Something that’s been on my mind lately has been corporate sponsorships. The majority of parks these days have them. The owners and the reps from said companies make these grandiose statements about how it’s “great for the community”, or “our partnership will bring such and such” to the fans, and all that. But we all know what it’s really for. Lining the pockets of the owners with some more money.

OK, OK, it’s probably not all for the owner’s personal jet fuel bill, or the wife’s shoe budget, I’m sure some of it goes back to the team in some capacity (extra management salary, perhaps? – yes that last bit was sarcasm, Dave), but I’ve yet to run into a fan that honestly thinks these things are a GREAT idea. Most every one of these parks that has a corporate name almost invariably has it’s nickname ignored by the people who matter the most. The fans.

This is a Rangers fan site, so I’m most familiar with our own corporate shill name (which is now fortunately gone), “Ameriquest Field in Arlington”. You ask any fan of the Rangers, and did they call it “Ameriquest Field”? Heck no, they still called it “The Ballpark”, after it’s original name “The Ballpark in Arlington”. I admit I was one of those people who was not at first a fan of the park’s original name. I wanted Vandergriff Field, or perhaps something to do with Nolan Ryan, but over the years, “The Ballpark” really grew on me. I like that name a lot. It’s simple. It works. These corporate names are frequently not simple, and they almost never work – the majority of them are fingernails on a chalkboard. Very few truly blend in – off the top of my head, the only one that does is the name of the Reds’ current home – “The Great American Ballpark”. For two years after it opened, I didn’t even know it was a corporate name, I just thought it was a really cool name. Oh well. That’s one against my argument, but it is very much the exception.

Lately I’ve been thinking of all the parks, and it made me wonder how many of them do not have any sort of corporate sponsorship at all. So I decided to run down the lot of them, and come up with some more information about their names, their former names, nicknames, etc… I’m organizing them by age, from their original opening to the newest parks. I’m also adding a few thoughts of my own unrelated to the corporate sponsorship issue I raised here. I realized once I got started that I have a few thoughts on these places, even though I’ve not personally visited the huge majority of them.

The stadiums I’ve been near, but not been to games at are Fenway, RFK, Tropicana, & Turner. (My wife has been to Skydome, but not for a game). The stadiums I’ve actually seen games at are: Oriole Park, Ballpark in Arlington, Minute Maid, PNC Park, Citizens Bank. Stadiums that aren’t around anymore that I’ve seen games at were: Veterans Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, The Astrodome, Mile High Stadium (Rockies 1st season).

So sit back and prepare to bask in my opinions on corporate sponsorship deals around Major League Baseball, as well as my thoughts on the various ballparks that make up the major leagues. If you are reading this on an RSS reader somewhere, you will have to visit my site to get the whole article. It was too large (at 18,100 words or so) to stick in the rss feed. :)

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While I’m sure most baseball fans would be agahst at the concept of cheerleaders in baseball, they’re apparently in Latin ball. If there’s one thing that I’ve liked in reading and seeing about latin ball games is that they’re a lot more “fun” than our games. It just seems like a party, something our games are not like.

Whatever you think about that, there’s no arguing that these cheerleaders look good. :)

There’s more pictures of baseball cheerleaders here and here. Check ’em out. :)

Definitely am not interested in the Red Sox winning this. Go Rockies. It’ll be portrayed as a David vs. Goliath kind of thing, I’m sure, and I’ll be rooting for the Colorado team. I saw the Rockies play in their inaugural season in 1993 when they played in Mile High Stadium. I wish I still had my Rockies hat I bought that day, but it’s gotten lost over the years.
I don’t want the Red Sox to win, mostly because they’ve become the Yankees. They’re the overspending high priced expected to win team. The only difference between the Red Sox and the Yankees now are the total number of World Series rings. Besides that, I view them no differently. I used to love going to Red Sox games in Arlington, except since 04 when the Sox won their series, their fans have grown more obnoxious than Yankees fans – something I didn’t think possible.
My prediction is Red Sox in 5, although I would like the Rockies to win – don’t care how many games.

Rudy Jaramillo is the last remaining link to Johnny Oates’ original coaching staff from 1995. He’s the longest tenured coach, and is widely respected and loved by his hitters. It does seem however, that 2008 will be the first year he’s not here in quite some time. That will feel odd.
Tim McMahon over at the DMN Rangers blog links to a rumour post that says that Jaramillo will go to the Mets as the hitting coach. As you recall, Rudy was a runner up to current Mets manager Willie Randolph, and the GM there (Omar Minaya) goes way back with Rudy.
If this does happen, who would you want to come in here? My personal choice for a hitting coach would be Rusty Greer. I think it would be a wonderful way to get him involved again – you know a lot of fans would make a big deal out of him being back in uniform. Plus with Mike Wood not a Ranger anymore, uniform number #29 is open again. Plus I bet Zack Minasian wouldn’t give out #8 next year, either.
Seriously though. If Rudy Jaramillo is gone, who would you want as a hitting coach? Leave a comment here – would like to see some feedback. Danke.

