Wherein we celebrate the Rangers' magic number plunging to 24, my discovery of brilliant hip-hop group Binary Star ("Reality Check" has already rocketed nearly to the top of my all-time favorite tracks list) ... and Baseball Time in Arlington's name finally impacting the age 25-54 demographic in a way that it never quite has before:

● Josh Hamilton was swapped from center field to designated hitter before Monday evening's series opener in Kansas City due to "aches and pains" in his troublesome right knee; despite the one-night setback, manager Ron Washington believes he could return to the outfield on Tuesday (Richard Durrett, ESPNDallas.com)

[Here, we have a good example of how you can reconstruct timelines of all sorts if you pay close enough attention to the right sources. Hamilton was primed and ready to receive his second -- and final -- cortisone shot of the season back on August 1st, but team physicians wanted to refrain from administering that shot so early, as the inflammation-reducing effects of the medicine might wear off during the middle of a post-season run or (even worse) before the conclusion of the regular season. Despite that, however, he received the shot at some point during that same day and the Rangers effectively crossed the point of no return. Now, with more than a month left in the season, his knee tendinitis is yet again flaring up, and while one major newspaper is downplaying the situation and the other is evidently panicking, it seems apparent that the problem is chronic and not easily remediable.

One could easily question why the Rangers didn't plop Hamilton on the disabled list at that point and save the final cortisone bullet in the chamber for late August/early September, but the truth of the matter is that we're not in the room and aren't privy to the exact medicals; in any event, the disabled list can't be ruled out if the knee is yet again producing the sensation that it's going to "give out." Cortisone is not the panacea. It addresses the symptoms, not the root cause, and if it's already losing effectiveness with this much time left in the season, Hamilton's likely going to require ample final-month rest to fully guarantee his post-season availability.]

● Derek Holland has officially supplanted Rich Harden in the starting rotation, a move to which the latter consented; the entire starting rotation will receive an extra day of rest as a result of Thursday's off day (Jeff Wilson, Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

[This should quiet down some of the folks pleading for Cliff Lee to receive extra rest. The bigger story here, though, is the Harden-to-relief move, largely because of what I wrote on the idea a month and a half ago: "Four years ago, Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus [...] found that starting pitchers who (a) post high walk rates and (b) low isolated power rates have a tendency to enjoy better performance gains upon conversion into relievers than other starters-turned-relievers. Harden clearly fits part (a), but perhaps not so much with part (b). However, given that he's effectively a two-pitch guy at this point, perhaps there's some degree of sense to assigning him to the bullpen upon his healthy return [...] and seeing what he can do."

On the surface, this is still an interesting idea, but Silver's theory was premised on such bullpen prospects wielding strong strikeout rates in addition to the high walk rates and low isolated power totals. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but his strikeout rate -- one of the few good things he had going for him earlier this season -- has now also gone to hell as of late, so there's no longer much reason to believe he's going to see a sizable performance boost from this move. Of course, there wasn't much reason to believe he'd see anything resembling high-leverage work in September anyway, so this is the part where we stamp Harden as a lost cause, sadly shake our heads and wonder where things went so terribly wrong this year.]

Cliff Lee displays his masterfully groomed coiffure on Thursday, August 26th.If you were listening intently -- or even only half-listening -- to the KRLD-FM radio broadcast after Delmon Young jacked a poorly located Cliff Lee change-up early in last night's game, you probably detected the slightest twinge of annoyance in Eric Nadel's voice as he explained Lee's recent usage pattern. When Lee hasn't been dominant, it has seemed as though there's always been some sort of extenuating circumstance making his performance appear to be worse than it actually was (e.g. porous defense, bullpen problems), and now with no such reasons available to exonerate Lee from last night's effort, there's a building crusade of sorts against his every-fourth-day pitching schedule.

Most of Lee's recent problems appear to stem from flagging command, a symptom often ascribable to pitcher fatigue; however, Lee insists he is neither fatigued nor in need of an additional day of rest, so that should be the end of the story, right? Not necessarily. I'm absolutely not going to accuse Lee of outright prevarication, but there's a key distinction to be made between Lee refuting talk of him being a lock to sign with the Yankees -- talk which doesn't even matter, because he's almost certainly going to the highest bidder no matter what -- and Lee attempting to preserve the image of being an ultra-durable ace who can shoulder any innings-based workload so long as he receives his standard four days of rest between starts. He has a deeply vested interest in maintaining such an image.

