Josh Hamilton's Mystery Ailment Is No Longer A Mystery

I'm a bit underwater at the moment (as you can no doubt deduce from the last couple of front-page posts), but the big news of the afternoon is that Josh Hamilton is returning to the Rangers' lineup tonight and batting third and playing center field after being diagnosed with "ocular keratitis" -- basically, corneal dryness leading to blurry vision, a condition which can stem from overconsumption of caffeine and energy drinks. 

Setting aside all thoughts of "something like this could only happen to Josh," it seems that the mystery of Josh's absence has been solved for now, and now you hope that he can continue his torrid .950-plus OPS pace of the last couple of months, as the Rangers have an opportunity over the next 72-plus hours to clinch -- or all but clinch -- the AL West title and move closer to clinching the No. 1 seed in the American League

Josh Hamilton's Bizarre Week

I had a post ready to go regarding the events and the fallout from last night's otherwise forgettable three-hour affair, but that post fell into a thresher maw and it's going to take a bit of time to resuscitate it. With that being the case, I wanted to go ahead and try and make a little bit of sense of this week's increasingly bizarre Josh Hamilton story.

On Tuesday night, Josh Hamilton pulled himself out of the game due to sinus issues that reportedly left him with what was described at the time as "blurry vision."

The following morning, Jean-Jacques Taylor pilliored Hamilton for his decision to remove himself from the game, citing the fact that he had just appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" the previous night and contrasting Hamilton's call against a sub-100 percent Adrian Beltre demanding his way into the lineup, and ultimately proclaiming that Hamilton lacked "mental toughness." This struck me as a rather odd criticism at the time, considering that (a) vision issues are a significant effectiveness/safety problem for any athlete, and (b) a player who lacked "mental toughness" presumably wouldn't have played last October in the kind of physical shape that Hamilton was in at the time. 

Thursday morning, Gil LeBreton wrote a cryptic column that seemed to hint at the front office and/or players taking some level of exception to Hamilton withdrawing himself from Tuesday night's game. On Friday morning's Ben & Skin Show, there was a discussion -- and I did not personally hear this live, so I'm being careful here -- about how one of Hamilton's teammates "confronted" him after he removed himself from the game on Tuesday, and some further discussion about how the clubhouse was beginning to grow weary of the distractions and everything else that comes into the picture when you're talking about Josh.

Before Thursday night's game, Josh Hamilton was pulled from lineup consideration when this happened during pre-game warmups:

"We hit him a ground ball and he'd catch and spin and lost his balance. We're not messing with that," [Ron] Washington said. "We hit a fly ball and he misjudged it. We're not messing with that. We got him off the field."

Later that night, more quotes surfaced suggesting that there was nothing wrong with his vision at all:

"Everybody in my family's been sick," Hamilton said. "The last five or six days I've been battling something. Every time I get sick it turns into a sinus infection, and that causes me to get off kilter, off balance. If your head's a little stopped up, you can get a little starry-eyed, dizzy. It's not a big deal. I had a little of that earlier in the year."

Hamilton stressed that there's nothing wrong with his vision.

"My eyesight is good," he said. "Got that checked and it's 20/15. It used to be 20/10 but I'm getting older."

And last night, we received an update about Hamilton traveling back to Texas to undergo more testing (as doctors had not yet uncovered the root cause of his issues), as well as a strange remark from Washington:

"We're going to do all we can to ease his mind," Washington said. "Once he has peace of mind, he'll be fine."

Asked what he meant by "peace of mind," Washington said that once the tests are over and the medical crew can explain what's been happening, the veteran center fielder will be able to deal with it.

I don't quite know what to make of all of this. I'm not sure that any of us really do. I don't imagine that he would be sent home to undergo a more thorough battery of tests if there was total confidence in this merely being a short-term sinus issue, and I suspect that the fear of this being something more serious has Josh in a troubled state of mind right now. I also wonder about the clubhouse situation, and if there's any truth to this word of Josh being "confronted" -- even if it was as simple as one of his teammates querying him on his story -- and the players beginning to harbor doubts about Josh's level of dedication, then you kind of imagine that he no longer gets the clear benefit of the doubt from his teammates when problems like this arise.

That can't possibly be a good thing. Nothing is good about any of this. I just wish it would go away.

The Great Redeemers

"yo dawg that joke was awesome do you have any more jokes""It’s not dramatic. I’m supposed to be doing something like that." - Adrian Beltre after popping last night's game-winning homer

I'll say something about Yu Darvish a little later, though to be frank, I think we're running out of the hyperbole it takes to adequately describe what he's doing to hitters right now. You all know the reality of my situation nowadays and the time constraints with which I'm having to work, and that leaves you in the position of needing to economize and narrow your focus what's on really important. To that end, there are two things which really jump off the page at me about what went down last night:

● This probably isn't one of the big things that everyone wants to talk about right now, but given the season-long focus on this matter, it certainly bears mentioning: twenty days ago, Michael Young's season OPS was sitting on .640 (again). Today, he's sitting at .277/.309/.367, and while those figures aren't very impressive either in isolation, the fact that he's elevated his OPS by 36 points in less than three weeks ties to the fact that he's hit .359/.391/.563 (.402 wOBA) over that stretch with seven extra-base hits (three homers). From May 21st through July 24th, Young amassed 221 plate appearances, and mustered only eight extra-base hits (zero homers). This latest 20-game sample is less than one-third the size of that May-July sample, but the overall power output is still superior. That's noteworthy. *

[* The discernible uptick in power is noteworthy. The other thing that's noteworthy -- and the other big thing that has driven the improvement in Young's numbers -- is the 80-point spike in Young's BABIP over these last 20 days compared to the rest of his season as a whole, and the fact that this BABIP spike has occurred despite the fact that the underlying indicators (the batted-ball rates, his well-hit rates, etc.) have remained largely static between the two periods. My eyes tell me that may have something to do with more batted-ball velocity of late, which isn't necessarily something that would be captured by the batted-ball data. Or maybe Young is a wizard.]

