The 2011 Texas Rangers regular season has been a season like no other for me since I started following this team in 1995. For a couple of reasons.
First off, we were the defending American League Champions. That alone was an interesting thing to deal with. The perception that the Rangers were the team that everyone else was chasing was a weird feeling. But a good feeling just the same.
Second, I only attended four games this season. Two were in Arlington (Games 2 & 157), and two were in Philadelphia (Games 45 & 46). That’s a low for me since I’ve been a Rangers fan. For someone who used to go to about 25 games a year, that was a major adjustment.
Thirdly, my drop in updating the site. I took a huge number of breaks this year, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that I dropped cable TV and went to antenna only. I discovered that my being more than a casual fan was really based around the fact that I could watch the games on TV.
Still, it was a great season. The Rangers won the division again for the second year in a row, and the fifth overall. We set a record for wins in a season, as well as a record for home attendance. Both by minimal numbers over the previous records, but still. New records for wins and attendance are great!
CJ Wilson stepped up and pitched like the Number 1 pitcher slot he was put in. He apparently picked up a lot from Cliff Lee when Cliff was here last year. CJ seemed very “Lee-like” in several places this season. I’ll say it again, I was wrong last year in thinking there was no way he’d make the rotation, but he destroyed that.
The Rangers new scoreboard in right is spectacular. Something that should have been done ages ago, but when I saw it for the first time, it actually gave me that “seeing the green in the field as a kid” feeling. I loved the new scoreboard. Shame I only got to go to two games.
The broadcaster stuff is more confusing. We started off the season with John Rhadigan replacing Josh Lewin on TV. He didn’t last too long, and was fired fairly early on in the season. That caused a shuffle of personnel, and we ended up with Dave Barnett replacing Rhadigan on TV, and Steve Busby replacing Barnett on radio. At the time, some noise was made about those moves being temporary for the rest of the season. I certainly hope that’s the case. I never wanted Barnett on TV, he was one of the reasons I stopped listening on radio for the most part. At this point, if things went the way I would like for 2012, I’d bring back Josh Lewin for TV, and have Bryan Dolgin be with Eric on the radio. When Dolgin was on the radio, I liked him. I have nothing against Busby – I like him too. But I’ve read where he’s not interested in doing play by play full time. But Dolgin is younger, and I thought worked well with Nadel.
We’re going to the playoffs starting in a few hours. My Phillies are in too. This will be interesting. Not sure who I’d root for there. :)

I’m going to Friday night’s Rangers game. I’ll be setting a new low in number of games attended (that isn’t a zero, I didn’t go to any in 1994 or 1995). This will be my SECOND game of the season.
Extended unemployment really saps your casual spending money big time. :(
Still, there’s a shot they could clinch tonight. I’m hoping Chuck puts on the Angels game on the Jumbotron after the fireworks so we can see them lose and we’d clinch. :)

Seems this having to watch/listen to games at real time is affecting me more than I anticipated. I’m missing weeks at a time here.
Will get caught up again soon, hopefully. :)
I miss Fox Sports Southwest!

Hey Texas Rangers fans.. What would you pick for a Texas Rangers specific playlist of songs? My list of iTunes tracks is woefully inadequate for the Rangers, but I’m having problems coming up with more than the three I have.
The three I have are:
Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire
Little Texas – God Blessed Texas
Merle Haggard – That’s the Way Baseball Go
Brother Cane – And Fools Shine On
That last one was a song the Rangers used to play a lot during their “take the field” music during the 1998 season.
The only other thing I can think of is the Texas Rangers specific version of “Talkin’ Baseball” by Terry Cashman, but I’ve never been able to find that to purchase online. Tkx for suggestions.
If you have any suggestions, drop me a line. Tkx.

While Ogando didn’t directly replace Cliff Lee in the starting rotation, one could make the case that Lee’s spot was taken by Ogando. Given Lee is pitching tonight in Philadelphia, it made me wonder what their stats looked like at this point in the season. While Lee’s are marginally better in some categories, they’re not radically better. Check this out:
Going into action on August 17, 2011, a comparison between Cliff Lee & Alexi Ogando..
Cliff Lee:
12-7, 2.83 ERA, 24GS, 5CG, 5SHO, 172IP, 153H, 56R, 54ER, 14HR, 3HB, 34BB, 177K .237AVG, 1.09WHIP
Alexi Ogando:
12-5, 3.33 ERA, 23GS, 1CG, 1SHO, 140.1IP, 122H, 57R, 52ER, 12HR, 5HB, 36BB, 102K, .231AVG, 1.13WHIP
Cliff Lee Salary: $11 Million for 2011, is an average of $314,285 per start based on avg of 35 starts per season.
Alexi Ogando Salary: $430,150 for 2011, an average of $12,290 per start based on avg of 35 starts per season.
Just sayin’. ;)