What none of this answers is the question of whether working in a few extra days of rest for Lee now will pay dividends later. Intuitively, you would assume the answer to be 'yes,' and anecdotally, this proved the case last year when the Phillies granted him one extra day of rest after a bad three-start run near the beginning of September, but a couple of problems surface here: (a) Lee actually received five days of rest before the second of those three consecutive poor starts, a game in which he allowed six earned runs in just three innings, and (b) if the extra day of rest truly did produce some performance-boosting effects, they were short-lived, because he got hammered in his final two regular-season starts of 2009. Not an especially strong anecdotal example.

What about on a more holistic level? For his career, Lee is materially better when pitching on five days' rest (1,822 PA, 3.64 FIP, 3.55 K/BB) than on four days' rest (3,197 PA, 3.80 FIP, 2.88 K/BB), a deviation large enough that I'm a bit inclined to believe it's not just a fluke ... but at the recent SABR 40 convention, Baseball Reference founder Sean Forman and baseball economist J.C. Bradbury found that the impact of days of rest on a starting pitcher's performance is negligible to the point of not being statistically significant. In other words, the population as a whole performed essentially the same regardless of the number of days of rest. I'm still more inclined to believe that Lee's a little better on extra rest than the study's findings might have you believe, but I don't think it's definitive either way.

With the Rangers still miles ahead of the second-best team in the division and home-field advantage not being an utterly dire need, I guess there's no real harm to be inflicted by throwing a few extra days of rest here and there at Lee. If he's not fatigued, you lose only a start or two at most in the process (and probably don't lose any real ground in the division race), and if he's more fatigued than he's letting on, well, then maybe it pays off later ... but that's a very strong "maybe." It will make for a very neat and tidy narrative if Lee receives extra rest and pitches well immediately thereafter, but if that happens, the rest likely won't have been as instrumental as you'll have been led to believe.

"Turn that frown upside-down now, Rich."In the pantheon of bizarre-to-the-core Rangers games played over the years, last night's Minnesota-at-Texas tilt deserves a special place near the top. The Rangers lost what would have been their first no-hitter of any kind since Kenny Rogers' 1994 perfecto (and first combined no-hitter in franchise history), but several things of even greater rarity than a conventional nine-inning no-hitter transpired during Rich Harden's stunning (and abortive) no-hit bid, and they're not necessarily what you think they are, either.

For starters, Harden -- who strung together 6.2 no-hit frames while striking out six but, in his typically walk-inclined fashion, also handing out five free passes -- is categorically not the worst pitcher to ever mount a legitimate no-hit effort, but I'm going to wager that the list of pitchers who were in the midst of a replacement-level campaign at the time of their accomplishment (like Harden) is very, very small; about the only example I could dig up was former Cardinals right-hander Jose Jimenez, who recorded a no-hitter at Arizona on June 25th, 1999 after entering that evening's start with a 6.69 ERA, but his fielding-independent ERA at the time (4.40 FIP) was better than the league average and not remotely similar to to that of Harden's (6.47 FIP) going into last night.

[Before taking this any further, allow me to fly off on a quick tangent: How on earth was the Pitch f/x pitch-tracking system not working at the Ballpark last night? I've always wondered about the perfect storm of technical difficulties that knocks it out of commission, but it's doubly frustrating now; even if Harden and Co. had managed to nail down the complete no-hitter, there would be no way to statistically dissect their efforts on a micro pitch-by-pitch level, because the system was, for whatever reason, non-functional last night. Hell, there could have been a perfect game and we would have no such record of it. Very frustrating.]

Even more bizarre, however, were several other aspects of Harden's wild night; at 4.83 pitches per batter faced (111 pitches to 23 batters), Harden was several degrees more inefficient than any other pitcher to log at least 6.2 no-hit innings in a single start during the pitch count era (1988-present); the next closest are Jon Lester (05/19/08) and Nolan Ryan (06/11/90), both of whom used 4.48 pitches per batter faced in their respective no-hitters. And it turns out that sub-nine-inning no-hit starts are even more rare than conventional no-hitters themselves; only 16 other pitchers in major league history have logged at least 6.2 no-hit innings in a single start while failing to reach nine full innings.

