This is a pretty embarrassing cheap-out lineup to open a 50% taxpayer funded billion dollar stadium with. There aren't just holes everywhere, they are at positions that are historically key to generating offense. The corners of the IF, DH, etc

Bingo Bango Bongo said:

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This is a pretty embarrassing cheap-out lineup to open a 50% taxpayer funded billion dollar stadium with. There aren't just holes everywhere, they are at positions that are historically key to generating offense. The corners of the IF, DH, etc

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Front office made no effort to upgrade the lineup in the offseason. It's why I was secretly hoping the season would be canceled.

At least the season is only 60 games and we have expanded playoffs, our pitching might be able to carry us in, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The front office has gotta get more guys in here who can hit.

There were a number of significant lineup upgrades available in the $15-20 million range. If you dont want to go 7 years and $35mill/yr for Rendon, I get it. But there were some really good players at need positions (like 3rd) that signed 4 year, $16mill/yr deals out there. That should have been a no brainer.

The friggin Reds signed TWO guys that both should/could have been options here (Moustakas and Castellanos). You're telling me the Reds can sign BOTH while you can't nut up enough to land one? GTFO

Grandal at C was another in that range. Chirinos should hopefully be an okay one year cheap stop-gap so I would have gone for one (if not both) of the guys I mentioned first, but that's still a position where they've had the worst WAR in the league over the past 5 years.

Bingo Bango Bongo said:

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There were a number of significant lineup upgrades available in the $15-20 million range. If you dont want to go 7 years and $35mill/yr for Rendon, I get it. But there were some really good players at need positions (like 3rd) that signed 4 year, $16mill/yr deals out there. That should have been a no brainer.

The friggin Reds signed TWO guys that both should/could have been options here (Moustakas and Castellanos). You're telling me the Reds can sign BOTH while you can't nut up enough to land one? GTFO

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In reality, The rangers should have been going hard after both moustakas and castellanos.

They didn't even appear to try with moustakas. It seemed like they pursued Rendon just enough to make a respectable effort so they can come back to the ranger fan base, shrug their shoulders, and say " oh well we tried". The hardcore ranger fans know the difference. We know that the rangers didn't try their best to get rendon.

After missing on both, the rangers let castellanos dangle out there forever. They seemingly never aggressively pursued him. The front office really likes their homegrown players, because I think they looked at it and thought Condor was a better option.

It is what it is at this point. I wish we could get some new owners and a massive front office overhaul for good measure. Fat chance it will happen tho.

I like our pitching. I like Chris Woodward. Defense = meh. Offense? Meh x 2.

Two out of four = just another middling Rangers team I'm afraid. I hope I'm wrong.

Schall 02 said:

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I like our pitching. I like Chris Woodward. Defense = meh. Offense? Meh x 2.

Two out of four = just another middling Rangers team I'm afraid. I hope I'm wrong.

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Probably.

It's so nice to have some sports to watch though.

wbt5845 said:

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My point is people point at the bad moves and forget about the good ones. Let's just be honest about his while body of work.

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His whole body of work? Solid.

His body of work post 2012?

2 seasons of playoff appearances, 2 division series losses.
4 seasons of 20+ games division deficits.
1 solid season but no playoffs.


And that's with a payroll ranking average around #12 in baseball during that time.

That's not a terrible payroll:production resume, but it's at least slightly underachieving. But you could stomach it if the franchise was setup for 2020 and beyond success... but it's still a club that won't realistically compete for a division title until 2022.

That ain't good.

I think JD has been pretty good with trades. Outside of the Ryan Dempster deal years ago, what they gave up in most of these deals never amounted to much, and there have been some quality impact players they got back.

I think he's been absolutely terrible at the draft, which has really come home to roost. I think he was decent with FA until this recent stretch of being extremely frugal, which may be more ownership than him.

But poor drafting and frugal ownership is a terrible combination.

Bingo Bango Bongo said:

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I think JD has been pretty good with trades. I think he's been absolutely terrible at the draft. I think he was good with FA until this recent stretch of being extremely frugal, which may be more ownership than him.

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I think he's been good on the under-the-radar type trades... But it's hard to ignore how poorly both the Prince Fielder trade and the Yu Darvish trade were handled.

The former seemed to lack any significant due diligence on health, and the former seemed to manage to sell at the lowest possible value.

