I’ve been doing this site for awhile now, and over that time, there’s been several sites that have been helpful in my collecting of info. I’m not talking about Texas Rangers specific stuff (like the Newberg Report, Baseball Time in Arlington, etc), I’m talking about larger scope sites, but not things on the level of ESPN & MLB’s site itself. I use a feed reader for almost all of my “site browsing” anymore, as I like them all in the same place (It’s Google Reader for the record).
Anyway, it occurred to me this morning as I was doing my reading that I should take a moment and point them out. If you’re reading my site, and have for awhile, you’ve probably heard me talk about them, but I wanted to take a moment and draw some attention. They are:

• MLB Trade Rumors: This site is run by a guy by the name of Tim Dierkes. This is kind of like what I used to enjoy watching on ESPN’s Trade Rumors page before it went behind the pay wall. MLBTR is a collation of trade rumours, news, and other player movement rumors. Granted – they put “rumors” right in the name, but don’t let that fool you. A lot of good news has come from there. I know some more “serious” writers tend not to like sites like this, but I love this place. They have really broken it down in detail by team and by player. You can actually get an RSS feed or a category down to an individual player. For example, click here for a news archive on rumors related to the pitcher we just signed, Kazuo Fukumori.
• The Biz of Baseball: This site is run primarily by Maury Brown. This is a site that speaks to something that has grown in my personal interest the last few years. The business side of baseball. This site has a wealth of obscure information relating to, well.. the “business” side of the game. As the game had an income of something like six billion (cue Dr Evil pinky finger) dollars last year, there’s a lot of “business” to be talked about. From payroll lists, to contracts you can read, the site includes other fun such as stadium deals and info, drug policy info, basically anything relating to “not on the field play” (although some of that is touched on from time to time). This is a great site if you’re into the back end of the sport. Most definitely worth a read. BTW, the domain name has confused me a few times. The name of the site is “The Biz of Baseball”, bizofbaseball.com – without the “the” in the URL. That’s burned me a few times – I thought the site had disappeared. :)
• MLB Contracts: A really cool blog run by a guy who doesn’t ID himself on the site, but some emails have said is Jeff. This is a site that exists to detail contract numbers for every player that you can think of. It’s not 100% all inclusive, as his info appears to come from submissions and watching the news, but it’s RARE that I go there to look up a player and can’t find the info. This isn’t one I visit regularly like a news site, but it is an awesome reference site.
• Baseball Reference.com: Most everyone should know about this one now. This is the king of obscure information – I’ve been linking to this site for years. If you’re looking for some weird piece of old information, then this is where you want to be. In more recent years it’s gotten fairly current as things are happening, but to me, this is where you go when you’re trying to think of a team’s record from 43 years ago – who played on that team? The depth of information at this site is spectacular. A surefire don’t miss.

I’ve added these four sites to a new sidebar block on my site called “Favorite Sites”. Again, this does not mean that I don’t think any of the local Rangers related sites are not “favorites”. This is for non Rangers specific sites.
Let me know if you use / know of these sites in the comments. Thanks!

This had better not be true.
Scott Rolen as a Texas Ranger? Wow, if there ever was a player to bring IN to the team that would get me to NOT want to be a fan, that would be it.
If you want to know why I feel that way, just remember where I grew up (Philly). Fuck Scott Rolen. I’d rather be a Braves fan, leading the “chop”. I’d rather be a Yankees fan than have Scott Rolen on my team.
The fact that we’d have to trade Hank Blalock away would make it even worse.

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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