David Cone posted one such start in September 1996, shortly before gifting the Rangers their first and only post-season victory to date: a seven-inning no-hit effort against the Athletics in which he threw just 85 pitches. It turns out that the reason for his seemingly premature departure was, as I suspected, health-related -- Cone had undergone shoulder surgery less than four months earlier to remove an aneurysm from beneath his right armpit, and then-Yankees manager Joe Torre adhered to his pre-game pledge to limit Cone to 100 pitches at most. Oddly, closer Mariano Rivera fell two outs short of completing what would have been a combined no-hitter when he yielded a one-out single in the ninth inning. Feeling an odd sense of deja vu, yet?

If not, here's the point of similarity: Neftali Feliz also blew his shot at completing a combined no-hitter with just two outs left, and also on a single, albeit one of the rocket line drive variety. No regrets; Joe Mauer's an incredible hitter, and it didn't remotely resemble a cheap hit. And no regrets about Harden's early exit, either. Sure, he might have pulled it off if he had been allotted 140-145 pitches, but that's just crossing into the realm of the irresponsible, and he was "effectively wild" -- the Twins were getting runners on base, and the score was close enough that it just didn't make sense to push Harden beyond his limits (and conceivably risk the lead) with a rested bullpen standing by.

I'm not going to call this a spectacular start from Harden, because the simple fact of the matter is that it wasn't; he did a good job of inducing weak contact on the whole, but five walks per seven innings will kill him sooner rather than later. It was, however, clearly enough to buy him at least 1-2 more starts, and speaking as someone who already had Harden's bags packed and halfway out the door about 12 hours ago, it's apparent now more than ever that nothing is ever a certainty in baseball. And that's just one of the many wonderful things about baseball that keeps bringing us back. 

C.J. Wilson delivers a first-inning pitch in Baltimore on Friday, August 20th.Because the sun always seems to shine a little bit brighter after a rousing Rangers win ... and, for that matter, after listening to the 13th weekly installment of the Goldstein n' Parks podcast extravaganza:

● Here's a fun little morning-after game for you to play: Punch up this video of C.J. Wilson's superb 8.2-inning, 12-strikeout performance last night -- which was far and away the best start of his major league career to date, with a superb game score of 89 -- and count how many times he put the decisive strikeout pitch right on Taylor Teagarden's glove. If that's not Cliff Lee-esque command of the strike zone, it's pretty damn close, and looking a little closer at the statistical minutia, it's apparent that his start was similar to those of Cliff Lee in more ways than one: whenever Wilson fell behind in the count to any respective Orioles hitter, his next pitch was a strike an astonishing 85 percent of the time, well above the league-average 66 percent rate.

About six months ago, I posited that Wilson might only be good for about 120-130 innings of No. 2 starter-caliber pitching this season. In hindsight, that was significantly underselling him, as he's now logged 158 high-quality innings (3.65 FIP) and, if anything, seems to be growing sharper after some early-August turmoil, posting a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 20-to-2 in his last two starts alone. I'm not sure whether there's abundant predictive value in his recent performance, as we're still not sure how he's going to perform down the stretch, but between his great conditioning and inclination to pitch in the heat and realization that he can't pitch at maximum intensity, Wilson may actually represent the perfect storm in terms of being able to make a seamless bullpen-to-rotation transition.

● Of the meager run support that the Rangers' offense did conjure up for Wilson (a whopping two runs), Mitch Moreland singlehandedly furnished half of it, launching a second-inning Jake Arrieta fastball -- a 95 mph heater outside the strike zone, no less -- the opposite way and just above and beyond the 333-foot marker near the left field foul pole. An identical blast at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington might not have even cleared its 14-foot-high left field wall, but the glimmer of opposite-field power from Moreland was a rather welcome sight nevertheless, as it's been in particularly short supply at first base since Chris Davis's major league career stalled out along a desolate Texas farm-to-market road. Or something. I hope you enjoyed that last metaphor.

After gaining something of a reputation as a power hitter to all fields during his sparkling 2008 run (and yes, the spray charts affirm that the results matched the perception), Davis's opposite-field power output collapsed in 2009, which is hardly the main reason why his season ended up going to hell but still proved noticeable all the same. I wouldn't expect Moreland's overall power output to rival that of Davis, but it makes some sense on an intuitive level that his advanced batting eye and short, quick swing path to the ball would enable him to roll with some outside pitches and drive them the opposite way with authority. It's still too soon to say exactly what Moreland's going to be in the long-term scheme of things, but already there are some promising indications that he's a more complete package as a hitter than Davis ever was.

