There’s been some talk that Roger Clemens might pitch in Texas in 2006, if he pitches at all. I’m here to say there’s no way he’ll pitch here, even if he’s “considering” us. Why? This quote from an article on Friday..

“It’s Houston, Texas, New York and Boston,” Clemens told a banquet in Fort Worth, Texas. “I love all those places, they have great players that I respect very much.”

When has Texas ever won out over another team like that, especially Boston/New York unless we throw a quarter billion at them? He won’t be here.

Something I’ve always wanted to do is to visit all 30 MLB Ballparks. Part of the problem is that is stupid expensive. That would have to be a “win the lottery” thing I’d do. Especially now that I have a daughter, so I’d have to pay for three. :)
Until I win the lottery, I’ve had to settle for the next best thing. I’ve gone and done a fly-by tour of all 30 Major League Baseball parks with the software “Google Earth“. It’s free software that gives you satellite views of pretty much everywhere. It has the ability to do “tours” of lists of coordinates. One night a week ago when I was bored, I went and created one for all 30 Major League Baseball teams. If you don’t have Google Earth, it’s free, so click on the link above to grab it, install it. And then click on this link, and it will show you the tour.
https://www.rangerfans.com/stuff/MLBBallparks2005.kmz
If you check this out, and enjoy it, please come back and let me know. Always curious when people use things I create. Thanks.

I don’t know how many of you read Jim Evans’ Baseball Daily blog, but he had a good piece on Sunday about how players seem to be running the show. He talks about Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, Jeff Kent, & Milton Bradley. Soriano & Roger Clemens get a mention, too.
It’s a really good piece, and you should check it out. Good read.

Miguel Tejada wants out of Baltimore.
Should we go get him? Oh hell yes. What would it take? Probably Joaquin Arias, one of Danks/Diamond, and probably Hank Blalock. I wonder if the Orioles would try and tack on Javy Lopez to that. It probably won’t happen, but oh man would that be cool.
Mike Young has already said he’d go back to second base if the right situation presented itself. I think Miguel Tejada would be the right situation. :)
Busy day for me. I just realized this was my eighth entry of the day here. 9th in the last 24 hrs if you count the Soriano trade story from last night. I’m not sure I’ve been that prolific before, but then again today’s been a busy day in Rangerland. :)
Feel free to use the comments system here to respond to anything I’ve said.

In my ongoing quest to get the majority of the content of this site into a blog format so I can more easily maintain it, I finished another section today. The uniform number history section. It’s a place where I track who has worn what uniform numbers in the history of the Rangers.
I cover from 1972 to 2005 (and 2006 when they announce it). Spring training before 3 years ago is spotty, and I know the odd coach has slipped through, but I’m pretty confident it’s all the regular season players. Check it out in the history section in the menu on the left.
You can also get to it here.

Today I’ve made a few changes to the website. For awhile now I’ve been doing entries and reports and comments in Six Apart’s Movable Type (MT) blogging software. It’s worked out so well for me that I’ve decided to move a lot more of my website into MT. When I started this site back in December of 1998, I was using Microsoft Frontpage. And for a couple of things I still will, but there’s a lot of things on this site that can be better served by being put into MT.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on moving the roster pages and the transaction archives into MT software. I’ve finished that today (mostly). The site’s menu now goes to the proper locations. It’s pretty much the same information that was here before, except now it’s in MT software. This has the added advantage to you of making the data searchable. This will also make my life a lot easier going forward in terms of data maintenance.
If you go the Roster page, you’ll see all the current active players, as well as the guys on the DL, and some selected minor league players. This is the same as it was before. (Yeah, I know several of the active players have filed for FA, but I don’t move ’em to former until that exclusive time period is up and thy’re truly not Ranger players anymore). The search in this area will search all the roster pages I have. Now earlier I said it was mostly all done. That’s because I haven’t finished converting over all the former Ranger player roster pages into the new format. Due to the way they were made over the years, I have to do them manually, and it’s somewhat tedious, so only some are done. I will get all the other ones in there. Since this was the only thing left to do, I didn’t want to hold up all these changes for former player pages.
Secondly, if you go to the transactions pages, you’ll see the roster transactions that I’ve had on my site since February of 1999. I have mostly tracked major league changes over the years, not so much the minor league transactions. But if you go into that area, there’s another search box, and that will let you search all my roster transaction archives.
So that’s the latest changes to the site. Please take a look at the areas, and come back here and leave a comment with your thoughts on these changes. I intend on making more such changes before the start of next season. I’m probably also going to be changing the way I handle game updates, too, although I haven’t worked out exactly how I’m going to do that yet.

One of the hardest things in writing this blog is coming up with something to say about every game. There’s about 200 of them in a whole season if you count spring training. Since ths is a fan site, I do it for fun, and it’s obvious that when the team wins, or is winning in general, it makes things a lot easier to deal with. When they’re losing, or just generally stinking up the joint, it’s a pain to come up with another way to say “Well, they lost”. Regular visitors to my site over tme know that I seem to take a break of about a week once during a season.
Well, I’m apparently not the only one who feels the way they do about the grind of updating a fan site for an entire season. Check out this article over at the Wall Street Journal by a guy who does a Mets fan site. It has some really good insight into what it takes.
I bet you Jamey Newberg feels this way, too. :)

A few short remarks:
This series has NOT been the pitching will dominate one that was advertised, that’s for sure.
If the Sox win this series, I say Joe Crede will probably win the MVP. He’s been great at third, and pitched in a lot offensively, too. He’s definitely my MVP for Games 1-2.

Got done watching the White Sox beat the Angels to get to the World Series. A few random thoughts about that..

• I was really surprised that Vlad Guerrero was so ineffective in this series. Given how badly he destroys the Rangers, he batted worse than Phil Nevin did for us at the end of this season.
• I wonder how many times we’re going to hear about Shoeless Joe Jackson during the World Series.
• Anyone else find it ironic that the widow of a the former owner of the team the Sox beat presented Jerry Reinsdorf with the AL championship trophy?
• Lou Piniella looks like a wooden statue when he’s on TV in the booth.
• Surprising to me that in the three games the Sox played in Anaheim, they didn’t make one substitution from the starting nine players in each game. That was simply amazing.
• Former Rangers Carl Everett & Scott Podsednik go to the Fall classic with the White Sox.
• Surprised that Fransisco Rodriguez was that bad in the 8th and 9th innings.
• How many Angels conspiracy theory fans think the umpires cost them the series?

And yeah, I want Houston to go to the World Series, too. It’s looking good for them, up 3-1 with Andy Pettite on the mound for game five.

The annual Halloween family event will take place again this year on October 29, 2005. From the press release…

Families will be treated to a day of face-painting, pumpkin-decorating, mask-making, home run hitting fun. Other Halloween festivities include crafts, pitching, a duck pond, ‘fishing’, ring toss, a balloon artist and spooky stories! Children decked out in costume will be entered in a drawing to win a baseball autographed by a Texas Rangers player.

There’s more information about this on the Rangers site here.