Navigating what might be the most challenging season to be a Rangers fan in years

Jamey is a lifelong Rangers fan who has been blogging for nearly 20 years at newbergreport.com and traces his fandom back to the days of Bump Wills, Bert Blyleven, and the powder blues.

The intentions were good, none would dispute, but there’s a certain category of road said to be so paved.  The typical response to a flyover of aircraft in formation timed impeccably with the final notes of the Anthem is goosebumps and awe.  It’s horribly unfair, therefore, to harbor (or start a story with) a complaint when it doesn’t exactly line up with the plan, even when a moment of silence is involved.  Still, it was a best-laid-plans moment, minutes after which the first five pitches of the baseball season, at least locally, resulted in three balls and six bases.

And then three losses, smothering a single win.

If you’re sensing a bout of overreaction, don’t: This was the story I planned to write well before the flying foursome that sonic-soared a bit sooner than planned and the long-awaited foursome with the World Champs that couldn’t get here soon enough.  How this initial 2.5 percent of the schedule turned out (a third straight 1-3 start, incidentally) had zero bearing on the notion I’ve tried to dismiss but couldn’t, the nagging sense that this might be the most challenging season to be a Texas Rangers fan — at least coming out of the gate — since the last time a million cubic yards of dirt was burrowed from the ground on one side of Randol Mill Road or the other.

Globe Life Park opened in 1994 (as The Ballpark in Arlington) with the allure of the majestic new building.  The following year, the Rangers were coming off a first-ever first-place finish in the division (despite a losing record) in what was a strike-shortened season.  Texas was coming off a winning record going into 1996, which was followed by three playoff seasons in four.  Though the 2000 season went badly, the advent of the 2001 season was mega-hyped with the arrival of Alex Rodriguez, baseball’s best young player.

The A-Rod years were brutal, but they were the A-Rod years, and I’d submit that “gut-punching” isn’t the same as “challenging.”

Texas moved on from A-Rod just before the 2004 season started.  A scuttled trade that would have brought Manny Ramirez and Class-A lefty Jon Lester to Texas led instead to Alfonso Soriano and not-Robinson-Cano (alias: Joaquin Arias).

Was it challenging to be a Rangers fan going into 2004?  Well, yeah.  But Alex didn’t want to be here, and as a fan that was as much a kick in the junk as the three last-place finishes while he was. So what I remember about that spring was a ray of hope that Soriano, who in his first three big league seasons had piled up 95 home runs and 119 stolen bases with an .832 OPS and plus-plus durability, and Arias, the 19-year-old shortstop whom Baseball America would slot behind Thomas Diamond and John Danks and ahead of Ian Kinsler in its Rangers prospect rankings after a season here — plus the extra millions Texas could operate with on the heels of the trade — signaled healthier times for the franchise.

Your mileage may vary, and 2004 may have been tough for you to get excited about.  I get it.  But for me, the club had emerged from under a dark cloud, and that, if nothing else, was energizing.

Texas won 89 games that season, an 18-game improvement that generated some buzz heading into 2005 (never mind John Hart and Buck Showalter preaching “managed expectations” as if it were a marketing slogan).

Going into 2006, new Rangers GM Jon Daniels signed Kevin Millwood to lead the rotation and had two hitters in their prime (Mark Teixeira and Michael Young) who’d earned MVP votes two straight years.  Encouraging.

Going into 2007, Texas had moved on from Buck Showalter and had new manager Ron Washington breathing life into things.

Going into 2008, the Rangers had traded Teixeira for what we knew, even then, was an absolute haul of young talent, had just made five first-round draft picks and signed a Venezuelan J2 kid named Martin Perez.  The team was coming off a bad 2007 season but things were looking up.  Same going into 2009 and 2010, as the win-loss odometer advanced.

That handful of years also featured, on top of it all, consensus assessment that the Rangers farm system was one of the very best in the game.

Every year since then, until now: Not especially challenging to be a Rangers fan.  The only spring from 2011 through 2017 when the club was not coming off 162+ — or stated another way, the only spring they entered having been eliminated earlier than the last game they’d played — was 2015, but there was a new manager in place.  Yu Darvish went down with an elbow injury midway through camp, and that sucked. But I know lots of hardcore fans of this team who felt that the arrival of Jeff Banister would help cure much of what had possibly grown stale or dysfunctional.  Right or wrong, there was at least a mild optimism that the era of Rangers relevance would get back on track, relegating 2014 to a state of outlierliness that folks would tell their grandkids about one day, with a smile.

