Rangers with record ratings last night

I was reading an article about the liverpool sale this morning and you could have taken any number of the rangers articles over the past year, replaced the club name, and not have known the difference.

Yes – they absolutely would. The Mavs sell out EVERY game, granted its only a 20k person arena. The Stars? They sell out EVERY game and have an extremely loyal fan base.

As for the Rangers, just this season and last I have started to see a large difference around the area. A lot more people with Rangers memoribelia, from cups to hats and shirts. I live in uptown Dallas, and last weekend at the pool, saw quite a few other 20 somethings with Rangers stuff on. You would defnitely not see that 5 years ago.

And didn’t draw well. When Cuban took over, he put a big emphasis on a more aggressive marketing strategy. The winning team was obviously the biggest player, but they have sold out every game for a while now (I think). Considering ticket prices and that it’s a reasonable number of home games (41+playoffs), I think there’s good evidence that D/FW will respond to good teams, especially if they have good marketing.

If you’re good for long enough, like the Stars were and the Mavs are, success will still be there even when the results dip. The Cowboys are the only ones who are immune to this.

Regarding baseball, there’s quite a bit of support for it at the high school and college level in Texas. Until somewhat recently I think, Texas has put out better baseball players than basketball players. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the fans of baseball at lower levels become/come back to being big Rangers fans.

But they’ve held on the glory of 99-00 for too long.

I can’t wait to see what happens this season, with no Modano, Lehtinen or Turco on the team. The Stars are going to need a good start and some early excitement or it could be ugly.

Too much like these dudes:

When I venture up to Dallas for one reason or another, I have a hard time convincing people to go to games because of the heat.

The heat?

We still drew 46000+. From the tv shots there were only a handful of empty seats. I don’t care if its classified as a “sellout” but if we can consistently get 40000+ thats fine by me

I didn’t care much about sports at all when I was living in Dallas, but I went to several Rangers fans, so that made me care about them and I became passionate when I started to care about baseball. And everyone was so obsessed with the Cowboys that I cared about them, too, and then the Super Bowls got me even more in to them and I just steadily became more passionate about the Cowboys and football.

With the Mavs, all the adults always talked about how much they sucked and how much they hated them. As a sports fan, I now know they were just venting, but as a kid, I thought that meant I shouldn’t like the Mavericks, so I didn’t. When I started caring about the NBA, Kobe Bryant was a rookie who was getting tons of coverage in Sports Illustrated for kids, and there was no NBA team closer than the Nuggets in the next state, anyway, so a Lakers fan I became. And I think that’s part of why I don’t like the NBA that much, I became a Lakers fan but I don’t have a real attachment to LA like I do DFW, so even with all the winning, I can’t get that passionate about them.

I was saying that even if they’re less popular than the Stars or Mavs, that doesn’t mean they would necessarily have bad game attendance or TV ratings, particularly since both franchises are so popular (or, at least until last season for the Stars).

most other franchises would have never drawn like we have over the past decade if they sucked as much as we have

metropolis areas… Its amazing how even now that I can find two radio stations that broadcast the Stros and none that broadcast the Rangers south of Austin pretty much… That kills me. Plus, FSSW needs to be more flexible and show the Rangers down here when the Stros are unwatchable.

and things are definitely getting better this year. In the past the Astros had all the coverage and it was a battle with Time Warner to even get them to show the Rangers on the alternate channel. They do it now for every game and have even showed the Rangers on occasion on the main FSSW channel and moved the Stros to the alternate. Even the sports on the news is showing more Rangers (not a whole lot b/c they still think UT created man).

But with the Stros sucking so bad it has been a perfect storm and a lot more people are wearing Ranger gear down here. Lot of stores used to never carry our gear and now they are. Would love to see RR become the Ranger AAA team.

and get a handicap accessible seat

If you’re on the bandwagon, great; but have enough respect for the people who have suffered on this stupid bandwagon for years to let them have their moment.