In a quite from Hank Steinbrenner that looks right out of the late 70’s/early 80’s George Steinbrenner playbook, Hank appears to have mouthed off pretty well. This sounds a lot like all the stuff the Daddy George used to say 25-30 years ago.
What do you think of this? Kind of makes me think that the more they mouth off, the bigger the fall there will be.
In a post over at the DMN Rangers’ blog this afternoon, it was announced that Nolan Ryan’s contract was officially signed, a four year deal. It runs through 2011.
Likewise, Jon Daniels got a two year extension as well. This runs both of them through 2011.
Of course, people can be fired anyway, but it’s nice to see an attempt at stable upper management, something we haven’t had in quite a long time. The true impact of Nolan Ryan on the club as President won’t be known for awhile, I’d imagine. To date, it still seems somewhat like a “figurehead” type of thing, but I suspect it won’t stay that way for long.
Despite the stupid Chris Young trade, which I’m still somewhat peeved at, I’d give thumbs up for Jon Daniels, so I’m glad to see these moves happen.
ACK! I need someone’s help. I had one person bail out of my fantasy league #1 which is drafting tomorrow night! That leaves us with an odd number of teams, and Yahoo won’t draft a league with an odd number of teams; we’ll lose our draft slot in that case.
I need someone to join the league between now and about 6PM tomorrow night (Central Time). If you were thinking of joining, and missed the boat, I need some help in filling the league. Thanks.
League 1 ID: 10215
Password: sosa600
Live Online Draft: Sat Mar 1 @ 8:00pm CST
Unique URL: http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/league/rangerfans
It’s been taken care of – thanks to the guy who signed up to pick up the slack.
The second game of the spring came on at an odd time. Most spring games don’t start at 4:05 Central Time. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter, as I was unavailable. My wife and I were at the Doctor’s office for her pregnancy. So I didn’t get to hear any of this. This, like yesterday’s game was on MLB’s Gameday Audio. If you don’t know Gameday audio, it’s a surprisingly good deal. For $15 a season, you get streaming access to every game. You get the home and away audio for every game played the entire season, including several Spanish stations. The Rangers’ Spanish team is on here. But if you spend a lot of time in front of the computer, and like other teams besides the Rangers, it’s a great deal.
Anyway, in looking over the box score, it appears we faced a pretty “real” Angels team. The Angels starting lineup was pretty much a regular season one. All their regulars appeared to start the game, including Torii Hunter, who most people figured would have been a Ranger now. Likewise the Rangers lineup looked pretty solid. I don’t think this was the “regular” lineup, but it seemed pretty close.
Offensively, the Rangers were pretty confined. Counting subs, we sent a total of 18 batters to the plate. Only four of them got hits. And three of those got two each (Kinsler, Hamilton, & Murphy). The other was Hank Blalock. Kinsler & Blalock had a double each, and Josh Hamilton had a triple. Our RBI’s came from Mike Young, Josh Hamilton, and Ben Broussard (with a sac fly). Most of this damage was against Anaheim starter Ervin Santana, who gave up two of the three runs in his two innings of work. He gave up three hits and a walk, which will usually push a run or two across the board.
The remainder of the Angels pitchers are surnames I don’t recognize (Olenberger, Bonilla, M White, & Arredondo). Even the linked names in the box score on mlb don’t have names for these guys. Must be all NRI’s. White though was pretty good, striking out four in his two innings of work.
On the other side of the coin, the Rangers sent eight pitchers to the hill in this one. Only the starter (Kason Gabbard) threw more than an inning (he threw two). Well, OK, Eric Hurley threw 1.2, but his time was balanced by Batista who threw just 0.1 (to one batter, no less). The remaining Rangers pitchers were Jamey Wright, Fukumori, Davis, Kam Loe, & Franklyn German. Gabbard, Hurley & Davis gave up one run each. Hurley walked two many (2 in 1.2 to go with three hits), but the walks were down (4 in all by Rangers pitching).
Because this game ended in a tie, I was tempted to make some sort of Bud Selig joke, but decided against it, as I couldn’t make it work well enough.
Bring on Eric & Victor tomorrow!
It wasn’t a big deal (for me) seeing him in an Indians Jersey. Or a Tigers. Kansas City was a bit strange, but this just looks weird to me. I can’t tell you why. Just a gut thing.
And so begins another year. I got to listen to the game, it was on mlb.com’s Gameday Audio. They had one of mlb.com’s “webcasts” (which means it wasn’t broadcast on the radio). This is game that originally was not supposed to count, it was listed as “Charity Game”, but it ended up being an official game anyway. 5,460 showed up.
The Rangers were designated as the home team, and sent out Kevin Millwood er, Brandon McCarthy AJ Murray to start the game. Arlington was “OK”. I don’t see a pitch count for him, but he was not crisp. Didn’t give up any runs, but walked two in his two innings of work. In the bottom of the first, Ian Kinsler got on via an error, which was ironic, since he gave up an error himself in the top of the first. However, KC pitcher John Bale then struck out the side.
The Rangers first run of 2008 was an RBI double by David Murphy, bringing in Marlon Byrd (who had also doubled) in the second inning.
