The last three games of the season. For the Rangers, it doesn’t matter much of anything, except possibly being over .500.
For the National League.. Damn Bud Selig and his inventing the Wild Card. It’s no good, it doesn’t add any exceitement at all, does it?
That issue aside, my hometown Phillies might be able to dump the ghost of 1964 if the Cardinals really blow it here. That would be a most impressive collapse.

I don’t have much to say about this, other than I wanted to point it out.
Jon Heyman over at SI.com has a nice article online today about Arod, and the possibilities he might be traded from the Yankees in the offseason.

I haven’t given up. :) I just have gotten busy, and yeah – the end of another season where we won’t get into the playoffs has taken it’s toll on me.
Still, I will play catchup on Thursday and get ready for the final three home games of the season; I’ll probably be at two of them.

Here’s a picture I took back on Feb 1, 2003. It’s actually 9 pictures that I spliced together, but is one I’m rather proud of. I just added it to the Wikipedia page for The Ballpark in Arlington, so I thought I’d mention it here. This picture was taken sitting in the middle seat of the last row of Section 225, which was about the most “straight in the middle” of the park seat I could figure out.
If you’d like to check out larger versions of this picture, you can do so at the page for it in my photo gallery here on this site.
I also have an older panoramic shot of Mark Holtz lake taken standing in the upper councourse.

As you can see if you’re reading this (unless you’re reading on RSS, or are reading one one of those sports leech sites that bring in news from everywhere else and bypass us, the original author), I’ve changed my site layout..
I moved the site into a template based system back in April when this season started. That makes changing things around easier to do, since all I need to do is change the css and templates. While the site has had always had a minimalistic look to it which I’ve liked, it has had an inconsistant font design. Various sections had different looks to them. I’m aiming to change that. I’ve kept the overall minimalistic layout, but I now have a more consistant font control.
There’s a few things that haven’t been changed. They are:

• The Forums – I’m undecided if I want to put the forums in this template layout. It would require “squashing” them to put the menu on the right there. Otherwise it should be pretty easy.
• The Photo Gallery – That, like movable type here, is template driven. However, gallery is a lot more complicated with it’s template work. I might leave well enough alone.

There is also one known issue. It’s this new “date image” thing I have. It looks fine in Firefox, but looks weird in Internet Explorer. While I think everyone should use Firefox, I do know it should look right in IE – even if IE does’t interpret the HTML properly. I’ll look at that later, but just to let you know I’m aware of that.
I really would appreciate feedback on the new site layout, please leave a comment here. Also, thanks to “RedSplat” for doing that date bar image.

Sorry about my freakout there. I honestly was really bummed out over the Devil Rays series. I have no intentions on stopping the site – far from it (more on that in a minute). But I’ve reached the point where I don’t think we can come back from the position we’re in. Would I love us to? Oh hell yes. It’s just my gut feeling that we won’t is what drove me to say that. :)
Additionally, I see that Eric Young was purchased from AAA for the stretch run in September. I hope that EY can do for us in 2006 what Dave Valle did for us in 1996, and making me look like an ass for “giving up”. Go ahead EY. Do it. :)

Caught a pretty cool article with Mark Teixeira this morning on mlb.com.
It talks about what Mark does in his spare time. These articles are always cool to read. But what caught my eye in particular was his remark about kid videos. Apparently Mark watches the Baby Einstein series of videos with his kid. My wife and I have quite a few of the same series we show to our daughter. It’s rather cool that a player and I share the same choices in that regard.
Now I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that – the stuff is pretty darn good. But I got a kick out of reading that. I also agree with Mark that Bull Durham is the greatest baseball movie of all time. Way to go Mark! :)

It was a year ago today that this picture became such a hollow gesture, and unfortunately what Rafael Palmeiro will now forever be remembered for. It was a year ago today that Rafael Palmeiro was suspended for a positive test to MLB’s drug program.
It’s still a bummer to me, because while officially not retired, all that he worked for, all that he was has been flushed down the toilet. I have a bunch of Raffy memorabalia at home, including a couple of Rangers giveaways I had custom framed. I won’t be getting rid of it, but the sheer enjoyment of having ’em hanging in my house is gone; replaced with sadness over what was thrown away by his positive test. Even if he was 100% innocent, he never really made much of a serious attempt to deny things. Sure, he denied it, but it wasn’t a terribly angry response, it was a sheepish kind of “Yeah, I didn’t do it”.
To this day I still don’t know what to really make of all that. Was Jose Canseco totally right? Probably not. Was Raffy as innocent as he claimed? Probably not. Either way, 3,020 hits, 569 home runs, 2,831 total games played, and an awful lot of fan goodwill is gone; never to return.
Say it ain’t so, Raffy.

Matt Stairs? What the hell?
I hope this is part of another deal going somewhere else. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Maybe Wilkerson is going somewhere…
Here’s the story from the Rangers site. Here’s his salary breakdown.
1 year/$1.35M (2006), plus $50,000 in incentives
* signed extension 9/05
* $50,000 incentive for 400 PAs in 2006

I read a lot. I used to read mostly books, but it’s mostly the Internet now. I also read a lot of baseball stuff, and as such I like to read up on what’s going on. Anyway, I read a couple of fan blogs for MLB teams fairly regularly, and it made me wonder if such animals exist for ther rest of the teams? Here’s what I read regularly blog wise:
Texas Rangers:
1) My site at https://www.rangerfans.com
2) The Newberg Report Site; (also available as a blog here).
Seattle Mariners: U.S.S. Mariner.
Philadelphia Phillies: Beerleaguer.
If you know of a good MLB fan blog, let me know. I also read a ton of more generic baseball blogs (Will Carroll’s, a few other Rangers sites, mlb trade rumours, etc..) Let me know if you know of something good there too – although I’m primarily looking for QUALITY fan blogs for specific teams. And it has to be reguarly updated, too.