Sunday, February 15, 2009

Around the Horn: Sunday (afternoon)

“The highlight of my career? In '67 with St. Louis, I walked with the bases loaded to drive in the winning run in an inter-squad game in spring training.”--Bob Uecker

This made me smile (regardless of the fact that Uecker didn't play for St. Louis in 1967) and brought to mind all of the positive memories we all have of Spring Training. Baseball Time in Arlington's post on Spring optimism, based on Josh Hamilton's "win 90 games" comment, reminds me of the fresh start associated with the beginning of each school semester or perhaps the start of every new year. No problem seems insurmountable, no deed seems undoable. For a baseball team, phrases like "if we can stay healthy" and "stay focused the whole season" are tossed around with careless excitement. All the Rangers, especially Hamilton, seem to be optimistic about the upcoming season. Here's to hoping their optimism is closer to reality than most people (myself included) seem to think . . .

Jeff Wilson writes about Elvis Andrus (and has a Spring Training update here). Apparently, Andrus is pretty well-spoken and handles the media well:

"When you have teammates like I do, they are superstars you want to follow and want to be in the future. I know it's going to be crazy, but I'm trying to keep it cool and trying to be myself and not change or do anything different."

So far he's not missing the forest for the trees. Great. Let's hope that he plays well enough to stay in the big league forest all season. I think he will be an exciting, if not frustrating, player to watch.

TR Sullivan forecasts answers to some early questions that have been lobbed the Rangers way. No real surprises here. In a different article, he also notes that Jason Jennings could start the season at AA or AAA. This would be a great move for the Rangers and would prevent learning the hard way about Jennings like they did last year:


(screenshot from espn.com)

Scott Lucas of The Ranger Rundown notes that the franchise is 197 games under .500 since the move to Arlington . . .

And that is about it for today. 11 days until Spring Training!

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