Fielder was tough but he'd been an absolute iron man up to that. He played all 162 for years. That was some really bad luck and perhaps somewhat on the Rangers medical staff. I'm not sure what you want on Yu. The market was abysmal that year. Tons of races were not competitive, and what little that was competitive didn't really match up for having a need for Yu. It was just really bad timing to have to sell at that time. The alternative was trading the offseason before, but keep in mind that Yu was still coming around from TJ surgery then too

Dillon Tate was a massive screw up. There were other much more talented players drafted after him. I think we were also about to draft Alex Bergman, but the astros somehow got him first. I'm not sure about all the stories, but the draft just hasn't been helping the big league club lately. All we can seem to develop is relief pitchers.

Where are the scouts who found josh Hamilton? where are the people who traded for Michael young? where are the guys who drafted Ian kinsler? Where are the people who drafted and traded Mark Teixera?

I want freaking those people. I suspect we might've been the victim of brain drain while our team was the talk of baseball in the early 2010 decade. Some talented people under JD were poached by other teams and we haven't replaced them with intelligent folks.

At the end of the day, we seem to have a front office who can't stop ****ting on themselves. The fielder trade was a colossal screw up. Do we have the final story on that? Did Dombrowski pull a fast one on the rangers? The dodger trade sucked. I understand that some people here like Willie Calhoun, but we should e gotten more. If AJ Alexy pans out, I will re-evaluate that deal but we gave the dodgers a pitcher who on paper should've been able to help them win a championship. We gave the dodgers a much better pitcher than the ones we've been able to acquire in between Cliff Lee and Corey Kluber.

Now....... are we just unlucky in the fact that Verlander and Gerritt Cole weren't on the market at the time? Would we have pursued them? Would we have pulled off deals for them?

In hindsight there are some ugly deals you can shed light on where JD tried to help this team in competing windows and the help ended up being not helpful.

Ryan dempster? Bust. I think we also gave up Kyle freaking Hendricks for him?

Christian guzman? Worthless. I think we gave up tanner roark here. Still would've been better than the scrub pitching we have been trotting out lately.

Matt Garza? It's about even. I don't think what we gave up amounted to much, but we also couldn't resign Garza.

Cole Hamels? Seems like he was very costly and I was always kind of underwhelmed by him. I think the coaching sucked while he was here. Brocail and Bannister were a bunch of meat heads. We got totally pantsed and embarrassed by the blue jays.

Jonathan Lucroy? Played like dog **** while he was here. I'd still rather have chirinos and to be honest, I don't even really like chirinos all that much.

Jeremy Jeffress? Bahahahah. Terrible while here. We supposedly had our choice of several great Milwaukee relievers and we Obviously picked the wrong one.

Stating the obvious here, but remember that with a 60 game season, the individual games are "worth" 2.7 times as much as games in a normal season. Winning a series is almost like winning 3 series in a row. Of course the same goes for losing a series, which I think we will see plenty of with this lineup.

I've been out of the loop for a couple of seasons now. Is there any hope for 2022? Good prospects expected to arrive at that time, or just hoping for free agents?

Hamilton was a trade, and a great one at that. When I consider what Hamilton, Cliff Lee, and Cole Hamels delivered when in return they gave up which turned out to be a bunch of nothing. that's why I think JD has been good at trades on the whole. The World Series runs were basically built on his trades.

They won 10 out of 12 of Hamels starts (including the last 10) after trading for him. Absolutely catapulted them to a division title. They also got Diekman in that deal who was a great asset for them

Hamels did everything we could have wanted. He wasn't the problem with those teams.

The Darvish trade was just bad because we took forever to actually commit one way or the other on trade or extension, which brought us to a position where we had absolutely zero leverage. You either hammer out an extension and move forward knowing Yu will be on the roster (even if you are slotting him in as a #3), or you make him available early enough that a dozen or so teams that might like him for a season or a season and a half can make their offers.

Instead we waited and waited and waited and then suddenly every team in baseball knew that they could lowball us.

Now to be fair on the last 2-3 years there's simply not much the front office could do -- they were battling a franchise that did a historical multi-year tankjob that no one had ever seen and therefore would be stacked in such a way that realistically anyone outside the Top 1-5 payrolls couldn't compete... So I'm not so upset about our results during that timeframe, but if we weren't going to compete then we should have been stocking up young talent... but our 2021-2024 talent pipeline doesn't exactly blow you away.

