I know it’s early to do this, but I have to take a break for a couple of games.
My wife is having outpatient surgery for something today (why I don’t want to get into here), and it’s going to knock her out of “mommy” commission for a few days. My mind will be elsewhere, so I’ll catch up when things are slightly more normal.

TR Sullivan’s weekly mailbag for the official Rangers site is up. Normally I don’t point those out, because I figure if you’re reading my site, you’re reading the official site, too, and don’t need me to tell you that. This time, however I want to point it out for two reasons.
First is the fact that there are no stupid trade scenario emails. TR Sullivan (Rangers/mlb.com) & Evan Grant (Dallas Morning News) handle the two biggest weekly Rangers related email newsletters. And the one thing that’s bugged me about both of them have been the persistent inclusion of totally stupid non thought out trade proposals. Now I’m not beyond my own goofy trade ideas, but these guys are pros. They know these things are dumb or unrealistic. What I want to know is why they keep publishing them? Are they that short on submissions that they need to publish those? Anyway, I’m glad this one didn’t have any, TR, let’s try and keep it that way, eh?
Second, there was a good question asking about the organization of the Rangers’ minor leagues. Now to someone like Jamey, that was a “skip” when reading I’m sure, but I thought it was good information, so I’m going to replicate it here. Thanks for that one, TR..

The Rangers have six farm teams. Let’s go from bottom to top with general but not necessarily strict guidelines:
Arizona Rookie League Rangers — This team starts in June right after the First-Year Player Draft. It consists of high school players from the Draft and young Latin players in the United States for the first time. Almost all players are 20 and under.
Short-season Class A Spokane Indians — This is another league that starts right after the Draft. Most college-drafted players start here, plus players up from the Rookie League.
Low Class A Clinton Lumberkings — Each team has two full-season Class A teams in one of five leagues. The Midwest (14 teams) and South Atlantic (16 teams) leagues are considered the low Class A, which simply means the players are younger and less experienced. Clinton (Iowa) is in the Midwest League.
High Class A Bakersfield Blaze — The California, Florida and Carolina Leagues are the high Class A. Bakersfield, of course, is in the California League. The competition is a little tougher.
Double-A Frisco RoughRiders — The jump from Class A to Double-A is the biggest jump in the Minors. This is where you really can tell if a player is a serious prospect.
Triple-A Oklahoma RedHawks — This is the last stop on the Minor League ladder and some players skip this level (Ivan Rodriguez) and some (Young) only stay for a limited time. Many teams stock their Triple-A team with former Major League players to provide depth in case of injury.

One last thing on the trade proposal thing. If you guys are putting them in there for mocking the request, that’s fine, but you don’t seem to be harsh enough. I absolutely loved Steve Busby on the old KRLD call in show, as he’d mercilessly mock callers who spouted off stupid stuff – and there were a lot of them. If you’re not going to mock a stupid user submission email, then don’t publish them. :)

As I wrote about a couple of times in recent months (February & November), I’ve written about cheerleaders in baseball. I’ve never considered myself a “purist” or “traditionalist”, who object to any change. Several things added have been good (wild card leaps to mind). But the one thing that I think doesn’t belong in baseball is cheerleaders. It just doesn’t “seem right”. I like mascots for sure, but cheerleaders seem like a bad idea.

Now having said that, a lot of the women in the first two articles I wrote on this subject look quite hot. Let me remind you of that first. Here is a picture of a “Marlins Mermaid”, one of the women who do the cheerleader thing for the Florida Marlins..

OK, now that I’ve shown you that, I need to apologize in advance for what I’m going to show you next. You see, I saw this come over the sports wire a week ago or so, and wanted to mention it to you.

This is a picture of tryouts for the “Florida Manatees”. This is a secondary set of cheerleaders that the Marlins will trot out in 2008. As much as I don’t like cheerleaders in baseball, what’s with this? It can’t be that serious – basically it’s a bunch of fat guys (well, mostly) getting out there and dancing. Can it be any better than Gene Gene the Dancing Machine from the Gong Show? (That ought to date me). I cannot imagine it will be taken seriously. This just seems to be a complete mockery and a total joke. I’m sure it won’t be PRESENTED that way, but I suspect that’s how it will be perceived.

I called Chuck Morgan when I saw this, and I could see him shaking his head through the phone. The scary thing that Chuck Morgan mentioned to me was the rule in baseball that if someone is successful in something, others will copy. It’s bad enough it’s on the Marlins, but if it spreads elsewhere, I just have this to say:

ACK! I need someone’s help. I had one person bail out of my fantasy league #1 which is drafting tomorrow night! That leaves us with an odd number of teams, and Yahoo won’t draft a league with an odd number of teams; we’ll lose our draft slot in that case.
I need someone to join the league between now and about 6PM tomorrow night (Central Time). If you were thinking of joining, and missed the boat, I need some help in filling the league. Thanks.
League 1 ID: 10215
Password: sosa600
Live Online Draft: Sat Mar 1 @ 8:00pm CST
Unique URL: http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/league/rangerfans
It’s been taken care of – thanks to the guy who signed up to pick up the slack.