In the third, the Royals sent out their #1 pick Luke Hochevar, who promptly sent down all six Rangers he faced. Two perfect innings. I heard him on the radio the other morning on XM, and he seemed pretty blase about being “the franchise” for the Royals. In fact, he said “you know” an awful lot in his talking, you know? ;)
Gerald Laird continued his defensive prowess behind the plate by throwing out Alex Gordon in the fourth attempting to steal; ending the inning.
In the top of the fifth, Frank Francisco gave up a run on three hits, and didn’t really help himself. That gave him an official blown save, but then…
In the bottom of the fifth inning, Brian Lawrence (briefly in camp with Rangers not all that long ago) gave up two hits and two runs, one a rather nice sounding double by Josh Hamilton. At that time Eric Nadel was in the booth with the mlb announcer. Hamilton was referred to as having “effortless power” by the mlb.com guy; Nadel agreed with that. They talked a bunch about being a “nice guy”, as the guy announcing the game was doing Reds games a lot last year. It was really nice to hear Eric Nadel again. Be better hearing him on Friday when the first Rangers broadcast happens.
In the bottom of the seventh, the first home run of the season for the Rangers was by Taylor Teagarden. It came off of former Ranger Ron Mahay, now with the Royals. We also picked up a few runs in the bottom of the 8th to close off the scoring at six.
Had the usual non Rangers announcer gaffes about our players. The most noticeable one to me was the guy calling Wes Littleton “Wes Littlejohn”, and that he was trying to win a roster spot for the first time.
I am busy at work with a project, and almost forgot to listen, but I had the whole game on. Funny moment is that they played the bottom of the ninth, even though the game was officially over. Only took a couple of minutes, nothing really happened – was probably an agreed to thing so that pitchers could get their work.
Nice to have baseball back again.
A couple of days ago we got the word that Kevin Millwood “tweaked” (Good Lord, what exactly does that mean) his hamstring, which will cause him to miss his first scheduled start on Friday.
Then this morning, Evan Grant posted the news that Brandon McCarthy is being held back from the exhibition opener tomorrow.
Neither are (officially anyway) being classified as a real problem. They’re saying that Millwood should only miss one start, and that McCarthy could pitch if he had to. I’ve been following this sport enough to know that we rarely get the TRUE meaning of these things. Aside from that hyper technical term of “tweaked”, do we really know – HONESTLY – what the problems are? They very well could be not a big deal.
I’m sure we’ll hear the usual platitudes about how it’s not a big deal, they’re really fine, and the word most often heard with news like this… “precautionary”.
But when I heard the McCarthy news, my first thought was “OK, that’s two. It always comes in threes, so who gets it next”?
Never good to hear this news at ANY time in camp.
Dollar values:
Beltre, Omar $390,000
Littleton, Wes $397,510
McCarthy, Brandon $404,810
Metcalf, Travis $392,000
Murphy, David $393,000
Murray, AJ $392,000
Ogando, Alexi $390,000
The 2008 Rangers TV schedule has been released. No huge surprises about it, although I have a few things to say.
It appears that more of the games are being shown on Fox Sports Southwest than before. The schedule shows 110 of them there. 48 are on “free TV” on KDFI-27, and two are on Fox 4 (home opener & July 13th). That totals 160 games. Up until a couple of years ago it was pretty much guaranteed there’d be 162 games televised. The last few years it seems it’s 160. Does anyone know (for real) why there are two that aren’t? Is this a tradeoff for the two we get televised during spring training? It seems with all the money (there’s that word again) going around baseball and TV, they’d do all of them. You would THINK they’d jump at the chance to sell more commercial time. I don’t understand that.
Anyway, the other two could be broadcast, as this schedule doesn’t list any national games. There’s always a few games that get rescheduled for ESPN Game of the Week, or Fox Saturday afternoon baseball or something like that. So this probably isn’t set in stone. Also, there’s no HD schedule yet. It doesn’t affect me personally, as I haven’t been able to afford to buy one of those yet – hopefully soon.
Another interesting thing is this new “FSN Plus” channel, which will be showing the 50 “free TV” games on an alternate cable channel. Read this from the press release about the schedule:
FSN Southwest will distribute the 50 over-the-air games broadcast in Dallas Fort Worth in the team’s outer markets on FSN Plus, a second channel available to participating cable systems. Games on FSN Southwest will be shown in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and parts of New Mexico and on FSN Plus affiliates in markets where there are programming conflicts.
I have DirecTV here, and see them all anyway, but I’m a little unclear as to the purpose of this. If I subscribe to a system that has access to “FSN Plus”, I’d be able to get the free TV broadcasts anyway. While I don’t think this is bad, it just is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – I don’t get it. Can someone who does please explain it to me?
The Rangers site has a press release about the schedule, as well as a downloadable PDF TV schedule of each game and which channel it is scheduled to be on.
I’ve started updating my 2008 schedule with this. I haven’t posted it yet, because I’m doing something new in 2008, and it’s incredibly tedious to set up – it takes me about an hour or so to do one month. But it will pay off as the season gets started. I hope to be finished some time early this coming week with that.