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I went to Opening Day on Friday, and I also went to Opening Night on Saturday. I actually spent most of this game worrying about the weather, especially when I was in the bathroom and heard “Tornado touchdown” over the radio. Anyway, it turned out to be fine other than some heavy winds, and the Rangers got out the big bats. In the early trend of the season, the longball provided just about all the offense in the game. 7 of the 8 were off a home run. We had four of them – two by Juan Gonzalez, the others by Arod, and one by Hank Blalock. All of them were no doubters, too. Probably helped a bit by the wind, but eh? :)
Colby Lewis wasn’t spectacular, but he was serviceable, and this year that will be more than good enough, I think. I enjoyed being at the ballpark again, and I have to say that my pitching fantasies were dashed early on this season, I suspect we’ll still play well, despite that. I do wish we were a bit less dependant on the longball, though – even if chicks dig ’em. :)

There never is quite anything like opening day, is there? Even if you lose (which we did), there’s something nice about visiting the park again for a game. :)
It was also a special day for me because my brother was visiting in from out of town. I picked him up at the airport at 10:30, and we headed straight to the ballpark. Got there early, took in the sights of the new things at the park. The new scoreboards were gorgeous, much better than before – the mats outside the stadium were a tad gimmicky, but still OK, the banners of players were nice, although I would have liked them not to have the Donruss logo on them. The food stand signage is new and a needed improvement. The concourses seem less cluttered, but the frickin “Sign up for a credit card and get a towel” people REALLY NEED TO GO. I didn’t find the famed garlic fries, so I’ll have to try them the next time I’m out there. I even thought the Rangers mascot was cute. I’m not one of these baseball zealots (like on some web forums) who think that anything that deviates from their perceived “mantra of baseball” is bad. I even thought the Ranger Captain was cool. Overall, a definite improvement – but the best “new” thing about the Ballpark was the return of Chuck Morgan. Games go so much better with him there – it really was painful at times last year without him.
The game? Well, we lost. Ismael Valdes looked pretty decent again, if not spectacular. All our offense came from home runs again (one by Blalock, one by Sierra). Was a nice back and forth game which we lost, but my excitement at being at the Ballpark again really overshadowed the game. Even the sunburn I got was no big deal. Seeing friends again (Hi Tina!) was really nice.

Is game 3 of the season too quick to totally give up on our pitching staff? :) This was ugly – even worse than last night’s game. We gave up 21 runs to the Angels in two games – blech. I bet you if we could bring Nolan Ryan out of retirement (his last season was TEN years ago now), he’d probably be as good or better than what we have. John Thomson, who I thought looked good most of his outing, gave up 6 in 4.1 innings. Fultz gave up two more in less than an inning, Garcia gave up one, and Jay Powell gave up one. The only pitcher who was good was Cordero who gave up nothing in his inning of work.
Doug Glanville continues his early season good form, going 3 for 5 with a home run, as well as some fine defensive play. He’s also got an OBP of .429 and a slugging percentage of .615 at the moment – if he keeps this up, he’ll be an absolute steal at the price we paid for him.
The story of the night was Arod’s 300th home run. He now became the youngest all time to reach 300 home runs – breaking the previous record held by Jimmy Foxx by about 80-90 days or so. Was also nice he got the ball thrown back by some doofus in the stands (they called him Nimrod on the TV). Also, Raffy got #491 last night too – his first (and so far only) hit of the season.
Anyway, for some reason, this 1-2 start seems depressing, because it shows just how weak our pitching staff is – I have a feeling it will be a long season. :(

Well, I guess the only good thing you could say about this game is that you didn’t get to see the stupid rally monkey. Even only 2 games into 162, these midnight games when we get blown out 10-0 are hard to watch. There goes matching the 72 Dolphins with an unbeaten record. ;)
Chan Ho Park reverted to the form he had before the final three starts and most of last season. There goes the Chad Kreuter theory. I didn’t buy into that, anyway. Just makes me feel even worse about his season, as his ERA is now over TWENTY! :( (CJ Nitkowski’s is over TEN too after just this game).
Offensively, there’s little to talk about, except we left a ton of people (5 in the first two innings) on base in the first two innings. If we had scored any of them, one never knows how much it might have changed the outlook of the game. It was kind of nice to see the setup for Mark Teixeira in his first major league at bat with the bases loaded. I had visions there – as I’m sure most everyone (including Teixeira, too) did. Oh well, I’m sure he’ll do fine in time.

OK, I hate the Rally Monkey. It was cute when it was just a jumping monkey on the Angels’ Jumbotron. But now it’s a stupid commercialized piece of crap – the commercial they showed on ESPN really irritated me – and I except I’ll hate it more once they hand out their Rally Monkey bobble head later this year in Anaheim. :(
We start the season and the Showalter regime with a win Sunday night in Anaheim against the defending world Series champions. The 6-3 win was fueled by three longballs – two by usual suspects (Arod & Gonzalez) and the third by Mike Young. Young’s was the turning point in the game, we were down 2-1 at that point, and we went up 4-2, and never looked back after that point. I also liked Mike Young’s home run as a big middle finger to “My second baseman must have godzilla like offensive numbers” GM John Hart. Mike Young is the best thing we’ve had come along in ages, and to mess with him like this really bothers me.
Anyway, we also got decent pitching too – although I’m not sure why Valdes was pulled after five innings and 65 odd pitches. Our pen was great, giving up no runs, and only a couple hits over four innings. Newcomer Aaron Fultz looked great, and Cordero & Urbina were both lights out.
It’s only one game, but it’s something to enjoy – I was ready for a real baseball game after playing several games of World Series Baseball 2K3 on my Xbox earlier in the day, driving around to several bookstores in Dallas to find a copy of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram so I could get their (far better than the Dallas paper) baseball preview section, watching the Rangers/Astros preview show from Fox Sports Southwest that was on my TiVo from Friday evening, watching the 90 minute Baseball Tonight show. :)
My wife said now that baseball season is started again, that I will be a happier person. I’m not sure I like the implications that I’m an unhappy person during the offseason, but baseball season HAS started again. :)

That’s it. Spring training is over. We finish up 16-14-1 with a 6-5 win over the Mariners. I was busy doing some “house stuff”, so I only got to listen to the 9th inning of this game, but it’s nice to say that the regular season is here finally. Tomorrow night it all starts up for real. I can’t wait! :)

I didn’t realize this game was on the radio, or I would have listened to all of it. I checked the MLB site around 10:45 and saw there was a feed, so I started listening to it. When I started, the game was already 4-4, but I still got to see some of the Juan Gonzalez show. :)
Nice to see a big offensive outburst like this – 6RBI for Juan, but I hope this carries over. These are nice to see, but I want to see ’em when they count.
John Thomson came out of the game iwth an injury, and how it will impact the roster is not yet known. However, other than John, the rest of our pitching was quite good – The team of Powell / Cordero / Urbina / Santos / Garcia combined for 6.1 innings, giving up just one run. As we wind down, I’m a bit concerned about Esteban Yan – he hasn’t seemed to have gotten it together yet. :(

Not available, but it was nice to see Chan Ho Park pitch good three times in a row. Hope it holds up. :)