Monthly Archives: March 2021


Spring thrills.

Come-from-behind wins are always fun. Spring training games are no exception. After being down 5-0 early, the Rangers turned it around with a four-run seventh.  Two actual Rangers—Nick Solak and Jose Trevino—highlighted the comeback with doubles.  Solak is starting to dial it. After a 2-for-3 last night, Solak is now hitting […]


Is Guzman for real?

Guzman continues to hit. His confidence continues to build. When he and Nomar Mazara came up through the Rangers system, Mazara seemed to get more of the hype and had more potential. But Guzman is still hanging on with Rangers while Mazara is in major league purgatory with the Tigers, […]


Davis’s bat is waking up.

Don’t write off Khris Davis just yet. His bat is finding the ball. And when that happens, the ball goes over the wall. In Davis, the Rangers traded for more of the same. Home run or bust. The DH and sometimes left fielder is just thirty-three. And having him on the […]


Dahl dialing it in.

David Dahl is finding his rhythm at the plate. And that is a good thing. After a slow start, Dahl has his batting average up to .350 and his OPS up to .890. The numbers aren’t important. But what is important is that he is once again making contact. And […]


Outfoxed.

If you’ve ever been to Cooperstown, you may have missed Jake Fox’s plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s easy to overlook. Because it’s not there. Which is surprising because, in March of 2011, Fox had a Hall-of-Fame-worthy spring training. In twenty-seven games he hit ten home runs, a […]


Night baseball.

Brew up a pot of coffee. The first night game of the exhibition season is tonight. And, since time changed in the central time zone but not in the Phoenix area, tonight’s game will start at 9:10. But a comfortable 7:10 locally. The Rangers have reached the halfway point in […]


Looking for answers.

Baseball gets back to normal. Well, at least as normal as spring training baseball can get. But no more shortened games. All games will go nine innings, unless there’s rain or something weird. No more bailing out of an inning because your pitcher was so bad he reached a pitch […]


Curtis Terry.

Most of spring training is waiting for it to end. Waiting for pitchers to work up their arm strength.  But every year there seems to be one storyline that makes these five weeks worthwhile. This spring it’s Curtis Terry. The six-foot-two, two-hundred-fifty-eight-pound first baseman is turning heads. He’s doing that […]


Experimenting with the shift.

Major League Baseball announced it is experimenting with rule changes in the minor leagues, to see if they might possibly make improvements to the big-league game. Possibly the biggest experiment is how to tackle the shift. It turns out that players cannot simply hit it the other way. Defensive shifts […]


Hello? Offense?

After scoring seventeen runs on eighteen hits on Wednesday, the Rangers were shut out on one lousy single on Thursday. From the second to last batter. The Rangers were almost no-hit. That’s spring for you. But that’s also two games in the last few days in which the Rangers went […]