The guy who fell over the rail at Rangers ballpark tonight and went head first into the area behind the scoreboard in left field just died (as I write this). (AAndro story here)
This is the third person who has fallen over the rails at Rangers Ballpark in now the 18th season the park has been open. A woman fell over in year 1 in 1994, and they raised the rails due to that.
Someone fell over last year, and he ended up being OK. Tonight’s guy
There’s video of the guy falling off at this link, although given he’s since died, I’m not sure if they’ll leave that video up or not.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot about safety rails in the next few days. When this happened in July of last year, a lot was made about how the height of the rails was above what “code” said they should be. The bigger problem generally is people leaning that far out to get balls, and losing their center of gravity. No amount of rail can stop that unless you screen every one off, and that won’t happen.
Apparently the guy went over throwing a ball up there that Josh threw into the stands at the end of an inning. A tweet by Anthony Andro said “Nolan Ryan on Josh Hamilton: Josh is very distraught over this, as the entire team is.”
God Bless his family. They’ll need it.
UPDATE: It gets worse. If you watch the video footage, there’s a little kid behind the guy who fell over the rail. NBC5 news said that was the guy’s kid.
UPDATE 2: The fan, finally named as Shannon Stone, was laid to rest on July 11th. It sucks. Still. The shock isn’t as hard, but man, this whole thing sucks.
Finally, Derek Holland pitched a fantastic game. He won 6-0. Who cares?

Not that there’s been a clamoring of fans at my doorstop demanding me return to my site, but I decided this afternoon that I’ll be coming back shortly. The All-Star game will be my return to writing updates for my site. I’ve had enough of a break due to Duke Nukem Forever coming out, and my loss of TV.
Also, I’ve decided that I might investigate new software for the site. I had to remove comments due to spammers. The main reason I’ve never done this before is a lot of hellacious custom templating for this site I’ve done. I may have thought of a way to do that, and if I can, I’ll be bringing back comments on the new site.
That 15-5 game tonight was fun to watch. Especially since I only get one per week now. That was a good one to have on Friday night. :)

Looks like I’ll be taking a longer break than I thought.
I wrote a few weeks ago about having to drop cable TV and go to antenna only. That reduced my Rangers game watching to once a week, and I have to say, it’s really cut into my paying attention to the team. Yeah, I know I can get it on mobile devices, my iPhone, my iPad, and good old fashioned radio, but there-in lies the rub.
I can’t time shift those. Oh, I could wait till the game is all the way over and listen to a replay, but that is near impossible in this world of Facebook updates, tweets, and whatnot. So many friends tweet everything that happens, that I would have to stay offline totally until I could see the game.
I decided not to go through all that, and while I’m still looking at box scores, and catching the odd inning here and there, I have to say I hate having to catch a game on it’s actual scheduled time. TiVo has changed me – permanently. I do not like having to do things on a prepared schedule, I want to do it when I’m ready, which usually means after the kids are in bed.
Long time followers of my site know I’ve worked in the videogame industry since 1992, and and the project my former company worked on for 13 years finally came out this past Tuesday. That’s Duke Nukem Forever. I have a part time gig doing contract work for the company that picked up the slack, so I was involved. It was a busy time, and to be honest, there were several Rangers games that I didn’t know the results of until after 24 hours beyond their endtime.
So I’ve decided to take a longer break. I don’t think I’ll break for the whole season, but I am still paying attention to results. I just didn’t realize how much of my being a baseball fan was tied to the television. Now that I don’t have that kind of TV game access anymore, I find myself not as interested, and that’s mostly due to TiVo.
I’ll be back. Been doing it too long to just quit totally. Thanks for visiting.

On the team’s off day, they decided to announce a major shakeup of the TV & Radio broadcasters. Here’s a line item summary of the changes, then I’ll talk about them a bit individually.

• John Rhadigan is removed from TV play by play – returns to FSSW to do pre & post game coverage.
• Dave Barnett moves from radio to TV to replace Rhadigan.
• Steve Busby will join Eric Nadel as Barnett’s primary replacement
• Bryan Dolgin will also handle an undetermined number of games with Nadel.