Congratulations to Michael Young on another 200 hit season. That’s something 26 of them in a row now.

Update: Sep 18, 2007 @ 5:15PM:
Well, after thinking about it for a few days, and listening to the feedback I got, I’ve decided to not end the site. At least not yet. What I’m going to do is finish out the season, and then stop. I’m not going to update for a couple of months after that, and see how I feel. Perhaps it’s just supreme burnout, but I’ve never felt quite like that at the end of a losing season. As I’ve pointed out before, this is the end of the ninth season since I started doing this site. Only two of them have been winning seasons (1999 & 2004). I doubt it’s burnout for THAT reason. Remember, I grew up in Philly, and rooted for a franchise that has now lost 10,000 games in it’s overall existence. :) I think it was born out of frustration at seeing lower than expected audience numbers.

I did run the logs as I said I would, and found these numbers for accessing the xml files that comprise the news feeds for the various aggregators out there:

Jun 2007: 9,026
Jul 2007: 9,561
Aug 2007: 8,589
Sep 2007: 4,044

Now those aren’t true numbers, because it doesn’t count all the calls made on the files by the various aggregators checking to see if anything new has been added. There’s no (quick) way to tell unique feed reader stats on those numbers, but it’s still larger than I figured. The overall pageview numbers are fairly respectable, too:

Jun 2007: 107,706 (3,590 a day avg)
Jul 2007: 82,156 (2,650 a day avg)
Aug 2007: 79,980 (2,580 a day avg)
Sep 2007: 20,637 (1,213 a day avg)

Again, things like Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp spider will inflate those numbers – I’d say about 10% of that is search spider pageviews. That’s a completely unscientific stat, I did not properly research it, I admit. Still, they’re decent (if not great) numbers.

So there is an audience after all. Some of the feedback said that since I went to a “no immediate comments” system with the blog, they’re having problems. Let me address that briefly. The reason I did that is to combat spam. Comment spam is a major problem on blogs everywhere, and with the new system here, there are better tools, but I decided that I didn’t want to deal with the problem, so I turned off anonymous comments. I was getting about 200-250 comment spams per day before I did that, now I’m at zero. I’m sorry if this gets in your way, but it makes life a lot easier. There are multiple methods for you to login for. I suggest using Typepad. It’s a unified login system that is recognized by any blog using Six Apart’s “blogging software” packages like this one (Movable Type), as well as their other stuff like Typepad itself, Vox, and LiveJournal). It’s free, and you can use it on all of those things.

Anyway, to sum up I will finish out the season, and take a break, and re-evaluate at some unspecified part of the off season. I don’t know what I’ll do then NOW, but I’ll probably continue on, I think I just need a break.

My original post from Saturday is still here in the extended version of the post. If you’re viewing this on a feed reader, you’ll need to visit the main site to see it.

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Thanks to TR Sullivan for pointing out that it was 34 years ago today (Sep 9, 1973) that Bob Short, the man that brought the Rangers to Texas (as the owner), fired Whitey Herzog, and replaced him with Billy Martin.

Given my age, I know Martin from his dirt stomping fiascos in New York. When Martin was a Ranger, I was 8 years old, and if you weren’t the Philadelphia Phillies, I didn’t care. Billy Martin should get credit for the first really good Rangers team 84-76 record and second place, and won Manager of the Year. Of course in typical 70’s Rangers fashion he was gone the year after that. I wonder if Tom Grieve will mention this during Sunday’s game, as he did play for Martin as a Ranger.
On a more generic topic, I wonder if there will ever be a video produced chronicling the managerial history of the Rangers. I admit to knowing the names of our managers in the 70’s for the most part, but not much about their time here, tell you the truth. I’d love to see something like that, especially if it included video clips of all the guys. I wonder if any video even exists of Eddie Stanky’s game.

I got hit by a bomb of projects all at the same time – been working on them almost non stop for the last several days. I’m going to put placeholder pages for the games I missed, but I won’t be writing commentary for them, and if it keeps going, probably not for the series that starts tonight either.
Gotta love it when several projects all come up at the same time. No spare computer time! :)