● From the "surprise, surprise" department comes word that the Rangers are interested in picking up exiled Rockies outfielder Brad Hawpe, a Metroplex native (of course!) and presumed all-around nice guy ... but also a guy with one of the absolute worst defensive track records in baseball and, as far as this season is concerned, a very replaceable bat. It turns out that hitting .255/.343/.432 (.336 wOBA) while playing half your games in the majors' most hitter-friendly environment and logging all your playing time at power-producing defensive positions actually doesn't ingratiate you with your employer. Colorado, per reports, "aren't seeking much in exchange" for Hawpe. What a shock.

The thing about Hawpe is that, yeah, maybe he does a reasonably okay job of bridging the gap between now and whenever Nelson Cruz returns, but it only makes real sense if the Rangers want to roll with a Murphy-Hamilton-Hawpe defensive alignment and keep Borbon warming the bench. In that case, however, Hawpe is likely hemorrhaging runs defensively at a similar rate as he's producing them offensively, and my uneasiness about running with Hamilton in center field remains present. Maybe Hawpe has something left in the tank, but there have been a few unsettling shifts in his plate discipline profile this season (he's swinging quite a bit more at out-of-zone pitches), and there's nothing very enthralling about the Hawpe-to-Texas idea if he ends up costing Texas $1-2 million and a mid-level prospect. The Rockies aren't cutting him loose just for the fun of it.

Taylor Teagarden rounds first base after clubbing a homer on Wednesday, August 18th.Well, it happened. For the first time since the jarring Baltimore-at-Texas disaster from July 8-11th (and the fifth time this season, though that isn't a point of great concern for me), the Rangers have been swept -- albeit by one of the best teams in baseball, while playing on the road with an injury-ravaged lineup. And in spite of that, the Rangers have lost exactly one-half of one game of ground in the division race over the last three days, which should serve as another clear indication that this division is still clinched tightly within their grasp ... but people's concerns aren't mollified quite so easily. More than anything else, they want to know that Texas won't collapse in the post-season, and to some, this three-game sweep signifies a huge red flag.

And, well, it's impossible to render iron-clad assurances to the contrary, but this simply is not the catastrophe that some will purport it to be, and context is one of the main reasons why. On Wednesday afternoon, the Rangers rolled out four players -- Taylor Teagarden (.259), Andres Blanco (.255), Julio Borbon (.286) and Joaquin Arias (.286) -- with season-to-date wOBAs below .290; furthermore, all four are projected to hit at right around replacement level the rest of the way. The logical expectation should be that neither Arias nor Blanco will log any significant playing time in a playoff series, and that Borbon, given the limited usefulness of his bat, will be restricted to late-inning defensive duties. (There's probably a debate to be waged on this point.)

"But the starting pitching sucked in Tampa Bay!", you grumble. And yes, it would be easy to draw such a conclusion from the average performance (5.0 IP, 5 ER) of Cliff Lee, Tommy Hunter and Derek Holland in this series, but Hunter was pitching in an apparently weakened state (residual effects from his short but violent bout of stomach flu), Holland hadn't pitched well since concluding his rehab assignment at Triple-A Oklahoma City, and Lee was victimized by one of the more brain-dead defensive innings in recent memory, hemorrhaging the bulk of his six earned runs during that inning but still managing to compile 10 strikeouts to just a single walk. It's also entirely possible that Hunter -- and certainly not Holland -- doesn't make any post-season starts, depending on series game schedules/durations. 

But perhaps most significantly (and I hate to keep drilling this home, but it's important), the Rangers continue to match up well with the best American League teams where the most consistent indicators of post-season success are concerned: team strikeout rate, team defensive runs above average, and closer dominance. While it appears the Rays are the runaway favorites from a defensive standpoint (and that's not a knock on the Rangers so much as it is complimentary of Tampa Bay), one could reasonably argue that there is little separation between Rays closer Rafael Soriano and Neftali Feliz, and the Rangers are extremely potent strikeout-wise, boasting two starters -- Cliff Lee (7.99 K/9) and Colby Lewis (9.10 K/9) with well above-average strikeout rates and no fewer than four late-inning relievers with sparkling strikeout rates.

I sometimes wonder if such apprehension is prevalent in other fan bases, or if the fact that the Rangers have exactly one playoff win in their nearly 40-year franchise history amplifies our uneasiness -- even when the Rangers are on the brink of turning in one of their most special seasons ever. I don't have a good answer to that, but here's what I do know: the offense will get better, the defense will remain steadily good, and the pitching staff will, in all likelihood, remain an enormous October threat. Perhaps the time will come when panic of some sort is warranted (and I sincerely hope that doesn't prove to be the case), but right now is definitely and emphatically not the time for it.