Proposition Joe said:

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Now to be fair on the last 2-3 years there's simply not much the front office could do -- they were battling a franchise that did a historical multi-year tankjob that no one had ever seen and therefore would be stacked in such a way that realistically anyone outside the Top 1-5 payrolls couldn't compete... So I'm not so upset about our results during that timeframe, but if we weren't going to compete then we should have been stocking up young talent... but our 2021-2024 talent pipeline doesn't exactly blow you away.

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Several people including myself have chalked up the fielder fiasco as bad luck.

I also think the rangers have suffered from bad luck when it comes to young talent acquisition. While we were trying to compete, the trade market was vibrant. You could usually find a deal if you tried. Teams were always looking to wheel and deal.

The last few years the landscape has changed and it's been unfortunate for the rangers. Teams are hoarding prospects now and treating them like they're gold. It seems like nobody wants to trade young talent for whatever reason. Teams like the Minnesota twins and New York Yankees decided that they would rather lose in the playoffs then trade for mike minor and go for it. All we've been able to move lately are relievers it seems like.

While the fielder deal was partially bad luck, it seemed foolish to hope a guy who is morbidly obese would continue to stay healthy.

The next few years will be interesting in front offices approach to building clubs. The Astros realized the "true outcome" method isn't that great after their 2015-16 seasons. They dropped the swing and miss guys and plugged in guys that will still make contact. Then, you have Washington who is old, but won with starting pitching as opposed to openers and bullpens. They plugged and placed some folks off the scrap heap, but mostly homegrown talent with proven starting pitching.

Young talent is Important to build the core of the club, but sometimes it takes a proven commodity to Win now and talent that hasn't reached potential is expendable because you don't know how long you'll have that window.

You can dissect a lot of things about JD, but I feel the additions of Napoli and Beltre have been conveniently left off the list of grievances. We had 5 post season appearances in the 2010s, the good seasons highlighted by mid season trades, and the bad seasons set up by poor offseason work. You win some and lose some in that regard and I'm not going to chastise JD about the losses in there.

What WILL be his downfall is the complete lack of prospects groomed and brought up by the Rangers system during his time. They're going to have to make an impact by 2022-2023, and if they don't I think JD is gone. I also feel Gallo is going to make a lot of fans angry at JD if he keeps going the way he's going. I don't know how much more I can take of the Rangers media team hyping up a guy who has proven to be a Dollar General knock off of Giancarlo Stanton. He's got room to turn it around, but by god man just find away to get a hit with men on base.

Change in the lineup today that'll hopefully spark some runs for Kluber's debut

Andrus
Solak
Santana
Gallo
Odor
Frazier
Chirinos
Calhoun
Refsnyder

Great post. I for one thought they should pay cliff lee instead of signing beltre. Boy was I wrong! In fact, both times they brought in Napoli it paid off!

PWestAg18 said:

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You can dissect a lot of things about JD, but I feel the additions of Napoli and Beltre have been conveniently left off the list of grievances. We had 5 post season appearances in the 2010s, the good seasons highlighted by mid season trades, and the bad seasons set up by poor offseason work. You win some and lose some in that regard and I'm not going to chastise JD about the losses in there.

What WILL be his downfall is the complete lack of prospects groomed and brought up by the Rangers system during his time. They're going to have to make an impact by 2022-2023, and if they don't I think JD is gone. I also feel Gallo is going to make a lot of fans angry at JD if he keeps going the way he's going. I don't know how much more I can take of the Rangers media team hyping up a guy who has proven to be a Dollar General knock off of Giancarlo Stanton. He's got room to turn it around, but by god man just find away to get a hit with men on base.

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Gallo is the only recent position player success story the organization can point too. I'm talking home grown guys.

Gallo walks a lot to justify his boom or bust approach. What really kills us is we have several other players who have a similar approach to Gallo, but they aren't nearly as talented. Too many swing for the fence guys or what I like to call hero ball.

Powder blues look good. Kluber with the SO

Klubers movement is crazy. That slider for strike one against story was nasty

Walked Story. That was close

Story gunned down at 2nd trying to steal

HELL OF A THROW

Solid top half.

Back to JD, I have utmost confidence in him as far as trades and working the bargain bin. Not perfect but a helluva a lot of good to great that built the backbone of WS and division winning teams. The draft and ownership getting tight seem to be the issue now. The draft has been an issue for a long time.

So who chooses the alternate uniform on sundays? Starting pitcher?

Sundays are powder blue all the time now. Fridays are red and rest of home are white

ugh... Kuber out with some injury. Palumbo in to pitch.