Another four playoff games today. With the very real chance of four Champaign-soaked celebrations, all in visitor’s clubhouses. It’s hard to see anybody beating the Astros or Yankees this year. They are just way too tough. Which makes these first rounds just the unwanted entrée to the main course. They […]
Before the Division Series began, the Twins front office printed up t-shirts with the slogan, “Slay The Dragon.” It was a reference to their not being able to get past the Yankees in the playoffs, having lost six consecutive playoff series to New York. Talk is cheap. But not as […]
Twins fans, we feel your pain. For years, the Texas Rangers ran up against the New York Yankees in the playoffs. And they went home empty. In the Division Series in 1996, the Rangers won the first game, then proceeded to drop the next three. In 1998, the Yankees swept […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
