Tuesday Morning Texas Rangers Update

Good morning?

Well, baseball has killed itself and it sucks. You were truly terrible, Rob Manfred, and you will be remembered as the reaper of a sport your tenure made us feel guilty for enjoying. Tony Clark, your cause in 2020 may have been just but your short-sighted dealings with the ghouls that have been put in charge of stewarding the game of baseball contributed to its downfall. Amateurs and minor leaguers deserved more than the blind eye you gave them and now that blind eye has been turned on you and the players.

The following people and entities and every one of their partners who drained the lifeblood out of the sport and robbed it of its dignity in a time of genuine loss and hurt across a devastated country should forever be shamed and ashamed:

• Ken Kendrick
• Terry McGuirk
• Peter Angelos
• John W. Henry
• Thomas S. Ricketts
• Jerry Reinsdorf
• Bob Castellini
• Larry Dolan
• Charlie Monfort
• Christopher Ilitch
• Jim Crane
• John Sherman
• Arte Moreno
• Mark Walter
• Bruce Sherman
• Mark Attanasio
• Jim Pohlad
• Fred Wilpon
• Hal Steinbrenner
• John J. Fisher
• John S. Middleton
• Robert Nutting
• Ron Fowler
• Charlie Johnson
• John W. Stanton
• William DeWitt, Jr.
• Stuart Sternberg
• Ray Davis
• Edward Rogers
• Ted Lerner

Sell your teams. They don’t belong to you. Go away.

I don’t really feel like searching for or linking to news today so, instead, I will let you know where you can find the writings of the people and sites who will need your support now that baseball has failed them:

T.R. Sullivan dutifully writes under the now tainted byline of MLB dot com.

Evan Grant covers the depressing sport of baseball for a depressing industry and remains upbeat.

Jeff Wilson has also been saddled with the baseball beat at a local newspaper and still brings it every day.

Levi Weaver and Jamey Newberg elevated the sport with their words at The Athletic before it let them down.

Fangraphs is responsible for changing how we consume baseball and it will be a miracle if it survives this.

Baseball Reference is the website I’ve visited most often other than this one according to Chrome data.

Without Baseball America, we perhaps wouldn’t have known about Kip Fagg’s almost enviable confidence.

Baseball Prospectus has been a dream job factory that baseball has turned into a nightmare.

I jokingly call MLB Trade Rumors our offseason home but what happens when every season is the offseason?

There are many, many more. Think of the scouts and team personnel that have been caught in the crossfire. Think of the stadium workers and employees, especially those in Arlington, where they will be having trouble making ends meet this summer while footing the bill for an unused palace.

Think of the writers and creatives who have devoted their gifts to propping up a sport that has shown that they care only about the immediate bottom line even during a global disaster following decades of hoarded prosperity.

Maybe baseball will fix this in the short term, maybe someone will go out there and clean up all the pretzels they threw at Whitey Ford, maybe we’ll have a 2020 season, but the damage has already been done. Baseball has proven to be fundamentally broken and it can’t continue with the people that currently have it in their custody.

I’ll leave you with a tweet from one of those writers up there. It’s by Levi Weaver. He’s one of my favorite baseball writers and he should be putting beautiful, purposeful words to MLB’s triumphant return during one of the most trying periods in modern history instead of facing the anxieties of this greed-fueled self-immolation:

As always, be well.

P.S. Hey, Rangers, if none of these people matter to you, the least you can do is fire C.J. Nitkowski.