I have to say this was a bit of a surprise to me. There’s a lot of moving parts to all of this, and the biggest thing is that it’s temporary. It’s supposed to be re-evaluated at the end of the season. Which tells me they felt that shaking everything up would be better than letting Rhadigan ride out the season, and make a change there.

Rhadigan fired: Well, as I said above, this was the biggest surprise. When it was first announced, I thought it was somewhat an odd choice, as he had never done play by play before. John however, was involved with the Rangers for ages through his association with Fox Sports Southwest. He knows the team, he didn’t have to learn the history, he knew it. While his lack of experience was a question mark, I figure his obvious knowledge of the team would allow him to compensate for that. He definitely came across as a newbie in the job. He made mistakes (but then even the big time pros do that from time to time), and had the odd quirk here and there, but overall, I didn’t think he was that bad. However, a portion of the fanbase was quite rabid about how bad he was, and from what Evan Grant said on Twitter, (more) that seems to have contributed. I don’t think that’s particularly fair, as he was only on the job for a matter of six weeks. I felt he deserved a bit more time than that. He WAS a new guy, he WAS rough, yes. But you don’t build a Vin Scully that quickly. I do recognize he was a bit rough around the edges, but that’s the kind of refinement that comes with time. Sadly he wasn’t given the time to refine what he was doing, and was booted. He does get a nice severance, as they paid him for the entire length of his contract, so he won’t be selling pencils. Would have liked to have seen him last at least the first year. Feel bad for the guy, but he will be going back to the pre/post game stuff on Fox Sports Southwest, so that’s at least something positive, I suppose. To close this section, I’m gonna steal this text from Evan Grant:

But just like Major League callups, you don’t always get the ideal amount of time to prove yourself.

Dave Barnett to TV: Ugh. Maybe it’s good I lost my Cable TV a couple of weeks ago. I have never been a fan of Dave Barnett. It’s not like he’s exactly awful, he’s not. He’s been doing broadcasts before the Rangers for quite awhile. He’s not as rough as Rhadigan, so in that regard it’ll be an improvement. But when there was a search for the successor to Josh Lewin, I had a few posts saying how much I did NOT want Barnett on TV. There’s no one fact I can give you as to why I don’t like him. It’s just a gut feeling sort of thing. He never gelled with me, and while I never actively campaigned for him to be let go or anything, I never wanted to see him on TV, because I watch more games than I listen to on radio. That miught change now with my TV situation and what Barnett on TV. We’ll see. At least I personally can hang my hat on the fact that it’s been said that the situation will be re-evaluated in the offseason, which means they don’t really want him as the #1 TV Play by play guy either, or they would have anointed him the permanent replacement. They also didn’t offer it to him this past off season, either. My gut says Barnett is out of here after this season, we’ll see.

Busby to Radio: Steve Busby has been involved with Rangers broadcasts for awhile now in some capacity. He’s been on TV before, he’s been on radio before. He was a former player, so he’s no stranger. I like his voice, I like his style. My favorite thing about Busby is something I’ve written about here before. He used to work the official post game call in show with Scott Franzke (who was offered the TV job in front of Rhadigan but declined). There’s always a lot of “no knowledge” fans calling in to these shows, and Busby would never take their crap. He’d call a lot of the callers out, when they’d say dumb stuff like “when are we getting some pitching in here”, or “trade so and so for x”. I LOVED THAT. So I was a bit bummed when I heard that the TV play by play job was offered to him, and he turned it down because he would have only wanted to do it for say 2-3 years, and the Rangers wanted someone for longer than that. That bummed me out. But we will get him on the radio for at least the rest of the season, which is good. HOPEFULLY he can be talked into doing either of them for longer, as I’d like to see Busby stick around permanently. Preferably on TV, but radio’s good, too.

Dolgin on Radio Too: Bryan Dolgin is the pre-post game guy now, and he’s way better than that doofus they had who initially replaced Scott Franzke (Mike Ogulnick). While I still don’t listen a lot to post game, mostly because I can’t stand the lack of baseball intelligence of most callers, I have to say I like Dolgin. He kind of reminds me Franzke. Not that he’s a clone, but I like the slant of his talking, and things of that nature. While I would prefer Busby as a permanent replacement for Barnett, if they went with Dolgin, I think I’d like it too. So however he’s used is good – so long as they don’t stupidly let him go like they did Franzke. Still a bit peeved about that one.

Ultimately, if I had my choice, this is how things would settle out, but I know it won’t happen.