Mitch Moreland reacts after the Rangers' Arias-marred defeat on Monday, Aug. 16th.On the major league appreciation scale, utility infielders might have it harder than anyone. Sure, they don't play very much relative to their starting counterparts, and they still bank tidy six-digit paychecks annually (provided that they're in the majors), but think about what being a utility infielder really means -- generally speaking, it means that you've been assessed by talent evaluators from virtually every corner of the major league universe, and they've all arrived at one sobering conclusion: that you're not good enough to cut it as a starter.

To make matters worse, being a major league utility infielder affords minimal job security, because unless you've established yourself as a quality/trustworthy veteran option, you can bet that there are legions of middle infielders in the Double-A and Triple-A ranks that are literally killing themselves everyday just so that they might procure the most outside of shots at your job. You're sometimes asked to perform -- and perform at a high level, to boot -- at a moment's notice, and enough failure to do so in a relatively small sample size could mean the difference between providing a comfortable standard of living for your family, and being forced to take second and third jobs during baseball's off-season because your sub-$30,000 Tumbleweed League salary just isn't enough to support your spouse and children on.

Rarely, those utility infielders flourish into legitimate starting-caliber infielders, with guys like Mark DeRosa and Chone Figgins being the most prominent examples of recent note. Much more frequently, however, their shelf lives prove minimal, and they're banished to the minors in favor of the next shiny new bauble or cagey veteran. And it is the latter outcome that Joaquin Arias now seems destined to fulfill, because Ron Washington's player-first managerial philosophy was sharply eschewed late last night as he did the nigh-unthinkable: he publicly called out Arias (and his atrocious defense), using the media as a platform for his baseball catharsis. 

[Arias, for those who might not recall (or didn't witness the horror first-hand, or perhaps blacked out), Arias wandered out into short right field after a lazy B.J. Upton pop fly with one out in the bottom of the eighth inning and the Rangers leading by a 4-2 margin; the ball dropped between him and right fielder Brandon Boggs, although it could be strongly argued that it was Arias's ball all the way. And then with runners on first and third base and one out (still in a 4-2 game), Carl Crawford knocked a grounder to Arias that he should have tossed to first base for the sure out; instead, he made the ill-fated decision to try and start a 4-6-3 double play. Everyone ended up safe, and, well, things violently spiraled out of control from there.]

Of the two plays described in the above italicized paragraph, Washington noted, respectively: "That's the second out right there. That's not Boggs' ball. In my opinion, Joaquin should have caught it. No doubt about it. [...] He should have took the out [on Crawford] right there. That's Baseball 101." And, of course, Washington's right. It doesn't render his late-May proclamation that he "need[ed]" Arias any less bizarre, but that's not the point. The entire problem with Arias is that he's one of the more extreme cases I can recall of tools failing to translate into readily identifiable baseball skills; his plus speed hasn't translated into much (if any) baserunning value, his once-above-average arm/range are now decidedly pedestrian, his plate patience never developed and his gap power only rarely translates into extra-base hits, leaving his batting average empty.

But perhaps most notably of all, Arias just doesn't seem to have any semblance of good baseball instincts or mental make-up. It's like he never really figured out how to process a game situation and execute properly at the same time. And that's just crippling. That's what has the Rangers' former No. 4 prospect (2006) in the manager's doghouse more than anything else right now, and what may well signal the pre-September end of his six-year run in this organization ... but, hey, I don't want to hate him, and in fact don't hate him. He's a very flawed player, but he's also a guy with a family who's probably about to be told that he's not good enough to play in the majors, and that's a burden he's going to have to bear long after the events of last night have faded from our baseball consciousness.

This probably isn't the brutally scathing attack job on Arias's defensive ineptitude that you wanted to read this morning. Hell, I'm not even sure that it's what I, personally, wanted to write. My original intent was to slam this idiotic, media-fueled idea -- which I saw perpetuated on at least one Dallas-Fort Worth television station last night -- that Cliff Lee was solely responsible for the eighth-inning "meltdown" (never mind the fact that it's pretty damn tough to record five outs in one inning). But perhaps this is one of those cases where some things about Arias are just better left unsaid. Or not.