There will be a slight delay in the resumption of my updates.
The reason is my wife and I had our kid on Saturday afternoon at 2PM. She had a Cesearean, which means she’ll be in the hospital longer than we expected.
Needless to say I’m a bit occupied at the moment. Not sure at the moment when I’ll get going again, probably later this week after my wife and baby have come home.

Just a remark I thought of posting..
As you may or may not know from reading what I’ve written over the last few months or so.. My wife is pregnant. Very pregnant. Her due date is next Saturday the 16th. As one can never really tell what’s going to happen with this subject, I’m not sure when I’m going to have to drop off the face of the earth for a couple of days to deal with this situation.
So if my reports suddenly stop coming, that’s possibly what has happened. Hopefully my daughter’s pending arrival will allow me to still go to opening day.

Well, tonight’s the night. The regular season starts. I watched the new Washington Nationals play the Phillies on Monday afternoon. I watched David Wells (wearing a Sox uniform and Babe Ruth’s #3) get torched in Yankee stadium. I read about Dimiti Young getting 3 HR and 5 RBIs (for a season avg of 480HR and 800RBI). And, unfortunately, I read a lot about steroids the last couple of months. That was a drag, but today, I don’t give a crap about that. Basically, the baseball season has started. And I couldn’t be happier – except possibly for the birth of my child sometime in the next two weeks. And for “special” 6AM wakeup calls. ;)
Anyway, as I write this, the Rangers game is roughly three hours away from starting. We have an odd 25 man roster to start the season (link) – there were several surprises there. However, all that doesn’t much matter, as real games are ready. I’ve got my Palm all loaded up with the Rangers and Angels roster. I’ll be scoring tonight. Last season, I attempted to score every game the Rangers played. I burnt out on that after about 100 games or so, so I’m not doing that this year. I’m scoring every one I attend, and some other selected ones. But I don’t want to burn out on that – plus with a kid coming, I likely won’t have the time. This evening, I went and updated my roster page with all the moves that were made over the weekend while I “took off”. I have about 4 or 5 players on the 25 man roster I have no roster page for. Once I pick up my copy of the 2005 Media guide, I intend on rectifying that. Unless of course my daughter Samantha decides to make an appearance and change my plans, I will be attending opening day. If my wife goes into labor during the game, I might not stay long, but I do plan on going as of this moment. :)
I’m ready to go, and let’s see if we can beat the Bartolo Colon problem we seem to have.

Check out this page on ESPN. It’s a Raners based poll on the upcoming season.

So says this article over at thesportingnews.com by Ken Rosenthal. This is his 2005 AL Predictions thread (he has one for the NL, too). He has this to say about the Rangers:
Home run champ: Mark Teixeira, Rangers. Teixeira hit 26 of his 38 home runs last season after July 1. If he carries that kind of production into ’05, a 45-homer season should be within reach.
Biggest name traded before July 31: Alfonso Soriano, Rangers. The Rangers could use Soriano, who can become a free agent after ’05, to acquire pitching, then play the emerging Ian Kinsler at second base.
He also thinks Arod will be the league MVP. I don’t agree with the Arod remark, but I tend to agree on his two comments about the Rangers. I can see us trading Soriano at the trading deadline. I bet he would have been traded in camp, if he wasn’t 0-6million to start out this spring.
We shall see. :)

March always brings good things. It’s when Spring Training is in full swing. There’s games on TV (although not as many as I’d like), and many on radio, and since the advent of MLB.com and XM Radio, I can now pretty much listen to almost any (broadcast) game anytime I want. This is good. In fact, as I write this I’m paying attention to a Twins/Phillies spring training game. The regular season is about two weeks away, which means daily Rangers games for six months! This is the good part of March.
The BAD part is all the FRIGGIN COLLEGE BASKETBALL HIGHLIGHTS on the TV! I can’t escape them! Every time I see another college basketball highlight, I want to pull my hair out from underneath my BASEBALL cap! Bleargh – I can’t stand basketball to begin with, and college basketball? Don’t waste my time – I need to see this many baseball highlights, thank you.
There has never been a term so accurate as March MADNESS. How so many people could be into college basketball is beyond my comprehension.

Intrasquad games start today. While they don’t “count” in the spring training standings, I’ll try and report on them if I can get info.
However, I probably won’t update until later in the week, as I’ve been terribly sick the last few days – I caugh something going around my office, and I’ve had a fever since Saturday that I can’t shake. :(

My first league has filled up. I started a second one, details on that one are at the bottom of this story.
My annual free Yahoo Fantasy baseball league is online. As in years past, I’ve asked folks from my site to come and play. If you’re interested, I’d love to have you, but please don’t join if you don’t want to stay the entire season. There’s nothing more fun than people who sign up and then are inactive.
We will be conducting a live draft again, and the date I’ve set is Friday March 11th at 8PM Central Time. I would have picked earlier, but my wife and I have family in for our baby shower the weekend before that. If too many people object, I’ll look at another time, but with this starting so late, there will likely not be a lot of slots available for drafts.
If you’re interested in joining the second league, here’s the info:
Fantasy URL: http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1
League ID: 53220
Password: cansecoroids
BTW, if you joined either of the leagues, please post something in the msg area of the fantasy league telling people who you are. In the first league I’m “Steroids Good!” (which I’ll explain later, it’s a joke), and in the second I’m “The Blalock Bunch”.

I just read tonight where Yahoo Fantasy Baseball lives! There’d normally be thousands of leagues drafted and many ready to go, but due to MLB.com’s attempt to make itself the center of all fantasy baseball (or so it seemed), the Yahoo fantasy baseball site looked closed. Indeed, until today, the message “The 2004 season is over, thanks for playing” was there. However, tonight, I read this:
Registration for the 2005 season will begin shortly after midnight (ET) on Thursday, February 17.
Yay! My Fantasy League lives on. As regular visitors of my site know, I’ve had a league I’ve done for the last 4 or 5 years or so, this means I’ll set something up on Thursday, so we can have a live draft for my league as usual. Hopefully those who sign up will stick around for the whole season (Hi Owen!). Anyway, I’ll have more details on this at the end of the week.

This afternoon, I have a few updates to the site.
First off, is a proper update to the 40 man roster and the spring training invites. The info I posted the other day came from the Dallas Morning News, who seemed to do a half assed job of getting the information together this year, as it was a direct copy from the Rangers Official Site. The problem with that is the Rangers site doesn’t have the complete information. I was informed by someone on my forums that the Ft Worth Star Telegram had the full spring training roster, including several non roster invites that weren’t listed on the Rangers site/DMN site. Additionally, it had uniform numbers for all the players, no matter how obscure they were. This is good, so I’ve updated my roster page and my uniform number history section with all the current numbers.
Second is the schedule. I noticed yesterday that I still did not have times or TV schedule information up for the regular season. Furthermore, the 3 or so TV games from spring training also weren’t listed. The Rangers site did list five spring training games on TV (3 by FSN, 2 by ESPN), so I added them to my site. However, their site did not list TV information for the regular season. I was informed again by someone on my forums that the 2005 Printable Schedule from the Rangers site has the full schedule information. So today I brought my 2005 schedule up to speed with all the TV channels and times for all the games. Check it out.
It is odd that the Rangers have the full schedule online via the printable schedule, but not the regular one. However, they don’t have their act together with the roster, so I guess I’m not surprised, really.