Wednesday Afternoon Rangers Notes: Forty-Eight And Counting

Here's to the overdue resumption of baseball tomorrow, the beginning of another 162-game ride for the Rangers a day after that ... and the return of the gameday chats:

- One local columnist suggests that the Rangers whiffed by not including Neftali Feliz in their starting rotation (which is not such an outlandish claim, though it is debatable all the same), but also seems to consider Feliz to be a lot closer to top-of-the-rotation status than most others do, and drops this rhetorical question near the end: "Winning with pitching, defense and timely hitting or trying to bash their way into the playoffs? Which has historically worked best for the Rangers?" (Jim Reeves, ESPNDallas.com)

[I think the problem here is the straight assumption that Feliz wouldn't be something of a question mark himself if he were to be slid into a starting role, or that he's not "unproven" himself. There are great arguments both ways here, and I've found myself concurring with certain aspects of both of them. The funny thing is that I sort of figured my alarmism over the state of the rotation to be some of the loudest out there, all things considered, and yet here's a columnist who's evidently not only more freaked than I am, but is also distorting the picture by seemingly introducing a straw man -- this team will be nothing if not adept both offensively and defensively. And I don't get why being a power-oriented club and yet still being able to deliver timely hits have to be mutually exclusive (as his question suggests) but ... ah, whatever.]

- Baseball Prospectus has published the findings of its new injury forecasting system, CHIPPER (which renders injury risk assessments based on a database comprising more than 400,000 player injury days dating back to 2002), for the 2011 season, and it finds five Rangers (Josh Hamilton, Ian Kinsler, Nelson Cruz, Brandon Webb, and Arthur Rhodes) to be red-light risks in the 30-days-or-more injury risk area; interestingly, however, this is one fewer than Oakland's six (Corey Dawkins and Marc Normandin, Baseball Prospectus)

[The good news for Texas is that we're talking about the likes of key figures like Mark Ellis, Josh Willingham, and David DeJesus being prime injury candidates; the bad news, of course, is that there are remarkably few red flags embedded in their AL West-leading pitching staff (though Brandon McCarthy and Rich Harden are both good examples of pitchers whose true injury risk likely supersedes the quantified risk here), and the Rangers' red flags are their three most important position players and a pitcher that they really do need to show up at some point. Of the Rangers' five red-light candidates, I like to feel as though Cruz's off-season focus on strengthening his hamstrings gives him the best chance of being able to significantly diminish his injury risk, but I also don't expect a health miracle to transpire.]

- FanGraphs ranks Texas as the seventh-best organization in baseball, citing the Rangers' present talent as eighth-best, future talent as 16th-best, financial resources as fifth-best, and baseball operations department as eighth-best (Steve Slowinski, FanGraphs.com)

[This actually represents a three-spot drop from last year, though I'm inclined to believe that is more a function of converting to a more objective and structured methodology -- though any rankings of this type are still quite subjective, obviously -- than a rip on Texas. The future talent grade is probably a bit harsh, and the financial resources grade seems a bit lenient in spite of the new ownership and television deal (is it really safe to believe Texas will go to $110-120 million lengths to retain their key pieces as arbitration/free agency issues begin to arise in greater abundance?), but the final grade is pretty fair and difficult to quibble too much with.]