In my ongoing quest to get the majority of the content of this site into a blog format so I can more easily maintain it, I finished another section today. The uniform number history section. It’s a place where I track who has worn what uniform numbers in the history of the Rangers.
I cover from 1972 to 2005 (and 2006 when they announce it). Spring training before 3 years ago is spotty, and I know the odd coach has slipped through, but I’m pretty confident it’s all the regular season players. Check it out in the history section in the menu on the left.
You can also get to it here.

Today I’ve made a few changes to the website. For awhile now I’ve been doing entries and reports and comments in Six Apart’s Movable Type (MT) blogging software. It’s worked out so well for me that I’ve decided to move a lot more of my website into MT. When I started this site back in December of 1998, I was using Microsoft Frontpage. And for a couple of things I still will, but there’s a lot of things on this site that can be better served by being put into MT.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on moving the roster pages and the transaction archives into MT software. I’ve finished that today (mostly). The site’s menu now goes to the proper locations. It’s pretty much the same information that was here before, except now it’s in MT software. This has the added advantage to you of making the data searchable. This will also make my life a lot easier going forward in terms of data maintenance.
If you go the Roster page, you’ll see all the current active players, as well as the guys on the DL, and some selected minor league players. This is the same as it was before. (Yeah, I know several of the active players have filed for FA, but I don’t move ’em to former until that exclusive time period is up and thy’re truly not Ranger players anymore). The search in this area will search all the roster pages I have. Now earlier I said it was mostly all done. That’s because I haven’t finished converting over all the former Ranger player roster pages into the new format. Due to the way they were made over the years, I have to do them manually, and it’s somewhat tedious, so only some are done. I will get all the other ones in there. Since this was the only thing left to do, I didn’t want to hold up all these changes for former player pages.
Secondly, if you go to the transactions pages, you’ll see the roster transactions that I’ve had on my site since February of 1999. I have mostly tracked major league changes over the years, not so much the minor league transactions. But if you go into that area, there’s another search box, and that will let you search all my roster transaction archives.
So that’s the latest changes to the site. Please take a look at the areas, and come back here and leave a comment with your thoughts on these changes. I intend on making more such changes before the start of next season. I’m probably also going to be changing the way I handle game updates, too, although I haven’t worked out exactly how I’m going to do that yet.

One of the hardest things in writing this blog is coming up with something to say about every game. There’s about 200 of them in a whole season if you count spring training. Since ths is a fan site, I do it for fun, and it’s obvious that when the team wins, or is winning in general, it makes things a lot easier to deal with. When they’re losing, or just generally stinking up the joint, it’s a pain to come up with another way to say “Well, they lost”. Regular visitors to my site over tme know that I seem to take a break of about a week once during a season.
Well, I’m apparently not the only one who feels the way they do about the grind of updating a fan site for an entire season. Check out this article over at the Wall Street Journal by a guy who does a Mets fan site. It has some really good insight into what it takes.
I bet you Jamey Newberg feels this way, too. :)

A few short remarks:
This series has NOT been the pitching will dominate one that was advertised, that’s for sure.
If the Sox win this series, I say Joe Crede will probably win the MVP. He’s been great at third, and pitched in a lot offensively, too. He’s definitely my MVP for Games 1-2.

Got done watching the White Sox beat the Angels to get to the World Series. A few random thoughts about that..

• I was really surprised that Vlad Guerrero was so ineffective in this series. Given how badly he destroys the Rangers, he batted worse than Phil Nevin did for us at the end of this season.
• I wonder how many times we’re going to hear about Shoeless Joe Jackson during the World Series.
• Anyone else find it ironic that the widow of a the former owner of the team the Sox beat presented Jerry Reinsdorf with the AL championship trophy?
• Lou Piniella looks like a wooden statue when he’s on TV in the booth.
• Surprising to me that in the three games the Sox played in Anaheim, they didn’t make one substitution from the starting nine players in each game. That was simply amazing.
• Former Rangers Carl Everett & Scott Podsednik go to the Fall classic with the White Sox.
• Surprised that Fransisco Rodriguez was that bad in the 8th and 9th innings.
• How many Angels conspiracy theory fans think the umpires cost them the series?

And yeah, I want Houston to go to the World Series, too. It’s looking good for them, up 3-1 with Andy Pettite on the mound for game five.

The annual Halloween family event will take place again this year on October 29, 2005. From the press release…

Families will be treated to a day of face-painting, pumpkin-decorating, mask-making, home run hitting fun. Other Halloween festivities include crafts, pitching, a duck pond, ‘fishing’, ring toss, a balloon artist and spooky stories! Children decked out in costume will be entered in a drawing to win a baseball autographed by a Texas Rangers player.

There’s more information about this on the Rangers site here.