And it did, with a couple of division titles that made being a Rangers fan comfortably uncomplicated.

Then 2017 happened.  The impossibly bad bullpen work early on and Adrian Beltre’s concurrent absence.  A season in which the hitters struck out too much and the pitchers didn’t strike out enough and the second baseman, a year after it was trendy to call him an MVP candidate, found himself included on short lists about the opposite end of the spectrum.

There was also the trade of Darvish, under circumstances vastly different from the trades of A-Rod or Teixeira.

A 95-win team had become a 78-win team, and the off-season that followed was relatively quiet.

And now, with term life set to expire on the ballpark in a year and a half, we were given no reason on Thursday to bury concerns about whether Cole Hamels — who is certainly being counted on to lead this staff — has a Verlander-esque resurgence in him before his run here comes to an end.

Then there’s Adrian.  When will his Rangers closure come?

And Elvis.  Same thing, different reason.

Those are the two we don’t even want to think about.

There’s a staging ground over the ballpark’s southwest shoulder that hammers home its mortality.  The expiration date for Hamels and for Beltre and for Andrus — at least in Arlington — is less clear.

Shohei Ohtani not only eluded the Rangers’ efforts of at least five years to close a deal, but signed with a division rival.

Not the division rival, though, that’s baseball’s best team based on the most objective measure, and that probably got better since the parade, at least on paper.  Gerrit Cole’s performance Sunday puts that argument in all-caps.

Set aside for a moment the deep Astros lineup.  Which Houston starting pitcher would not be the Rangers’ ace?

Or look at it another way: Which Rangers starter makes the Astros’ rotation?

It’s a challenging answer.

It’s easy to be an Astros fan right now.  True, too, if you’re a fan of the Yankees, Cubs, Indians, Nationals, Red Sox or either Los Angeles team.

It’s not that challenging, as long as baseball is more than a social event, to be a Braves or Padres or White Sox fan, seeing what those organizations are building on the back fields.  It takes a little patience and imagination, but it’s a good time to care about those clubs, even if the win-loss doesn’t pay instant rewards.

That’s not to say the Rangers farm system isn’t on the uptick itself.  It is.  But the fruit’s gonna hang out on the vine for a while.  Patience and imagination are called for, even if the system is arguably not quite as flush at the top tiers as it is in Atlanta or San Diego or Chicago’s South Side.

We learned towards the end of camp that the left-handed pitcher I had pegged as the number two southpaw in the system (Cole Ragans) is headed for Tommy John surgery, while my number two righthander (Kyle Cody) has been shut down, for now, with elbow inflammation.

Those things don’t devalue the system, but setbacks aren’t fun.  At any level.

The Rangers won’t (and shouldn’t) acknowledge it, but the rest of us can: The goal this season is to compete for a Wild Card berth.  Fighting for a division title, if not impossible, is unrealistic, assuming Houston stays anywhere close to healthy.

Even with Wild Card aspirations, the team’s starting pitching needs a whole lot to break right.  The track record is there.  But in each starter’s situation, the Rangers are betting on something exceeding projections.

Their outfield defense has questions, and did even before Delino DeShields went down this weekend.  The team’s left field issue takes on added scrutiny given the decided lefthandedness of the rotation — and losing DeShields for what could approach a quarter of the season is an unwelcome development for both the defense and the offense.

Even missing DeShields for now, the offense is good and has a chance to be better than that, with several productive young hitters certainly capable of another gear.  The bullpen (Sunday notwithstanding) looks like it could be a strength.

But if the first half of the game doesn’t go well, the bullpen can only be so much of a weapon.

Apologies for bringing the following up, but there will be a point.

Seventh inning, Toronto, October 14, 2015.

The Rangers were back at Rogers Centre, where they’d won the first two games of that ALDS before dropping a pair in Arlington to knot up the best-of-five.  Texas nursed a 3-2 lead on the scoreboard, needing to record nine more outs to seal the same margin in the series and advance.  Rougned Odor had just scored the go-ahead run in the top of the inning on a throw that catcher Russell Martin had intended for the pitcher, but that instead caromed off Shin-Soo Choo’s bat.  One pitch and a thunderstorm of beer cans later, the inning was over.

Martin led off the bottom of the seventh.  A 1-2 grounder to shortstop was booted by Andrus.

Kevin Pillar followed.  He hit a 1-2 grounder to first baseman Mitch Moreland, whose throw to Andrus to start a 3-6-1 double play bounced off the dirt in front of the bag and off Andrus’s glove.

