Well...the Hall of Fame vote has come and gone, as well as that shining jewel on the Rangers' pitching mound which was supposed to be one of the best rotations in baseball this year.

Damnit, Holland...

So, let's talk Rangers, the A.L. West, and baseball in general, in no particular order...


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Posted by: Ben at 01:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Paul Swydan at Fangraphs looks into the question of whether every World Series championship team had a Hall of Fame player.  (No, but most did and the study is interesting.)

Grant Brisbee writes that Mike Piazza must be elected to the Hall of Fame (because Piazza is the only candidate who can plausibly get elected even though he doesn't really warrant the honor, and therefore will clear a spot from the current HoF logjam.)


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Posted by: Ben at 10:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So all I've got is some articles from around the Western Division:


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Posted by: Ben at 04:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So, now that the Cowboys are off the radar, the official countdown for Spring Training starts in Texas.  There is, however, very little Rangers news going on; there really isn't much baseball news to speak of.


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Posted by: Ben at 10:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Which is, nothing other than the posting of Masahiro Tanaka.  I'm torn on Tanaka myself.  He's not as good, overall, as Yu Darvish.  Darvish clearly had the make-up, build and stuff to be an ace.  Tanaka is smaller but has a decent build, has fewer and weaker pitches except for his excellent slider, relies on his change-up more which could affect his durability, and has a lot of mileage for a twenty-five year old.  He projects to a middle-of-the-rotation starter; his excellent slider has some predicting him to be a TORP, or at least *almost* a TORP.


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Posted by: Ben at 01:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Just a few minutes ago the news started cascading that the Texas Rangers have signed Shin-soo Choo to a contract for 7 years, $130 million.  Unless Texas works a magic deal for a high-risk undervalued hitter, the Choo signing probably ends big deals for Texas this year.  The value of this deal is also fascinating in light of recent stories that New York offered Choo 7/$140m, which was taken off the table when Choo's agent Scott Boras asked for $143 million for vanity reasons.  I will be interested to see how much of the contract is dependent on quotas.


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Posted by: Ben at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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An argument that's fallen by the wayside the last couple of months is whether Jurickson Profar is going to be the star many predicted.  Profar had a relatively disappointing 2013 as the Rangers utility infielder, swaying the opinion of many in favor of trading him while he still had some prospect shine left.  Now that Profar is likely to be taking Ian Kinsler's place at 2nd Base, it's worth wondering what we're going to get.


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Posted by: Ben at 10:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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All's quiet on the Free Agent Front.  And the Trade Front.  And not much is happening with the prospects in winter ball.

However...


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Posted by: Ben at 06:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Beyond the Box Score has an article up on what defined "league average" performance in 2013.

Important take-aways:


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Posted by: Ben at 09:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Over at the soon-to-be-defunct Shutdown Inning, Peter Ellwood writes that Jon Daniels did a fantastic job signing Geovany Soto and J. P. Arencibia to catch for Texas next year, and it was a big mistake.


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Posted by: Ben at 03:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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(This was originally posted on my personal blog about a month before being posted here, which is why it seems to be out of the timeline...)

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Jeff Pasan tweeted earlier today that the Rangers were doing "background work" on Masahiro Tanaka:



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Posted by: Ben at 12:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I figured out what to do with this blog.

You may have figured it out.

The genesis of this idea is two-fold.  Fold One:  I'm not particularly thrilled with filling the MidniteTease blog with baseball comments.  Of all my friends an acquaintances, only a handful care about baseball, so the meager readership at MidniteTease really falls off when I focus on baseball.  Fold Two:  Two prominent Rangers fansites have shut down recently; one because the prime blogger and site manager burned out when he started his full-time, post-college job as a CPA.  The second was a (relatively) recent website that received a significant portion of the readership when the first site shut down.  Unfortunately, that fansite has been bought by Paranoidfan which plans to focus on their iOS app rather than blogging.  It has been suggested repeatedly over the past year that a new fansite needed to be created, so I'm gonna give it a try.

Welcome to Texas Baseball Town.  Inquiries are welcome.  There are a number of good Rangers bloggers out there that are looking for work right now.  Hell, even if you're not a Rangers blogger, you're welcome to inquire.  As long as you don't mind writing your baseball posts on a Rangers blog.

Posted by: Ben at 09:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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