Tuesday Morning Texas Rangers Update

Good morning.

Jeff Wilson has the first Rangers Reaction from Summer Camp and focuses on, you guessed it, the pitfalls of playing baseball during a pandemic.

T.R. Sullivan writes that this is a big week for roster hopefuls looking for playing time in the upcoming season as Opening Day is now ten days away.

The DMN’s Sam Blum looks at four questions the Rangers will need to answer at Summer Camp before these ten days are up.

Sullivan notes that the Rangers were hit with a few potentially meaningful baseball-related injuries on Monday.

Wilson writes that Shin-Soo Choo turned 38 years old on Monday and the Rangers’ DH/OF is taking an upbeat approach to his future.

Over at Fangraphs, the Rangers didn’t fare too well in Jay Jaffe’s Positional Power Rankings for first base.

Alternatively, by the estimation of Anthony Castrovince at MLB dot com, the Rangers are set to have one of the best rotations in the game this summer.

The Washington football team retired their name on Monday and yet another opinion column at a major newspaper has the Rangers targeted as a franchise that should consider something similar.

If you’re interested in a quick, not very nuanced opinion from me on this subject, it goes like this:

I think Texas Rangers as a sports team name is different from the out and out ugly slur that the Washington team name was. Given what we know about the origins of the name, I don’t think it escapes criticism, but, as words, it doesn’t evoke something derogatory upon utterance. That alone could be justification for keeping the name. However, the name is never what drew me in and it was never what held me even as the team’s iron grip on my soul has never flinched.

The legacy from which the name derives might have been built upon mythmaking and hero worship from a turbulent time in history but it comes with a lot of hurt for people in very real moments from history who didn’t get much of a chance to write their side of those stories.

If the Rangers can prove that Texas Rangers Baseball Club has become nomenclature unto itself that goes beyond what they were initially named after, fine. Keep it. It’s possible. After all, I certainly don’t think of law enforcement when I hear the name Texas Rangers. I think of this cursed baseball team. But I’m also thinking about the gosh darned baseball team all the dang time. I’d wager that there’s not terribly many of us like this out there in the grand scheme of things.

They should know that it will be difficult to recede those myths from the minds of many who hear the name for the foreseeable future and, thus, these requests to change the name will continue and they will perhaps be justified even if anyone personally aggrieved by the deeds have long been gone.

Honestly, a fresh start wouldn’t be so bad either. The baseball team hasn’t really been doing much to make the name all that worthy of preservation and, hey, maybe we’d finally get a new logo and branding out of the deal.

And, finally:

Be well!