Tuesday Morning Texas Rangers Update

Good morning.

T.R. Sullivan writes about Mike Minor’s spring debut which wasn’t sharp but more importantly he comes to Texas with a fresh arm.

Levi Weaver’s Texas Ten-Step on the loss includes a fun anecdote from Minor on a time he was nearly kicked out of a clubhouse as a suspected impostor.

Despite the loss, Evan Grant notes that Spring Training is already wild as the Rangers succeeded on a delayed steal of home using the noted fleet of foot Nomar Mazara and Shin-Soo Choo.

Sullivan writes that the plate philosophy Rougned Odor has adopted this spring is “one pitch, one zone.”

Weaver has some fun with some Rangers pitchers by having them rank five randomly chosen things.

Among Sullivan’s camp notes are items on the readiness of Martin Perez, the bullpen pitching in A games, and outfield plans for Willie Calhoun and Choo.

We still don’t know if the Rangers will play on a real grass surface at the new Ballpark, but, as Bill Hanna writes, the team has decided that the seats at Globe Life Field will be wider.

And, lastly, the latest in the ever-growing number of online imbroglios stirred up by CJ Nitkowski exploded into actual news yesterday as Nitkowski drew attention to himself over what could have been an innocuous mistake of liking a tweet and following the account of a SPLC-listed hate group.

Of course, it takes having a modicum of grace to toss out the “Whoops, my bad” that would have ended the whole thing but Nitkowski dug in instead and though everyone had moved on over the weekend, Nitkowski came back online yesterday to pick fights with the “nobodies” who pointed out the ties to hate on his follow list.

Eventually, that landed him in the largest newspaper in the area explaining himself. Which, in turn, put the Rangers and John Blake on the defensive. And though he claims to Grant in the piece that he “gladly unfollowed” the hate group account once it was pointed out to him, he later told Weaver at The Athletic that he wouldn’t have unfollowed the account if it hadn’t started affecting the Rangers.

And, sure, the whole affair is mildly ridiculous when boiled down to its origins of a “like” on Twitter, but remember there’s only one party here among the escalation that is representing your team as the TV voice of the Texas Rangers.

Have a nice day!