Well, as with most everyone else in Rangers fan land, I was surprised last night when I read that Juan Dominguez was traded. I think most fans tended to agree that Juan fit the mode of a player with an awful lot of promise, but one that has generally left it unfulfilled. He’s shown incredible starts (that one in Yankee Stadium was probably his high point), and some really horrendous ones. And then there’s his well documented off field problems, which I won’t go into here.
Even having said all that, I think most fans kept feeling that he’d “get it”, and become the great pitcher we all wanted to see come up through the system and become dominant. So when he wasn’t picked to be the fifth starter earlier this week, my guess is that most people figured it would be another setback, as he hasn’t shown that he can deal with these “setbacks” well. The word came down that he was late for another team meeting that day, which probably didn’t help the team’s mood about him. Then Adam Eaton got hurt, and pitchers 3-5 in the rotation got moved up, and Juan Dominguez was widely accepted to have been given the fifth starter’s spot by default, than actual merit.
Then comes last night, we get the word that he was traded. And to the Oakland A’s as well. It’s at this point where we start hearing things about we hope he does well, as you want to feel good for him. But as a Rangers fan, I have to say I hope he falls on his face in Oakland, because I don’t want his skill to blossom there and come back and bite us in the ass. I know most people won’t come out and say they want the guy to fail, but I refer simply to the sport. As a human being I hope he matures and becomes a great pitcher, but simply on the sport of it, I don’t want him to do well at all. I hate trades inside the division just for that reason.
I’m not the greatest at breaking down big detail on players I don’t know the most about – but Jamey Newberg is good at that. Go check out his report this morning for some detail on the inbound players in this move. I don’t know much about the inbound guys (or the transient player we had briefly in the three team trade), except I remember the name John Koronka from when he was a Rule 5 draft player by us a couple of years ago.
The only thinking I have now is this.. Is John Kronoka really that much better than the other #5 options we had at this point (minus Dominguez)? My gut feeling is that we might have been better off giving #5 to Dominguez, or some of the other guys we had in the competition than Koronka. That might not be fair to Koronka, but that’s probably our good old friend “fear of the unknown” creeping in there.
Either way, I hope whoever pitches for us gets wins, and those who pitch against us do not. If this all sounds like rambling, it might be. I don’t write my best essays in the morning, as the brain isn’t in gear yet. :)

I got this submitted via a comment a few days back. One of my site visitors submitted this graphic he made. It was pretty cool, so I wanted to make sure y’all saw it. It’s been the background image on my laptop for the last few days. Click on the thumbnail below to see a larger image in another window.
Thanks to “Chaz” for submitting it. It’s good work!

There’s players flying all over the place right now. :) The next 24 hours will be quite chaotic for the roster. I have decided that until it’s all sorted out who is where when the final roster is put toether tomorrow night, I’ll wait and see what’s going to happen. I’m going to be at the game on Saturday, so I plan to pick up a media guide which I’ll use to update roster pages for players that don’t have them now. My roster page/transactions page has some of the changes, but not all – I’ll catch up when the 25 man is announced.