as well as all the NRI’s (plus coaches).

A few observations.. The Rangers have had for awhile Zack Minasian as the home clubhouse manager for the last 16 years. After the 2009 season, he was let go (we never really heard much about that story, actually). One of Zack’s “things” from the past was that if there was some “important” Ranger who was with the club, and then was not, their number was not given out for a year after that. Some examples from the past were when Pudge left after 2002, nobody wore #7 in 2003 (until Eric Young got it in 04). Same goes for Juando’s departure after 1999. Nobody had #19 in 2000, but Gabe Kapler had it in 2001. Also Rafael Palmeiro. He had #25 in 2003, then nobody in 2004, until Marshall McDougall had it in 2005.

We have several numbers for departed Rangers that are unassigned in 2010. Now I don’t know who the new equipment manager is, but he appears to be holding up that tradition too. Anyway, the numbers are 8 (Rudy Jaramillo), 9 (Hank Blalock), 33 (Kevin Millwood), & 53 (Joaquin Benoit)

One other amusing thing to me (perhaps only to me, as I don’t think anyone else cares to this level) is the number 21. 2010 will be the first year in a row that the same player has worn number 21 since 2001. That is the most inconsistent number. Check this out:

2000: Ruben Mateo
2001: Ruben Mateo, Craig Monroe
2002: Pat Borders, Reynoldo Garcia, & Todd Hollandsworth
2003: Ruben Sierra, Jason Jones
2004: Jason Jones (only in camp, was released before opening day)
2005: Esteban German, Steve Karsay
2006: Adam Eaton
2007: Sammy Sosa
2008: Milton Bradley
2009: Jarrod Saltamacchia
2010: Jarrod Saltamacchia

The last player who wore #21 for two complete full seasons in a row was Warren Newson, who carried that number in 96, 97, & 98.

Oh, and Johnny Narron (Josh Hamilton’s “life coach”) switched from 73 to 23. :)

There is one thing I was hoping fans could help me by contributing. If you’ve ever looked at my uniform number history page, I’ve gathered over the years pictures of the various numbers being worn on players. I’ve posted some of them on the bottom of each number’s page as an “example” of that number. The Ruben Mateo picture above is one of those. But check out the pages, and look at the bottom. I think it makes for a nice little archive of pictures.

The part you can help with is with pictures. Take a look. If you have pictures of any of the players who I do not have a picture of, I’d love it if you could send me the picture for inclusion on these pages. I’m specifically looking for ones that show the player’s name along with the number. Not just the front where the number is, I really want one with the player’s name and number from the back being shown. I know a ton of you have picture archives (I’ve seen ’em on Facebook & Picasa Web Albums), but I’m sure there’s a ton more I haven’t seen.

Please take a look at what you have, and if you have something useful for this project, let me know, I’d love to get it online. Danke. Here’s some of the ones I’ve collected. It’s the guys who are only up for 2-3 games in a season and then never to return are the hardest to get shots of. :)