Saw this today on a trade rumor site. The source is Ken Rosenthal at Fox. He’s usually pretty reliable. Here goes.
The Rangers and Brewers were close to a trade: Akinori Otsuka to the Brewers for Tony Gwynn Jr. Rosenthal seemed to dislike it, but I think it made sense for the Crew. Regardless, Bill Hall’s injury thwarted the deal as Gwynn will be needed to man center.
Good thing Bill Hall got hurt, as I would have hoped we’d get more than Gwynn Jr for Aki.
This was funny. I laughed rather a lot at this video. It’s “Dinner Bell”, and was produced by CJ Wilson. CJ has his own blog over at the official mlblogs site. If you’ve never read it, you should. It’s good stuff, and is in my daily RSS feed reader.
Anyway, this is one of those silly videos produced with appearances by the majority of the bullpen, a few of the starting pitchers, and a voice over by Tom Grieve & Josh Lewin. Good stuff.
And you thought the regular old eephus pitch was bizarre. Check this out.
Quick note, as I’m about to drop off and go to bed…
There’s an interesting article over at “The Hardball Times” about the AL West, and how it breaks down in their eyes. Check out this chart from their article. It’s a pretty quick visual representation of how the season has gone so far.
I also know I’m behind in game updates, I’ll catch up tomorrow morning. Too tired now to start to write.
I know we’ll likely be active in the trade market in July, but I wouldn’t think we’d be bringing players in. Especially Jacque Jones. An article in the Chicago Sun Times seems to imply the Rangers are interested in Jones. If we’re bringing in outfielders, I’d want someone a bit higher quality than Jones. Now he’s not bad at all. But if we’re importing, I want someone like oh Torii Hunter.
I can’t see where this move makes a ton of sense for us. Course if guys like Nelson Cruz would take the job that was essentially handed to them on a silver platter, this talk likely wouldn’t even exist.
You know, I keep bringing up the name Mark Clark on my site here as one of the worst starting pitchers we’ve had in recent vintage. I decided to actually check on his numbers, and how they compare to the 2007 Rangers. It looks like I might need to make one of these guys my new “Mark Clark” on the site before too long.
Check out this comparison between the two seasons Mark Clark pitched with us, and the stats of the 2007 Rangers to date. The number of starts is actually quite similar. Clark pitched some relief in 2000, as did Loe & McCarthy in 07, those stats are accounted for in the overall ERA and WHIP numbers, I don’t know a way short of manually calculating based on old box scores to extricate the relief numbers from the overall numbers.
| Name | Starts | Record | ERA | WHIP |
| Mark Clark 1999 | 15 | 3-7 | 8.60 | 1.84 |
| Mark Clark 2000 | 8 | 3-5 | 7.98 | 2.04 |
| Kevin Millwood | 10 | 2-6 | 7.82 | 1.94 |
| Vicente Padilla | 13 | 2-8 | 6.28 | 1.68 |
| Robinson Tejeda | 13 | 5-7 | 6.49 | 1.56 |
| Brandon McCarthy | 11 | 4-4 | 5.90 | 1.57 |
| Kameron Loe | 10 | 1-6 | 7.40 | 1.67 |
That was far worse than I anticipated. Technically Mark Clark has worse numbers, but man – after looking at the actual numbers it looks like we have close to five Mark Clark’s in our rotation in 2007. Heck, Mark Clark would feel right at home this year, our numbers are just as bad as his was with us. To look back, here are my comments from when we signed Mark Clark, and from when we released him. I had forgotten how much I wanted to like him when we signed him.
Which one of our current guys would you nominate as the new “whipping boy” for my blog to represent everything that is wrong with Texas Rangers starting pitching?
Just read this over at lonestarball.com. I agree with Adam.
Josh, most Rangers fans aren’t rooting for Sammy Sosa not to hit homers right now, so that #600 will be at home. Get his 600 ASAP, have the celebration, then DFA him so we can bring Botts up. Is it possible to DFA someone in the game during the game? I say we do it as soon as he crosses home plate after #600.
THAT is what Ranger fans are rooting for. In fact, get your two home runs tomorrow night in Pittsburgh, and you can leave him behind at Primanti Brothers in the Strip District.
I think what Josh meant to say is that the Rangers management wants Sosa to not hit home runs and then hit two at home vs the Cubs so we can sell more tickets. THAT is what he really meant to say. I can see why Josh would confuse Ranger management and Ranger fans. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make.
I’m such a dork. :)
I spend an awful lot of time online; I see a lot of the fads and trends in online communication.
When I was looking at some Ranger pictures today, all I could think of for Dice-K is this, so I whipped out Photoshop…
Original Post @ 10:30AM:
I’m sitting here at work with mlb.com’s video channel on, which is supposed to simulcast the ESPN2 feed. I expect it will be swamped, and be unwatchable due to extreme bandwidth demand.
Anyway, I’m not the greatest expert on the draft, so I will defer on analysis completely to Jamey Newberg and his gang on the draft – I suggest you do too. Go check out Jamey’s site for all there is to know from a Rangers’ fan perspective.
