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Apparently I was Bored Today

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Here’s a Rangers starting lineup with uniform numbers all under 10.  No repeat numbers, either.  :)

C – Pudge (7)
1B – Mike Napoli (5)
2B – Scott Sheldon (4)
3B – Wayne Tolleson (3)
SS – Elvis Andrus (1)
LF – Al Oliver (0)
CF – Leonys Martin (2)
RF – Larry Parrish (9)
DH – Dick Billings (8)
SP – Rob Bell (6)

DH made it easy to stick anyone there.  I didn’t want to use another catcher there (Lord knows there’s enough “8” catchers), but you rarely see catchers as DH’s.  Dick Billings got on there because I wanted an early Ranger on the list.  Plus the DH came into being the second of his third years with the Rangers.

I may have over thought this a bit.  :)

Ballpark Seating Capacity

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So the new Rangers Ballpark for 2020 is breaking ground next week.  They announced the seating capacity being between 41 & 42,000.  I’ve seen a lot of fans get mad about that given the capacity of the current park is about 49,500.   I want to examine that irritation and what the reality of ballpark seating capacity has been since our place opened in 1994.

[Read more…]

Realignment & Expansion

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If you remember some time ago when Tom Hicks owned the Texas Rangers, then commissioner Bud Selig had promised to do something about the fact that the Rangers were stuck in a division with all West Coast teams.  While there was no solid info as to what was going to happen, there was much talk that Selig would “fix the problem”.   Then came Interleague play. [Read more…]

The 25/40 Man Roster

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Was having a chat on Facebook about bringing up Willie Calhoun, and I made a comment about him not being on the 40 man roster.  The comment was made “I only counted 32 up here at the moment”.  I tried to explain it, but when I didn’t think I was getting the message through, I decided to go and write my own article explaining the 25 man and 40 man rosters.  It’s not as confusing as the infield fly rule, but I’ll try and sort it out.

UPDATE Nov 2019: Starting in 2020, the 25 man roster will be a 26 man roster, and things are changing relative to “September Callups”.  I will revisit this closer to the rest of the season, but for now, this mostly all still applies.

Here goes: [Read more…]

Being “The Guy” at Catcher

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Earlier today on the Texas Rangers Facebook group I’m on, a discussion popped up on our catching situation.   I postulated that since Pudge left as a regular player after the 2002 season, we haven’t had that ONE GUY we could count on to be the #1 catcher, the one guy you KNEW would be there year after year.   There just hasn’t been that guy.   I decided to dig into the numbers (and I dug deep), looking for all of the guys who have caught for the Rangers from 2002 onwards because I wanted to prove my point.

Pudge & Sunny

Some Thoughts

The closest we’ve come to that was Rod Barajas, who caught 105, 119, & 94 games in 2004, 2005, & 2006.   He’s the only guy with three consecutive years being “the guy”. [Read more…]

2016 Roster Thoughts

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It has been awhile since I’ve written about anything here, and those who are on Facebook know I’ve spent the majority of my time there in the Rangers Fan Group.  I still keep up with the uniform number history part of my website, but most of the other ones are archival.   However, from time to time, I get the urge to write about something, and that’s today.

The 2015 season is over.  It ended QUITE ugly.  No Ranger fan will deny that.   The formal off season starts I believe it is two days after the World Series ends when players eligible for free agency can file for that.   Given where we were expected to be when the season started (and especially after 2014), to say we got into the playoffs was a major accomplishment.  The way we exited the playoffs was bad.  No doubt.  But thoughts turn to 2016, and I decided to take a look down the Rangers roster and offer a few thoughts on everyone and what I think will happen for next season. [Read more…]

Site Update – May 2015

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If anyone is still looking here, you’ll note I changed the theme again.  I was having some technical problems with the old one, and wanted a new “coat of paint” so to speak.  I’ve kind of let most things slide here.  I stopped the daily updates in the 2013 season, and I kept with the transactions through the end of the 2014 season.

One thing I’m still doing that I’m VERY proud of is the uniform number history section.  I’ve gotten some nice compliments from Victor Rojas (when he was here), and Eric Nadel himself has told me he’s used it as a reference on air.  That’s the highest compliment I could get as a Rangers fan.  No way am I letting that go!   I’m also fond of the “How many in 201?” series I’ve done for the last few years, am keeping up with that.

Lots of places might look strange, but I don’t want to just jettison all the work I’ve done over the years.  I’m still mostly hanging out on the Texas Rangers Facebook Group these days.   If you are on Facebook, come join us.

Baseball Trade Rumors App

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As we head into the off season, we begin a phase of the baseball season that was never as fascinating to me when I was younger, but in the last decade or so, I became enthralled with all the movement of players and contracts and whatnot.   Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing as great as the game itself, but I’ve found my enjoyment of the process almost as great as the games themselves.  But not completely.  :)

IMG_2371
Main Unsorted News Page

I think social media has played a big part in my interest in all of this.  However, with all the official sources, the beat writers, players themselves, and just regular bloggers all in the mix, it can be a bit of a cacophony to keep track of without going nuts.

Enter “MLB Trade Rumors”.   This is a website that I’ve been following for years, and if you’re at all interested in baseball transactions, I can’t recommend them enough.  The website is available here, for free: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com – that’s been that way for awhile, and is a valuable tool.

However, we can’t always be around our computers, and there are mobile apps available for iOS & Android.   Those aren’t free, but are WELL worth the cost of the app.   The app costs $2.99, which is pretty darned cheap given what you get with it.  Officially the app is known as “Baseball Trade Rumors”, and not “MLB Trade Rumors” like the website is.  I suspect that has something to do with the name “MLB” and licensing, but that’s a non issue.  Ionly point it out in case you went searching for “MLB Trade Rumors” for the app name, you won’t find it that way.

The app is HUGE around certain times of the year (Winter meetings, Trade deadline, etc).   This is a great way to keep up with “up to the second” transaction rumors and whatnot.  There’s other ways to get this info for sure, but I’ve found given all the hard work it is to keep track of it all, these apps do a great job sorting it down to the individual nuggets you’d want.

Now, I have an iPhone and an iPad, so how the Android version works specifically, I can’t say.  My brother has that, and from what I can gather it is mostly the same – but I can’t speak from first hand experience there.  I can speak from the iOS app.

You can get notifications on your phone by team, by individual player, and by league.  You can also tell it to notify you of actual transactions and not just rumours, also sort by just one team set of news, the info is quite flexible in the app.

The notification system is the strongest point of this app for me, because otherwise it’s an app version of a website, and I could just look at the website for the same info.  But the notifications are the reason I bought this app.   In the screenshots below you can see a few examples of the ways you can set up things to be notified about.

This is a universal app, and works on the iPad too, but is one of the rare apps that I don’t like the iPad interface, and wish I could run the iPhone interface on the iPad just double spaced.  There is only one other negative thing I have to say about the app.  You can’t use it to send stories to your friends (via text msg, email, or Facebook).  The only thing you can do with individual entries is tweet them.  Which is fine, but I don’t always want to do that. Hopefully that gets changed in a future version.  But this is a minor quibble, and isn’t a dealbreaker for me.

Baseball Trade Rumors is probably my second most used iPhone baseball app (the first being the MLB At Bat app).  Mostly because this keeps track of trade info all the time, and I make use of the track by player feature, so I get notified on my phone when something happens with those players.   I don’t have very many apps in the Notification center on my iPhone to help conserve battery power, but this one definitely lives in the notification center!

If you’re a fan of transactions, I STRONGLY urge you to look into this.   Very useful tool.

$2.99 – [ App Store Link | Google Play Store ]