Greatest Rangers Moments?

But you know.

but..

MY + Blalock game winners in All-Star games.

he was great – obviously much better in California and Houston – not arguing his relevance, but that says a lot about the franchise when there’s so little accomplished in 3+ decades that a pitcher in his 22-26th seasons has 2/3 of the greatest moments.

I was still single digits in anos.

1. on Prime Nine best regular season catches. I was there, btw.

particularly that first outing of course, but all of it.. he was putting up historic numbers and obviously we were already hyped about it.

But because I agree with you, I’ll repeat it… I first started rooting for ‘em in 2004, basically out of hatred for the Angels. It was either them or the A’s, and I didn’t really fancy the A’s either.

I followed kinda nonchalantly, through ‘05 and ’06 via newspaper box scores and the 11 o’clock news sports ticker, and then I found TR Sullivan’s blog in 2007 and started posting. Even the old me that knew fairly little about baseball eventually realized the cronies over there where idiots and I moved on to commenting heavily at the old BBTiA at MVN for awhile. Eventually I joined up here and got a rude awakening about my own baseball knowledgeability in 2008.

I was 14 and living an hour east of the Bay. I absolutely loved Jose Canseco. I think I had/have over 150 of his baseball cards, posters of him, et al. I was devastated when he was traded. I immediately turned my back on the A’s and hated them for dealing my favorite player. Followed him to Texas and I’ve been hooked ever since.

during the era of V-Ball. The team was fun to watch, it was dirt cheap to go to games, and since their record was never good, you could also get freebie season tickets about all the time. After growing up watching games in the craphole that was the Astrodome, going to games outdoors at Turnpike stadium was a huge upgrade.

The team wasn’t particularly good, but there was some interesting young talent, and guys who would become monsters. All in all a fairly similar era to the current one.

I was in 2nd grade on my little league team at a baseball clinic being held at Drillers Stadium (RIP) We were in groups of 5 or 6 and my group was with one Rusty Greer. He worked with us on fundamentals and another player, an older player I think John Russell, came by our group and told us to listen up because he will be a big star. From then on I remember going to or reading the paper every day on AA and AAA players and to see who of them would go to Texas. It was a pretty big deal for me when Rusty made it and I followed them every damn day since.

because Buffalo has no major league team and I hated all the attention the Yankees got. But I just watched whatever was on since in those days there were only 3 channels…
Moved to TX in ‘92 for grad school, didn’t follow baseball as much during college, too busy. Started going to Arlington in ‘94 and rode the wave of optimism as the Rangers rose to division winners in the mid to late 90s. Started reading Newberg pretty soon after he started writing it, but I can’t remember how I found out about him.

My father wasn’t a baseball fan, so neither was I. Simply no interest.

In 1988, a high school girlfriend took me to a game in Arlington. Her family loved baseball. The GF lasted 2 years (not bad for a high school relationship). The love affair with the Rangers has lasted forever.

I don’t have an actual moment I became I die hard, but I do remember when I started to care. My family moved to Texas when I was 7, and it was the first time we’d lived near an MLB team (born in Florida before the Rays and Marlins).

I still remember my first game. I remember Nolan Ryan started against the Brewers in 1991. Looking it up, that would be this game, which was: Opening Day. Kind of crazy, I didn’t realize until just now it was Opening Day, though with how packed and exciting the place was, that makes sense.

I remember I got a Nolan Ryan hat (which I still have, looked at it last night, in fact). I really didn’t like sports back then and I was actually pretty bored and had little interest in baseball (though back then I contended it was the best sport), but that was the day I began to care about the Texas Rangers, and that was when my love affair with Ryan, in particular, was born.

We lived in Texas for three years and went to a few more games, including opening day at BPiA. After that I moved to New Mexico, which is where I slowly started to care about sports. People out there were mostly Rangers or Rockies fans, so it was easy for me to stick with the Rangers (my brother became a Rockies fans). It was also easy because they started winning divisions.

1998 was the year I became a bonafide baseball fan, for the stereotypical reason. It also came with a pretty awesome Rangers year, to boot. Over the next several years, my interest in baseball actually wavered, though. I never stopped following in some degree, but there were years when I only paid attention to what the Rangers were doing half-heartedly and only started watching the rest of the league in the playoffs. It peaked when A-Rod signed, but then declined when I started being busy every summer and the team sucked. Somewhere around 2006 I started to care almost as much as I did about football (partly, btw, thanks to Fire Joe Morgan), and over the last few years I’ve started to be as passionate about baseball as I was in my early teen years again.

I posted fairly frequently on the ESPN Rangers board in 2004 and the spring of 2005, but never was involved enough to follow Adam when he started his thing. Then one day in 2008 I decided the best way to follow the Rangers would be to find a Rangers blog. So, I Googled “rangers blog” and Adam’s old blog came up. But it was dead. Then I found Lone Star Ball (it was a long time before I realized they were the same). I read for a couple months before actually joining, but talking here with Rangers fans every day, and finding out about MLB.tv, allowing me to actually watch plenty of Rangers games, has made me more avid about the Rangers than I ever was. I always loved them, but it’s much more fun to follow a team when you get to see them and talk about them with other fans regularly.

http://www.lonestarball.com/2009/5/1/861920/game-22-game-day-thread#15125666

Palmeiro’s probably belongs since his primary team is probably Texas.

But I also think when they’re trying to fill in a franchise that just doesn’t have many moments that most fans are going to find memorable, there’s a good chance 500th and 600th hrs are gonna make it.