Yearly Archives: 2019


Washington pulls it out.

What do you do when you’ve ignored starting pitching in the off-season and suddenly find yourself in a wild card game? You start totting out your bullpen. And what do you do when you’ve been deploying this same move all season long and your bullpen arms are dead tired? You […]


Let the extra games begin.

The post-season starts today. For Rangers fans, those are extra games the good teams get to play because they chose to try to win. The National League Wild Card Game is today. Milwaukee at Washington. The American League Wild Card Game is tomorrow. Tampa Bay at Oakland.  Three of those […]


The end.

And so this placeholder season comes to an end. A season of zero expectations yielded some pleasant surprises, some unexpected excitement, some positive moments, and a totally expected outcome. It was a baseball season that was more about architecture than about baseball. It was about saying goodbye to a perfectly […]


30.

Congratulations to Rougned Odor on a 30 home run season.  On the strength of two at-bats in a huge game against the mighty New York Yankees, Rougned Odor resurrected his career. He is no longer the weak-hitting second baseman who disappears for months at a time while being a huge […]


Santastic.

Pretty hard to say about a team that is twelve games under .500 but where would the Rangers have been this year without Danny Santana? Honestly, maybe twenty games under. He was one of the rare scrap heap pickups that was a gem instead of a germ. When his signing […]


200.*

For the first time in his career, Mike Minor struck out 200* batters in a season. It comes with an asterisk. Stuck at 199, with time running out in the game, he yelled at Roland Guzman to intentionally drop an easy foul pop up so he could reach that magic […]


Limping to the end.

The Rangers, it seems, ended their season a few weeks before the baseball calendar ended it. In baseball, there are no reprising yesterdays. There are no reunion tours. The Rangers can’t run their greatest hits from eight years ago out onto the field. They have to play what they have […]


Bullying.

With each passing game against the elites, it’s clearer and clearer that the gap is wider than one might have imagined.  The Rangers are now 3-9 against this stretch of super teams. And it just mirrors what is happening in baseball.  A record four teams have lost 100 games. Three […]


Road woes.

The Rangers road schedule is over. Thank you, baseball gods, for ending the punishment. For the second straight season this team finished 33-48 on the road.  They weren’t much better in 2017, going 37-44.  Rangers manager Chris Woodward said he was going to look into why that is the case. […]


Lynn passes Ryan.

Anytime you can pass Nolan Ryan on any list you are doing well. With twelve strikeouts yesterday, Lance Lynn moved into third place on the franchise list of most strikeouts in a season, passing Ryan’s 232 in 1990. Second is Yu Darvish, who racked up 277 in his brilliant 2013 […]