Hey friends. Thanks for serving as my creative writing teacher this week, giving me prompts and forcing me to do something other than scrawl band logos in my notepad. This time of year—especially in a slower-than-usual off-season—it can seem like there are no real baseball things to write about, so it’s very helpful to get […]
The 1/24/18 Upset Update: On Diekman’s award and the Hall of Fame, etc.
Good evening and welcome to the January 24th Upset Update. Today’s music recommendation is an old friend of mine named Casey Black. I’m sure I’ve recommended “Lay You in the Loam” before—it’s one of my all-time favorite albums—so today, I’ll recommend “See the Black Sea” from 2016. He’s a gravelly-voiced poet, and perhaps that might […]
Bridges Unburned: Rangers avoid arbitration with Kela, Diekman, and Profar
The streak now reaches 18. In 2000, the Rangers and Lee Stevens went to an arbitration hearing. Stevens had played 146 games in 1999, thanks largely to a knee injury that befell Rafael Palmeiro. Stevens hit .282 with 24 home runs and 81 RBI, and thought that worthy of a contract worth $4.7 million. The […]
Rangers Mailbag: Defensive Metrics, a Bad Trade Idea, and it’s Fight Time
The first time we did a Rangers mailbag, this thing devolved into ranking the various stages of Cole Hamels’ beard. That seems like an unmitigated success to me, so let’s do another one! How much of an upgrade defensively is Cain to Delino in CF? — Kevin Turner (@ktfuntweets) January 6, 2018 Oh. OH. We’re […]
Diekman, Delabar, and Date Changes: the Jan. 4th Rangers Upset Update
We did it! We survived a day in Texas where the temperature didn’t get above freezing. Some of us handled it fine. Others, perhaps, less so. The new year is now four days old: still new enough to smell like a new year, but old enough now to already have its first coffee spill or […]
Cold Stove: why the Rangers’ off-season has been so quiet (or has it?)
You might not have noticed the relative lack of content here in the Rangers section of the site. After all, we just careened headlong through the road-trips-and-flight-delays portion of the holiday season, and now you’re unpacking your gifts and begging the kids to get their Lego Foot Destruction blocks off the floor. But the last […]