UPDATE @ 4:445PM:
Our second pick in the sandwich round was used on pitcher Neil Ramirez. At this point, I’ll have to stop, as I need to get back to work. :)
UPDATE @ 4:20PM:
OK, they’re not showing the sandwich picks on TV anymore, so we’re done with screen grabs. :) The Rangers took an outfielder as Pick #35 overall, which was the compensation pick for losing Carlos Lee. The kid’s name is Julio Borbon.
Our next pick is 44th overall – in the sandwich round. It’s a pick for losing Gary Matthews.
UPDATE @ 3:20PM:
The Rangers second pick in the first round is pitcher Michael Main.
UPDATE @ 3:15PM:
The Rangers are on the clock again at Pick 24.
UPDATE @ 2:43PM:
The Rangers first pick is local boy Blake Beavan. ESPN is calling him “the most competitive pitcher” in the draft.
UPDATE @ 2:38PM:
The Texas Rangers are on the clock!
UPDATE @1:10PM:
Hearing Bud Seling say “Tampa Bay is now on the clock” was seriously cool to hear. Then showing Don Zimmer, and hearing all the Tampa Bay fans in the background chant “Tampa Bay – TAMPA BAY” was really cool. I enjoyed that a lot. Wonder where all those guys are at Tampa Bay home games, though. ;)
UPDATE @ 1PM:
I’ll probably have a few remarks on the draft itself, not so much on the players – that’s Jamey’s bag, not mine. :)
It just started. This looks just like the NFL draft graphics. That’s kind of cool. This whole thing makes it “feel” like everything is all of a sudden more important.
Saw a nice article over on mlb.com about the lost art of scorekeeping. It is true that it’s a lost art. I keep score at every game I go to, and when I do, I rarely see anyone else doing it. A few years back when I had a bigger season ticket package, I noticed a lot of others doing it (Hi Rose!), but it seemed to be regulars; only season ticket holders for some reason.
Now I can understand why. It requires you to pay attention to the entire game. A lot of fans who go to these games seem to (unfortunately) not have the attention span to watch the whole game, let alone pay attention to every single pitch. And don’t even get me started on the boob job & cocaine crowd at these things who are there to be on their cell phones, or just “to be seen”.
Anyway, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid in the 70’s, and still enjoy doing it today (I wish I still have some from my youth, I’d like to see how bad my kid scoring was). As an adult, I used to buy programs, until I realized I was paying the Rangers $3 a game to keep score, so I decided to make my own form in Microsoft Publisher 98, which basically was a copy of what was in the Rangers programs. This file is still available here on my site as a download if you use Microsoft Publisher. After awhile, I wanted something else, so I went to sporting goods stores and bought large printed books – at about $4 or $5 or so, it was’t bad at all, they usually lasted the whole season. But even that got tiring after awhile because of all the limitations that physical paper has on games with a lot of subs and extra innings.
However today, I don’t use paper anymore, about 6 or 7 seasons ago I started keeping score on my Palm. It’s so much easier to do it digitally, as you don’t have to worry about running out of space for extra innings, you don’t have to worry about where all the substitutions are going to go in those 18-4 blowout games where everyone is subbed out or moved around… Plus you can keep a theoretical unlimited amount of games in there. For me, it’s the only way to go. The software I use is called “Scorepad”, and can be obtained here One caveat, though. The stuff isn’t cheap. The full package is $169 (although when I bought it a few years back, it was $129). They do have a cheaper option if you only want to keep score on our Palm, and do not care about the desktop app – that version is only $39 (plus they have other options inbetween, check out their store link.
But if you have a PalmOS handheld, and like to score, you really should look into this. It’s good software. I took a picture of myself a few years ago, here’s what it looked like on my Palm at a game. You can click on it to go to a larger image where you can more clearly make out the screen.
UPDATE: Given I wrote about Scorepad, and keeping score, I decided to score Friday night’s game (Jun 1st) against the Mariners. I got a wild game to keep track of, and I’ll write more about the game on Saturday (it’s 2AM, and I’m exhausted), but I wanted to update my scoring entry here with some examples of what Scorepad generates. After the game was over, I synced the game back to the desktop application, and then I could look at it there. The desktop app has the ability to export the data to a box score HTML page, as well as a play by play HTML page. Both are here, as well as screen captures of a few places from the desktop app. Here’s a list of what I have here:
Now, the pitch sequence is where this program can get seriously hardcore. I don’t use this, because even for me, it’s a lot to keep track of. Not only do you keep track of each pitch, but you can also keep track of what kind of pitch it is, where it was in the zone, and what the speed was. Now, I don’t do this, because it’s even more information than I can keep track of (or care to). However, this software is also used by several major league baseball teams by their official scorekeepers, as well as numerous minor league and softball leagues, so it can be used to keep track of everything – it’s seriously powerful stuff.
I didn’t start off to write this article as piece on how much I loved Scorepad, it was more about my love of the actual scoring, not the facilitating software. I guess the two subjects are pretty well intertwined, though. :)