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.

Sunday:

Monday:

Saw a rather silly promotion the fans of the Milwaukee Brewers came up with. It’s called..
“Pee Your Pants for the Brewers”
The idea here is that if the Brewers win their division, the fans would collectively pee their pants on the premise they’d be so surprised they made the playoffs for the first time in 24 years. It’s quite an odd thing, something that the late Bill Veeck probably would have loved. The Brewers are currently 25-12 (.676) and 7 games up in the NL Central. Only the Boston Red Sox have a better record right now. Granted, 125 games remain in the Brewers’ schedule, but it’s a promising start.
Makes wonder what Cubs fans would do if they actually won the World Series?
I would rather not pee my pants intentionally, thank you. I’d stink.

Well, the chat log from Evan Grant’s recent chat on the DMN website is up, and in it, two answers talk about trading Mark Teixeira. There’s also the rumour site mlbtraderumors.com who picked up on the chat and offered their own speculation on the matter. Got me to wondering, what SHOULD we do with him?
Now I’m nowhere near ready to panic and give up on 2007 – that would be a Cowboys fan mentality to give up that quick. Sure, it hasn’t gone that well so far, but the basic construction of the team is sound, IMO, and I think we can, it just has to be done soon, where we have to decide if we are going to try and trade off pieces.
Ignoring the reality of trade pieces, and whatnot, if he wasn’t here, I would think Baltimore would be a great place for him to go. I think they’re still looking for that “face of the franchise” type of player that Cal Ripken was. Tejada is a great player, but I don’t think Orioles when I think of him – he’s still an “A”. If you’re a Rangers fan, you already know he’s from there, so I’m sure it would be a nice fit. Whether they can offer what we’d want in return, which I’m sure would be a major league ready starting pitcher, and a replacement for Tex (Markakis?). Problem is they don’t really have any active starters that excite me. But where else would he go? Anaheim? I doubt we’d trade him there unless we got John Lackey back (yeah, right – like that would happen), although I can see him going there as a free agent. Or worse, the Yankees. Ugh.
Anyway, I set up a poll here on the front page of my site asking what you think we should do with Teixeira this season. Please vote. Thanks. BTW, I voted for “sign him long term”, but I’m starting to feel that won’t happen. Two off seasons ago, he signed that two year deal to avoid arbitration with the idea that we’d work on a long term contract before this 2 year one is up. It’s almost up – I wonder if they meant that.

Just wanted to drop folks a line. I got the word the other day that I have a family member that was given about a week to live, so if that happens, I might drop off the face of the earth for a bit. Just wanted to let you know in case I stop updating for awhile.
Update Wed 25th: My stepfather died last night after a bout with several illnesses that I won’t get into here. This will probably keep me offline through the weekend. Thanks for the notes of condolence I’ve gotten so far.
Update 2 Sat 28th: I’m taking off in the morning to attend funeral services back home. I return Wed evening, I’m not expecting to be updating while I’m away. Nice win last night – good to see Tex finally get a home run. And Sosa keeps hitting ’em.
Update 3 May 5th: I’m back home, but I’m so behind the eight ball from being offline for a week that I probably won’t be able to do any updates until Monday, at which point I’ll probably do one of my massive catch up updates.

Remember the old post game show guy Scott Franzke? When KRLD dropped the show for a year, we lost Franzke to the Phillies, who was first hired just to do the same thing there he did here. But he’s now in their broadcast team. Philadelphia does things differently than we do here. In Texas, we have dedicated radio & TV teams. Not so in Philly. After a couple of innings, they rotate between TV and radio, so you get to hear/see everyone in one game (I believe it’s everyone).
Anyway, there’s an article about Franzke and the rest of the Phillies broadcast team over here at this Philly sports blog. They seem to like him over there – which is good. I was rather annoyed when we let him go. I don’t think I’ve listened to his replacement here in Texas more than once or twice.