Well, the Rangers season is over, and we took a step backwards in 2005. Generally teams that overperform one year tend to slide backwards the next year, and we followed that. We were 10 games lower in the standings than last year. We ended up in third place again, which I suppose is better than the four years we spent in last. However, I’m tired of all the losing. I’m ready to win something again. Next year will be the 10 year anniversary of our first division championship. I know we won twice more in the following three years, but 10 years. That’s a long time. I know we need pitching, I know we need that, but I’m starting to feel frustrated. Perhaps it’s because the playoffs are going on, and the Rangers are at home again. We’ve got a lot of work to do in the offseason. I’m working on another article where I talk about every player that was on the field this season which will go into player specifics.
That leads me into the next part of the story. John Hart is gone as general manager. I think it’s a fair statement to say that you’d have a hard time finding many fans who said they liked him. Hart was extremely inaccessible when he was GM. You never saw him for the most part. Whenever there was a signing or whatnot, there was very frequently a “conference call” so he didn’t have to actually show up. He was there from time to time, but it was the exception, not the rule as far as this fan can tell. On Hart’s watch we signed probably the single worst free agent signing in club history, that being Chan Ho Park. How much of that was really Hart’s doing, and how much of it was Hicks in his “Let’s be Steinbrenner” period, we probably will never know. But there were several other not great signings during Hart’s era. Those were Todd Van Poppel, Jay Powell, Juan Gonzalez. There were also some really dumb moves too, like letting Travis Hafner go for beans. Letting Doug Davis get away. Both dumb moves. There’s plenty others. It wasn’t all bad, though. Some of the positive things were basically stealing Chris Young from the Expos for Einar Diaz (which ends up being Travis Hafner for Chris Young, essentially). John Thompson was great when he was here, that was a good move at the time. Frank Francisco (chair aside) was a great move – if he regains his health, it will be good for us again. But I suppose the best moves made during Hart’s run was signing Mike Young and Hank Blalock to long term contracts. That will definitely save us some money for a few years. That’s the one thing I thought Hart did well in Cleveland that he used here and it worked, the signing of players long term. Thought it was shrewd move in Cleveland. I wish they could have gotten that done with Kevin Mench, though. Overall I have to give John Hart’s run a C. He isn’t the devil like people like Randy Galloway make him out to be. He’s by no stretch the greatest we’ve had. Yes, there were a lot of dumb and bonehead moves, but what GM doesn’t have a handful of those under his belt? But he’s gone, which will make a lot of sports radio announcers and a lot of fans happy.
We replaced him with Jon Daniels, John Hart’s 28 year old assistant GM. Personally, I was hoping that would happen. Now I’m not foolish enough to say I know Daniels personally. I’ve only ever met him once, and that was in a group setting anyway. But in the little time I’ve got to hear him speak in person, he’s nothing like Hart, even though he was Hart’s assistant. From what I can tell, Daniels handled most of the contract negotiations anyway. Daniels will talk to fans and to the press. Obviously his job dictates that he can’t tell you everything, but I get the impression that Daniels wants to tell you what he can, and doesn’t put off an aura of “No, you’re not supposed to know that” or “Why are you asking me that?” – those things I felt from Hart. Daniels is pretty much a clean slate in terms of I don’t know if anyone really knows what will happen with him in terms of moves he’ll make – how he handle this and that. I won’t go into a lot of speculation on that, as there isn’t a lot to put out there, I think. We’ll just have to take it as it comes, and I think I speak for a lot of fans that I feel good about that. Hopefully his first order of business is signing Teixeira to a long term contract (and I mean more than 3 years – something like 7).
I’ll have more soon regarding individual players and what I’d like to do. But in the meantime, I have to say I really am enjoying the fact that the Yankees get to go home.

After all this time, Rangers Captain was finally in the upper deck! If Captain is supposed to be for kids, then he should be upstairs a lot more often. Most families can’t afford to sit downstairs where he usually is. Kids and families are forced upstaris because of the cost of attending. And that’s why Rangers Captain should be upstairs more often.
It was fun having him up there, actually. This picture was taken with my cel phone camera in Section 328. Captain was standing in the aisle in Row 3. It happened on Saturday night, in what was at the time the big highlight of the night.

Was reading online today and ran across this article on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette site. It’s about how technology in use with new ticket systems is putting a crimp on some scalper activities (that’s a good thing).
Check out the article. It’s relevant here, because the Texas Rangers also participate in the same program, which is one of being able to sell unused season tickets through the team’s website. It’s far more secure due to bar code scanning at the gate.
I wish more teams in more sports did this kind of thing.

I got terribly busy yesterday and today and had no time at work to do an update. I will do one for Thursday’s game when I update for the weekend games.
I also see that we were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. I had given up awhile ago on that, but it’s still kind of sad to see that when it happens.