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Magic Number is 156ishApril 7th, 2008
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Well, the long Rangers nightmare is over. A Texas starter finally pitched a complete game in Kevin Millwood’s Saturday night loss to LA-Ana-Cali. You could tell that the streak was on their minds all season last year, derailing what had been a promising campaign after the first ten games. Players really let stuff like “Consecutive Starts Without A Complete Game, American League” get to them. They take it personally. Kind of like being picked dead last in a four-team division by every publication known to man. (Although the Tibetian Times of Napal said they might challenge for third. The Senegal Sentinel picked the Rangers fifth, but that’s just being hateful…)
The good news from Week One is the Rangers are still in the thick of this thing. 3 and 3 after Sunday afternoon, which means that Texas is not mathematically eliminated yet, and that certainly tops last year. (In the interest of fairness, Texas was 5-5 last year before the bottom fell out on the season. So, we had that going for us…)
And the first week has had a little bit of everything. We opened the season with our traditional road loss, with the highlight being the sight of Milton Bradley, still rehabbing a knee that got blown out last season when his own coaches had to wrestle him to the ground, going nose-to-nose with the umpire. Now, if you look at the build on Ron Washington, he might want to reconsider getting in Bradley’s way. In fact, Ron should probably treat it like Marlin Perkins always did on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, sending Art Howe out to fight the Giant Anaconda while Ron sits in the studio, gently petting a Koala.
After Kason Gabbard threw an absolute gem against the Angels in Game 4, the Rangers starting pitchers had an ERA under 1.20. You think spell check hates “Kason Gabbard”? Try typing “Rangers”, “pitchers”, “ERA”, and “under 1.20” in the same sentence.
The bottom line is, that after week one, this feels like a pretty good team. The starting pitchers are looking great. The team is competitive. And you know that the Rudy Jaramillo led offense is going to hit the ball better. Michael Young will heat up and get on track for his 200 hits that he gets every season, hopefully quicker than last year, when he got 197 of his hits after the All-Star break. (Cary would like to point out that this statistic is possibly incorrect.) The team has yet to face more than a 4-run deficit, which is great considering that they’re six games into the season and Benoit has pitched a couple of times.
And it might be time for Fantasy League owners to meet David Murphy, no known relation to Dale Murphy, but currently starting in Left Field for the Texas Rangers. Murphy is the kind of sleeper that you look for in Roto Baseball, with a decent history, but getting his first chance at a full-time role. David’s lifetime OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage) coming into this year was over .900, but with very limited action. By the way, .900 OPS is about similar to Mark Teixeria’s career numbers with Texas…not that Murphy is replacing Tex. That job belongs to native Texan Ben Broussard. But Murphy is off to a crazy start, batting .409 so far. Keep an eye on it, but the point is that there will be plenty of opportunity to see him in action since he’s making it tough to take him out of the lineup.
So a good first week. And the reason that there is hope this season, maybe not of a play-off spot, but of at least staying within 15 games of the lead after May, was Game 2 in Seattle. Texas got a nice start from Padilla, where he was efficient, effective, and didn’t hit anyone on purpose. But then the defense started playing like medical marijuana was being prescribed in the dugout. (They did the same thing in Game 1. The team has started off the 08’ season by ranking #1 in unearned runs allowed. All-time strikeout king Nolan Ryan may be the team President now, but that doesn’t mean the Ranger’s staff will rack up the K’s. The ball will be put in play so the infield is going to need to improve it’s performance, starting, how about today?) Suddenly, our lead was gone, the game was slipping away, and last spring, there was no way that the Rangers pulled that one out. But Josh Hamilton crushes one into the stands, and suddenly the Rangers start 1-1 instead of 0-2. That wouldn’t have happened last year. 3-3 and coming home. Better than some might have predicted.
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April 8th, 2008 at 12:23 am
[...] Hometown 9 wrote an interesting post today on Magic Number is 156ishHere’s a quick excerpt Murphy is the kind of sleeper that you look for in Roto Baseball, with a decent history, but getting his first chance at a full-time role…. [...]