If there ever was any indicator that the Rangers franchise has not seen anything like the Yu Darvish media circus, it was in evidence today.  Forget the bazillion photographers who followed him around.  That kind of thing has been seen before (although not in that quantity).  What really impacted me was this:

The game was not scheduled to be on television.  It wasn’t scheduled to be on the radio, either.  It was, however scheduled to be webcast on mlb.com.  However, since Yu Darvish was starting – and more importantly it was his first start…  The first two innings were on regular radio.  Then the game went off the radio, and was exclusively on the regularly scheduled mlb.com webcast.   That’s mind boggling.  That a brand new pitcher, one who has yet to throw a single pitch in the majors had the power to change the broadcast schedule to include JUST his appearance on the mound.  That’s amazing.

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I didn’t get to hear too much of this game.  At the time the game started, I was actually at Children’s hospital with my wife and son for an appointment.  As the Doctor hadn’t come in yet, I fired up MLB At Bat on my phone, but the free WiFi in the hospital really stunk.  I was able to listen to a tiny little bit, but the connection kept dropping out.  Then I tried 3G, and that was worse, at points I had zero bars and dropped out to AT&T’s “Edge”.  Ugh.  So I tried to just do the play by play in At Bat, and that net connection kept dropping, so I gave up.  By the time we got home from the hospital and a trip out for dinner, the game was over, I found out the score at the end.

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Game 2 of spring training was one of those webcast deals that I’ve talked about many times in the past. The broadcast people were Steve Busby and John Blake. Busby was kind of cool to listen to, but when you bring in guys aren’t usually broadcasters like Blake, it tends to seem like I’m listening to some other teams broadcasters.

Unlike yesterday’s game when we had only five hits for the whole game, we got out pretty quickly and were up five to nothing after an inning and a half. It ended up being 5 to 1 after two. There was no big outburst there was just a lot of sustained hits. I suppose the biggest deal in that was Elvis’ triple in the second.

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Today was the first game of spring training for the Rangers.  Oh, there were a few inter squad games before this, including one that had Yu Darvish’s pitches chronicled pretty well.  But today was the first real one.   As is the tradition since we moved to Surprise, AZ for Spring Training, we took on the Royals.

So I sat down at the computer to listen to the game, as I was working on the new server for my Rangers site at the same time.  My son was taking a nap, and my wife and daughter were heading out to a baby shower.  So I got to listen to the game.  Which was kind of cool.   It was VERY nice to hear Eric Nadel’s voice again to start the broadcast.  I actually heard the tail end of the pre-game stuff, and the pre-first pitch stuff (like lineups) in the car on the way home.    Heard a great sermon by a visiting Bishop at church today, had a good time there, the girls were off to have fun, so yeah, it was a pretty decent day (unlike the day before).

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