Something I try to do every year to bring the site up to speed is update my roster pages. I started this site in December of 1998, and unless a player is a “cup of coffee” guy, I create a roster page for them. As they move to other teams (and even other countries), I try and keep them up to date. The problem is that as the years have gone on, and I’ve amassed more and more former player pages, it becomes harder to make a pass through them. I have a total of 226 pages at the moment. I try and keep all the links the same, so two years ago when I decided to add a Wikipedia link to the roster pages, I had to go through and edit all the pages for that. A few years I never made it through the “pass”, but this year I did.
I’ve gone through all my roster pages, and updated everyone. There were bunch of players from last season I never created pages for, and they’re all up to date now, too. As is the case during spring training, I don’t add pages for everyone, since most of the guys in camp aren’t breaking camp with the big club, and they’ll likely not be seen again, or won’t be seen for awhile anyway.
So at this point unless we trade for a major player who has a guaranteed major league contract, or sign a guy who will be on the big club, I’m not adding any more pages until the 25 man roster is set in late March.
One thing though – all the current player pages I’ve added a new widget thing from ESPN – it has individual stats and news on players. Here’s an example of two: They’re free, so I figured why not. :)

Now that Nolan Ryan is our president, I wonder how plausible this might be..
In a couple of years, Pudge Rodriguez will likely be on the back end of his career. He’s still pretty darned good now. Not the Pudge of the mid/late 90’s, but he’s still a great catcher. Of all the former Ranger players from the championship teams that went and played somewhere else, Pudge is probably still the most beloved.
Juan Gonzalez is in the Cardinals system trying to hang on, most have retired, but Pudge is still pretty active. He turns 37 after the 2008 season, so I wonder.. When he’s no longer a frontline catcher, I wonder if the Rangers will bring him back to be the backup catcher/part time DH. Nolan caught Pudge back in the day, and I wonder if that might spark something on either side for a career ending reunion.
Other Ranger players have done that kind of thing at the back ends of their career. Jim Sundberg came back in 88/89 to finish off his career after spending a few years in Kansas City and Chicago. Jeff Russell came back in 95/96 after a couple of seasons in Oakland, Boston, & Cleveland. So it could happen.
I was at Pudge’s final game as a Ranger. It was quite the love fest, and when he’s returned with Florida and Detroit, he’s always warmly welcomed by the fans.
Wouldn’t surprise me.

Yahoo’s fantasy baseball is open again. I’ll be running the usual league I do, but someone posed this question to me..
What about doing a paid league? Where folks had to pay to play? Yahoo has a pay league which has more in the way of stats, and all that. If the league was made up of folks who paid, we’d be likely to keep the league together towards the end.
I’ll still have a free league whatever I do, but is there enough interest in putting together a paid league?
The league costs $125 to buy the whole league, which would be not too bad if we spread it out amongst everyone who joined. Is there enough interest from those of you who regularly play in the leagues I put together?
Please let me know.

Back in November, I wrote about cheerleaders in baseball. As a red blooded normal American male, I find them nice to look at, but as a baseball fan, meh. Like crying, they don’t really belong in baseball, do they?

When I last wrote about this, it seems that when there are cheerleaders, it’s in Latin ball mostly. Turns out that’s not an exclusive thing south of the United States. I saw an article today talking about the cheerleaders for the Florida Marlins, The Mermaids. Heh. Given the community in the Miami area, it makes sense I suppose, but I can’t say I recall seeing them on TV. Not that I see a lot of Marlins home games, but you’d think they’d turn up somewhere.

What do you think of the concept of cheerleaders in baseball? A lot is written at places who write a lot better than I about what “baseball has become”. The game itself sometimes seems like a sideshow to all the other “stuff” that is going on in and around the park. A lot of teams have faux cheerleaders already – ushers that dance, groundscrew that dance, and the Rangers version of that, the “somethingorother six shooters” – girls that play games with the crowd, shoot t-shirts into the stands etc. They’re “fakey” cheerleaders.

When I was in Florida in March 2007 for spring training, the Phillies had Hooters girls (in full regalia) as ball girls. Ball girls are a bit different than an actual cheerleader, though. Makes you wonder at what point some major team will take the leap from all these “almost” cheerleaders to actual cheerleaders. I mean besides the Marlins.

Or heck, with JerryLand being built next door to our little ol’ ballpark, I wonder if we’ll be seeing the Cowboys cheerleaders at games now. I mean if you go to a Rangers game, which of these two pictures would you rather see live in person? It’s a harder question than you think. :)

It could be worse, though. It could still be “Rootin’ Tootin’ Ranger”. :)

Was looking through some pictures I’ve collected, and ran across this one of Johnny Oates. It always makes me laugh. Looks like an overly enthusiastic call to the bullpen. :)