Congratulations to Michael Young on another 200 hit season. That’s something 26 of them in a row now.

Update: Sep 18, 2007 @ 5:15PM:
Well, after thinking about it for a few days, and listening to the feedback I got, I’ve decided to not end the site. At least not yet. What I’m going to do is finish out the season, and then stop. I’m not going to update for a couple of months after that, and see how I feel. Perhaps it’s just supreme burnout, but I’ve never felt quite like that at the end of a losing season. As I’ve pointed out before, this is the end of the ninth season since I started doing this site. Only two of them have been winning seasons (1999 & 2004). I doubt it’s burnout for THAT reason. Remember, I grew up in Philly, and rooted for a franchise that has now lost 10,000 games in it’s overall existence. :) I think it was born out of frustration at seeing lower than expected audience numbers.

I did run the logs as I said I would, and found these numbers for accessing the xml files that comprise the news feeds for the various aggregators out there:

Jun 2007: 9,026
Jul 2007: 9,561
Aug 2007: 8,589
Sep 2007: 4,044

Now those aren’t true numbers, because it doesn’t count all the calls made on the files by the various aggregators checking to see if anything new has been added. There’s no (quick) way to tell unique feed reader stats on those numbers, but it’s still larger than I figured. The overall pageview numbers are fairly respectable, too:

Jun 2007: 107,706 (3,590 a day avg)
Jul 2007: 82,156 (2,650 a day avg)
Aug 2007: 79,980 (2,580 a day avg)
Sep 2007: 20,637 (1,213 a day avg)

Again, things like Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp spider will inflate those numbers – I’d say about 10% of that is search spider pageviews. That’s a completely unscientific stat, I did not properly research it, I admit. Still, they’re decent (if not great) numbers.

So there is an audience after all. Some of the feedback said that since I went to a “no immediate comments” system with the blog, they’re having problems. Let me address that briefly. The reason I did that is to combat spam. Comment spam is a major problem on blogs everywhere, and with the new system here, there are better tools, but I decided that I didn’t want to deal with the problem, so I turned off anonymous comments. I was getting about 200-250 comment spams per day before I did that, now I’m at zero. I’m sorry if this gets in your way, but it makes life a lot easier. There are multiple methods for you to login for. I suggest using Typepad. It’s a unified login system that is recognized by any blog using Six Apart’s “blogging software” packages like this one (Movable Type), as well as their other stuff like Typepad itself, Vox, and LiveJournal). It’s free, and you can use it on all of those things.

Anyway, to sum up I will finish out the season, and take a break, and re-evaluate at some unspecified part of the off season. I don’t know what I’ll do then NOW, but I’ll probably continue on, I think I just need a break.

My original post from Saturday is still here in the extended version of the post. If you’re viewing this on a feed reader, you’ll need to visit the main site to see it.

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Thanks to TR Sullivan for pointing out that it was 34 years ago today (Sep 9, 1973) that Bob Short, the man that brought the Rangers to Texas (as the owner), fired Whitey Herzog, and replaced him with Billy Martin.

Given my age, I know Martin from his dirt stomping fiascos in New York. When Martin was a Ranger, I was 8 years old, and if you weren’t the Philadelphia Phillies, I didn’t care. Billy Martin should get credit for the first really good Rangers team 84-76 record and second place, and won Manager of the Year. Of course in typical 70’s Rangers fashion he was gone the year after that. I wonder if Tom Grieve will mention this during Sunday’s game, as he did play for Martin as a Ranger.
On a more generic topic, I wonder if there will ever be a video produced chronicling the managerial history of the Rangers. I admit to knowing the names of our managers in the 70’s for the most part, but not much about their time here, tell you the truth. I’d love to see something like that, especially if it included video clips of all the guys. I wonder if any video even exists of Eddie Stanky’s game.

I got hit by a bomb of projects all at the same time – been working on them almost non stop for the last several days. I’m going to put placeholder pages for the games I missed, but I won’t be writing commentary for them, and if it keeps going, probably not for the series that starts tonight either.
Gotta love it when several projects all come up at the same time. No spare computer time! :)

In my getting the old entries from my site into the blog software, I ran across this link from 2003. It was an article talking about Hank Blalock, and includes this quote from Buck Showalter on Hank…

Hank Blalock will reach his potential. Rangers Buck Showalter will make sure of it. “His progress is a priority for me,” the Rangers skipper said.

That reminds me a lot of the remarks that Ron Washington made when he first became skipper of the Rangers, and his “He’s mine” comments. I know Hank’s been hurt most of the year, but I’m still hopeful for that. My gut feeling says 2008 is a make or break year for Blalock. I have no big list of numbers to back up that feeling, just one of those things you “feel”.
I didn’t write this to dump on Hank – I like him a lot, but the Showalter / Washington remarks seemed somewhat similar to me. :)

Check this post out over at Oriole’s Hangout. On the headline from the main page of their site, they had the line Paul’s Game Recap: (curled in fetal position) – that made me chuckle. He included some classic comments like this:

MAKE IT STOP. Please. Anyone. I’m begging you. This is the most torturous game I’ve ever witnessed. I cannot believe what I’m seeing. I feel like I’m about to burst into tears– or flames. I want to go home, yet I’m stuck here watching this nauseating train wreck.
I don’t want to be a recapper anymore. I’m questioning my entire life as I know it. Why am I here? What have I done to deserve this?

After thinking about it some more, I think this video applies. :)

I don’t know how many of you follow the site “The Smoking Gun”, but it’s a site that regularly posts court documents and things that are generally supposed to be sensitive. Most of the time it’s stuff I don’t care about, but every once in awhile a real doozy comes along. Like this guy… Jonathan Lee Riches. He filed a lawsuit in court against Barry Bonds, Bud Selig, and Hank Aaron’s bat. Check out this summary from the site:

In his lawsuit, Riches, weaves an intricate conspiracy theory involving television ratings, steroids, the cracking of the Liberty Bell, Colombian narco-terrorists, and secretly recorded conversations for which journalists Robert Novak and Judith Miller have transcripts.

Some other amusing stuff is that he claims that Bud Selig is Barry Bonds’ steroids dealer, Barry Bonds personally bench pressed the guy, and of course Bonds used Aaron’s corked bat to crack the Liberty Bell.
Go check it out, it’s quite amusing.

Testing again.
The final release version of this software came out this morning. It’s installed now, just wanted to test it, make sure things didn’t explode. :)

A really good site to read regularly is “The Biz of Baseball”. It talks about well.. business related issues to baseball. Anyway, this morning I noticed an article about the Rangers, specifically about the “You could use some baseball” ad campaign.
I wrote about this some time ago – the ads are generally funny, and reflect little “moments” we have when we realize that our entertainment choices aren’t great. The only one that’s a little bit of an eyebrow raiser is the one I talked about back in February about “First base has nothing to do with kissing”. Explaining that to a small kid could be odd, but nothing to really get bent out of shape over. ;)
And unlike some people who take any opportunity to bitch about Tom Hicks, I wanted to say I liked the article a lot, and the ad campaign made me laugh, so yes. It worked. Although I don’t think it would make me attend any more games, no advertising would work on me in that regard. :)
Go read the article at bizofbaseball – it’s an enjoyable read.