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:

• Scorepad’s box score page
• Scorepad’s play by play page
• The desktop area for Texas
• The desktop area for Seattle
• A pitch sequence example

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. :)

Testing something, having some server issues today.

For those of you who are recent to my site, I started this awhile back. I put my site online back in December of 1998. I don’t have any particular reason why – or if I did, I can’t remember it all these years later. :) But I did get at least one really good season during all the time I’ve been running this site. Too bad it was the first one.
Anyway, I’ve been doing the site in “blog” format for a couple of years now, and the years from 1999-2004 were in the “old format” I used to do. Tonight I started moving the old entries into the blog format. Once I eventually get them all done, I’ll be taking the old pages offline – that should help kill off some dead weight on this site (the total space usage for this siteis seriously large). Plus there will be benefits like searching old reports, etc, etc..
Anyway, if you look down the right hand menu of the site, you’ll see categories for 1999-2004 that weren’t there before; I started putting the old entries in. It will take awhile, as they all have to be done by hand. Requires cut/paste of old writeup, formatting the box score (which I want to save), and manually setting the date so it will show up in the right place. Not exactly tough, but it can be tedious. Plus with about 200 entries a season (162 regular, 30 or so spring training), there’s a lot of them to get through.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for visiting the site. I know I’m not the most popular Rangers site out there, but I do get enjoyment still out of doing the site all these years later. I just wish they’d win a bit more often than they do.

Couple of years ago it was the slap heard round the world. Now it’s Arod screaming in the ear of a fielder trying to make a catch (story). He’s also been rumoured to have been in strip joints with a woman who is not his wife.
What’s next?

If you read my site, I’ll say with some confidence that you read Lone Star Ball, too, and will have already seen what I’m about to tell you about here. There’s a seriously badass article up there right now called More draft prep: Organizational reset. If for some mutant reason you prefer my site to his, and have not seen this article, then you need to go check this out.
It lists the status of all the major league players, plus some comments on all the best players at each level of the minor league system. If you’re at all interested in the Rangers minor leagues, this is a must read. Do not miss it.
I mean, really. Stop right now, and go read that.

I’ve updated the poll on the main page. The new poll is about who our closer will be in 2008. With the season in the toilet the way it is, I cannot forsee Eric Gagne being here after the trading deadline, not unless we manage to get ourselves out of this hole (unlikely), or Gagne gets hurt again (a possibility of course). To that, my poll is sort of trading deadline related, I’m asking who do you think our closer will be in 2008? Just hit the main page of my site, and vote please.
If you vote for “someone else”, please leave a comment with this post saying who you think it will be.
I also closed out the last poll which was “What do you think we should do with Mark Teixeira?” Here are the results of that poll:
Trade him in 2007: 50%
Sign him long term: 47.06%
No idea: 2.94%
Let him walk: 0%
Kind of a divided crowed from those results.

Saw this picture randomly pop up this evening, and it made me laugh. If you think of a funny caption for it, leave a comment. Hopefully this gets more than the usual comments left on this site, which are mostly zero. :)

It’s Alex Rodriguez if you didn’t know.

I’ve been wondering why this hasn’t happened sooner. The 24 hour a day baseball channel was officially approved! I remember mlb talking aout it 3-4 years ago, and it’s finally coming in 2009. Don’t know why it took that long, but OK, I’m still looking forward to it.
Check out this story on mlb.com.
My HDTV TV which I will have by 2009 might as well have just one channel then.

I’ve been meaning to mention this site for awhile; keep forgetting about it. It’s a cool site called “Cardboard Gods“, and is a site about baseball cards.
I’ve tried a few times to figure out EXACTLY how to describe it, and it’s hard. The author (Josh Wilker) takes a baseball card, and sometimes talks about the card itself, or has a story about things relating to the card, it’s not your “normal baseball fan” website. While not every single story engages me, it is interesting enough to make me keep it on my RSS feed reader.
Today’s story is about an old Bump Wills Texas Rangers card that was mistakenly labeled “Blue Jays”. He’s covered other Rangers cards too; the others are Jim Bibby, Jeff Burroughs, Bill Hands (twice), and Jim Sundberg.
The site has a very interesting flavor; go check it out.