Ryan Goins then slapped a bunt toward a charging (and hobbled) Beltre on what looked to be a failed effort to move the tying and go-ahead runs into scoring position.  With the wheel play on, Beltre gathered the 50-foot bunt on one hop and delivered a perfect feed to Andrus for the force at third base.  Instead, a third baseball in a matter of minutes failed to stick in Andrus’s glove.

Sam Dyson relieved Hamels at that point, and two batters later there was a bat flip.  Never mind that part.

The point is that, after that nightmare of an inning for one of the surest-handed shortstops in the game, it wouldn’t have been the most surprising sports-thing for Andrus’s career to start receding from its peak.  He had four months to think about that traumatic seventh before seeing his teammates again in Surprise.  It was, by his own admission, the biggest challenge of his life as an athlete.  It could have gotten the best of him.

Instead, Andrus turned in a career-best .800 OPS in 2016.

And then a new career-best .808 OPS in 2017.

Perhaps there’s an example there.

Drop.  Drop.  Drop.

Challenge.

Step up.

I think Elvis Andrus would probably suggest this isn’t the time to fold.  As a fan, this feels like a challenging moment in time — and I’m not talking about the weekend’s Astros series — but there are two ways to respond to a challenge.

The Mavs have been eliminated, the Stars have been eliminated and the Cowboys are planning for a draft in which they’ll pick higher than they expected to.  The Rangers have been eliminated from nothing.  This might take some patience, and maybe even some imagination, but it would be a mistake to pack it in.

There’s Joey, and the next step.

Delino, same, once he’s back from the hand injury.

Alex Claudio.

Maz is going to hit third for playoff teams.  Watch him grow.

Adrian: What if this is it for him?

Elvis: What if this is it for him?

You wanna miss that?

Winning is hard.  That’s a huge part of why it’s the best.  For the players who battle, and the fans who invest.

Maybe Rougned, who we all know can be a lot better because he has been, starts to figure out some of what’s gotten away from him.  There’s obviously lots of room to go up, and not just at the plate.

Maybe Keone builds on a very good 2017 and has a great 2018, and helps anchor a pen that, if it had even a marginally effective end-game at the start of last season, might have led to another year of 162+.

Embrace what’s happening on the farm, not only with Leody Taveras, Willie Calhoun, and Hans Crouse – but also with Michael Matuella, Sam Huff, Chris Seise and C.D. Pelham. Soon enough Joe Palumbo will be back on a mound and Julio Pablo Martinez will be in the system and we’ll see how long the kid gloves are on before each is turned loose.

When Globe Life Field opens in 2020, Gallo will be 26 and Calhoun will be 25, as will Palumbo and Matuella and Cody and Pelham and Ronald Guzman.

Mazara will be 24.

Martinez will be 23.

Ragans and Pedro Gonzalez will be 22, and at age 21 there will be Taveras, Crouse, Seise, Bubba Thompson, A.J. Alexy, and Anderson Tejeda.  There will be a few more international and draft classes to factor in before then, and maybe even a 32-year-old named Kershaw.

Even with a mid-September run that kept the Wild Card standings, and not draft position, in focus, last season took a lot out of me.  It featured the bullpen, the injuries, the shocking seasons from the second baseman and the former catcher, and The Trade.

But the biggest challenge of his career didn’t derail Elvis.

Facing a lineup with Bryce Harper near the top and Max Scherzer at the bottom didn’t faze Austin Bibens-Dirkx.

Nothing fazes Alex Claudio.

I’m not counting on a playoff run this year, but there’s more than enough upside here to not rule it out.  And there’s the other thing: It’s baseball.

It’s Joey Gallo missiles. It’s Elvis Andrus’s complete game. It’s Alex Claudio’s brass ones.

It’s Adrian Beltre.

Part of what made “True Detective” such a tour de force was that it blew away expectations.

(Season 1, that is.  Comparisons of the advent of this Rangers season to Season 2 are prohibited — the expectations here are nothing like they were for the “True Detective” sequel.)

Again, this has nothing to do with Houston’s visit.  The Rangers lost three of four to start the 2016 season and ended up winning 95.  They started the 2015 season 8-16, and won the division.

They were 5-9 out of the gate in 2010, and won their first pennant.

A 1-3 start facing the best team in baseball irritates me less than the next three being played, in the division, at 9:05 at night with work and school the next day.