TV: Tom Grieve as color, and Victor Rojas as play by play
Radio: Eric Nadel & Steve Busby
Post Game: Bryan Dolgin

I know there’s no hope of Rojas coming back. I wish they would have given it to him before MLB Network got off the ground. That was a good promotion for him, but when he left that, they didn’t make a run at him, which bummed me out.

Oh, and finally, I should point out my broadcasters history page here on my site. Not one I pay a lot of mind to, but it is kept up to date, and with this news, it seems like a good time to mention it. It doesn’t go back into the DC years of the franchise, I don’t have that info. One quirk though – for quite awhile there were different broadcast teams on TV if the game was on regular TV vs Cable. That’s why there are columns that say that in the descriptions. It hasn’t been used that way in awhile now, but I never got around to reformatting the page. :)

Let’s see how the new TV team goes, as tonight is the one night out of the week I get a game on free antenna TV. I’ll probably have something to say about it in the recap for tonight’s game.

(This was originally posted May 17th, bumping it while I play catch up so people can know why I’m behind).

I’m having to check out for a little while here… Not from my site, I plan on keeping that going. But from watching Rangers games. You see, yesterday I had to disconnect Time Warner Cable. It wasn’t a decision I really WANTED to do, I was kind of forced into that due to my life circumstances.

While I try not to go on about it, if you’ve been reading my site at all the last couple of years you know I’m unemployed. I sadly still am. I do have a part time gig which helps, but it’s not enough to live off of properly. As we’ve gotten to a tipping point in my situation, I’ve had to make some rather drastic cuts. I’ve been making cuts all along, but this round is by far the hardest one to make, as it cuts into things I always figured, “Well, I can make do and not have to deal with that bill”. Well, no mas. By turning off Time Warner Cable, I’m gonna save about $70 a month.

I’ve gone back to plain old rabbit ears. I would prefer to install a good antenna on the roof, but I don’t have the cash to pay for the antenna & the installer to put it up there (doing it myself is NOT an option). So I’m back to a pair of $8 rabbit ears. I did a ton of research on antennas, and actually chose a different one than this – a $50 powered really nice looking one. Didn’t get all the channels I wanted. Then I tried the $8 one, and it actually got more channels than the powered $50 antenna. I was shocked. Packed up and returned the $50 one to Amazon, and went to Best Buy and got another of that $8 rabbit ears. That’s what I’m using now. It works great for the TV stations I care about. There’s a ton of stations here in D/FW, but a lot of them are Spanish Soap Opera kind of stuff on UHF. I get all the 2-13 channels well enough, and the UHF ones I care about (21, 27, 33) I get fine. I also get a few others, too, so for eight bucks? It worked out great.

Unfortunately, there’s a couple of MASSIVE downsides to this being a Rangers fan.

First off, I just disconnected MLB Network. That’s quite painful, as it was probably my most watched single cable channel – by far. There’s tons of stuff there I’ll miss for sure. Second, though is Fox Sports Southwest. This means that I’ve just lost my ability to watch every Rangers game unless it’s on Friday night – where I can get it on the free OTA channel 21.

Before you say “Just listen on the radio, then”.. Try having two kids whose bedtimes are during non west coast games. it doesn’t work. I relied on the TiVo and FSS to timeshift the games until after the kids were asleep. You can’t do that with radio. You have to listen when it happens, or you don’t listen. There’s always the possibility of waiting till the entire game is over and listening to the radio via MLB Gameday Audio reply, but the chances of me not knowing the score that long for that many games is unrealistic.

MLB.TV isn’t an option. I am retaining internet at home, but I can’t use MLB.TV because Rangers games are blacked out in this area. No love there.

So basically, I’m cut off from watching Rangers games again until I can get myself employed at a full time level. I haven’t decided if I was going to stop doing my updates based on just the MLB recaps or not. That gets old after awhile.
It will stink if this is still going come October and playoffs, as the bulk of the playoffs are on TNT, which I can’t see now. So the next time you’re watching the Rangers and complaining that you don’t like Rhadigan, or whatever else you want to complain about, remember – you’re watching it.

One positive. I won’t have to hear about anyone sending up baked goods to the booth for a while. Perhaps there is a silver lining in all this.

P.S. If you’re ever in need of information for antennas, I cannot recommend TV Fool high enough. The amount of detail they give you on all the channels in your area is astounding. You even get asked serious detail like how high up your antenna is, several variables to account for (trees, buildings, etc). There are overlaid Google Maps maps showing how strong a stations’ signal is in your area. Plus they have a good help forum. I cannot recommend them highly enough. AntennaWeb is far more known, and there’s nothing WRONG with them, but TV Fool has a lot more detail.