It’s the bigger picture that makes this year feel more challenging as a fan than just about any I can remember since the old stadium stood.  But these are the years when, if things happen to fall just right, being a sports fan can be its most wildly awesome.

We all want to see Adrian and Elvis in Rangers caps when Globe Life Park closes, just as Nolan was when the last stadium shut its doors.  But that’s 2019.  We’ve got 2018 to get our arms around in the meantime.

There’s a very big thing being built next door, but not only there.  The core of this Rangers team is largely young.  And capable of jetting past expectations.  There are lots of if’s, but if’s are not can’t’s.

Before the new building opens, there’s at least one more flyover to calibrate.  If things go right, maybe more.

And maybe not exactly the way you expected.

EXIT VELO

• Early returns on the effort to add swing-and-miss to the rotation have been positive.  Here’s a comparison of last year’s Darvish-Perez-Hamels-Griffin starts to kick off the season with this weekend’s Hamels-Fister-Moore-Minor starts:

Summary: A swinging strike every 10.3 deliveries (after one every 15.5 last year, a 50 percent improvement), and 8.8 strikeouts per nine innings (compared with fewer than five per nine a year ago).

• Banister said during camp that what the club wants out of Odor this year is “a more productive aggression.”  I suggested a few days ago that “it would be tremendous if [Odor’s first] 100 at-bats took at least 115 plate appearances to materialize.”  Odor’s average through the first series is an unsightly .083, but he’s drawn two walks (after just one unintentional base on balls every six games last year) and had a tremendous plate appearance in Friday’s win that ended in a key sacrifice fly.  The hits haven’t come yet, but he’s finding a way to be productive otherwise, and that’s encouraging.

• With the Rangers’ middle-of-the-pack finish in 2017, they will select 15^th in June’s MLB Draft, with that pick sitting in a $3,738,500 slot.  That bonus amount is not fixed; whatever Texas spends on its first pick will count against the allotted $7,356,000 the club has been assigned for the first 10 rounds.  The club’s second pick, 55^th overall, has a slot value of $1,257,500.

• Texas has also been assigned an international bonus pool of $4,983,500 for the 12-month J2 signing period that opens July 2.  Fourteen clubs presently have more to spend (though only 10 can do much with it — more on that in a second).  However, clubs can acquire up to an additional 75% via trade (so, for the Rangers, another $3,737,625, for a total of $8,721,125), a path Texas frequently explores.  A club that exceeds its pool — which the Rangers have not in 2017-18, even with the expected signing of Cuban outfielder Julio Pablo Martinez — cannot spend more than $300,000 on any player in either of the two ensuing J2 periods.  The clubs that will be limited in that respect for 2018-19 are the A’s, Astros, Braves, Cardinals, Nationals, Padres, Reds, and White Sox — which makes them prime candidates to partner up on bonus pool trades (along with Baltimore, which historically treats J2 money like a food allergen).

• Right-handed reliever Seung-Hwan Oh, whose February physical dissuaded Texas from a closing a one-year, $2.75 million deal (with an option for a second year), pitched a scoreless inning in Toronto’s season opener against the Yankees and then recorded a save Sunday with another scoreless frame.

• An update on the trade with Philadelphia that brought Hamels and Jake Diekman to Texas in July 2015: Catcher Jorge Alfaro made his first Opening Day roster (perhaps only because he’s out of options) and started one of the Phillies’ first three games.  Righthander Jerad Eickhoff, a fixture in the club’s rotation, is expected to miss as long as two months with a strained lat muscle.  Righthander Jake Thompson made the club as a long reliever, entering in the fourth inning with a 7-2 deficit on Saturday — as the ninth and final relief pitcher to appear in Philadelphia’s season-opening series, unless you count utility infielder-outfielder Pedro Florimon.  Outfielder Nick Williams (who hits from the left side) started once in the series but doesn’t appear to be in a standard platoon, as Philadelphia faced three right-handed starters.  Righthander Alec Asher was sold last spring to the Orioles, who designated him for assignment last week.  And lefthander Matt Harrison, whose contract the Phillies took in order to get a better return in prospects, never threw a pitch for them.  While it’s easy to bemoan the deal as a Rangers fan, given that the Rangers have won two playoff games since and no more, it certainly hasn’t paid off the way Philadelphia hoped — at least not yet.

(Photo: Cavanaugh Flight Museum flyover on Opening Day at Globe Life Park in Arlington, March 29, 2018.  Credit: Michael Lamb)