Now, I don't expect this late-season burst of offensive enlightenment to effect a wholesale change in public opinion on Young, or to quell the disdain for his rollovers to shortstop, but we're still talking about Young producing at a high level over a multi-week period for the first time since early April. You don't want to be forcibly sucked into the hope that he can keep doing this because, well, it's hard to innately trust someone who flirted with the "worst player in baseball" label for the better part of the season ... but, at this point, that's all you can really do is hope that he can sustain something remotely close to this, because he's not going to stop playing once the post-season arrives.

● The big thing that everyone's still buzzing about was the Adrian Beltre killshot, a majestic blast that resulted from a hanging Ernesto Friero curveball being launched deep into the night and, among other things, sent the Angels' win expectancy -- and odds of reaching the post-season -- into a nosedive:

Bill Welke intently watches the homer. Ernesto Frieri watches in pain. Adrian Beltre watches Ernesto Frieri watching in pain. Chris Iannetta, meanwhile, can't even bring himself to watch. [End Scene]It's early in the afternoon on the day after the homer, and with that being the case, I'm not going to devote an excess of time to talking up the heroics of the moment, or the fact that Adrian Beltre once again had to talk his way into last night's lineup after initially being excluded due to intestinal pain. It's still astounding and deserving of heaps of praise and recognition, but we know what Beltre is at this point, and this is what Beltre does. He battles until he has almost nothing left, and then he delivers, and then he shrugs it off because, in his mind, that's what he was supposed to do in the first place, and he's simply fulfilling an obligation that he couldn't leave unfulfilled. 

What I will talk about for a moment, though, is the overarching significance of Beltre's season when stacked up against his contract. About a month ago, I wrote a post that went unpublished -- up until now, that is -- about Beltre murdering the ball at the time, and the implications for the Rangers:

One of the big concerns that was bandied about at the time of the Beltre signing was a concern that is frequently tied to large-money contracts -- that is, the concern about the back end of the deal, when Beltre would be playing out his mid-to-late-30s seasons, facing a potentially steep decline (though certainly not as steep as what we've seen with Michael Young this year), and providing diminishing and/or negative value in relation to his steadily escalating salaries. The concern there, I think, is that with all of that fully in mind, you either wanted to see Beltre hold up better than expected over the entire life of the deal, or provide some huge surplus value at the front end of the contract to counteract the loss of value at the back end of the contract.

Yeah, we're still only in the second year of Beltre's deal, and there's still ample time left for things to go awry as Beltre advances further along the aging curve, but he has now churned out 11.5 wins above replacement over the 2011-12 portion of his contract, and, using the $4.5 million/win baseline, has produced $22-23 million of surplus value already. If he delivers just 2.5 wins per season over the final 3-4 years of his deal (depending on whether or not his 2016 option year vests or is voided), the Rangers will come out in the black on a huge free agent contract during a time in baseball when it's really quite hard to come out in the black on huge free agent contracts. 

He's the Rangers' most valuable player this season, he's the best third baseman in baseball, he's probably one of the five best overall players in the American League this year (even when you include Justin Verlander and Felix Hernandez alongside Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano, and Mike Trout), and he's probably going to the Hall of Fame someday. We're always ready to embrace transcendent performers when they happen to stop down in this area of the world, and we're always on the search for the next guy who can deliver a transcendent performance, and I just hope no one commits the grave error of overlooking Beltre as one of baseball's transcendent performers of the last few years.

Report: Rangers To Sign Colby Lewis To One-Year Extension

Per John Blake:

Rangers to announce one-year contract extension for 2013 for RHP Colby Lewis this afternoon.

— John Blake (@RangerBlake) September 17, 2012

Per Jeff Wilson:

Colby Lewis contract for next season worth $2 million base with up to $4 million in incentives. #Rangers

— Jeff Wilson (@JeffWilson_FWST) September 17, 2012

Scott Feldman's Shameful Secret

At the start of this afternoon's action, the Rangers' chances of winning the AL West stand at 78.9 percent (per Baseball Prospectus) and 68.0 percent (per CoolStandings.com), and for scheduling/talent/standings reasons, the greatest likelihood is still that the Rangers claim the division title ... but there's a glass-half-empty way of looking at those odds, and it's that the Rangers are now projected to be cast into a one-game playoff 20-30 percent of the time. Weird stuff happens in small samples, and, yeah I still think the Rangers are going to win the AL West, but I won't begrudge some justified nervousness on your part about where things stand as of right now:

● Forty-something days ago, Scott Feldman was coming off a sub-2.00 ERA month of July, a Rangers Player of the Month award, a torrent of media praise about how he was pitching like an ace and had emerged as a "steadying force" and -- in Ron Washington's view -- the team's "security blanket." Today, Feldman is coming off one of his shortest major league starts (2.2 innings), has posted a 6.99 ERA over his last seven starts, and the fan base (and media) at large are ready to move onto Martin Perez, with Ron Washington carefully deferring the question of whether Perez will replace Feldman this coming week by stating that he hadn't discussed/decided what the Rangers would do as of yet. 

Part of the problem that the Rangers face is that they can't manipulate their off day tomorrow as a means of shielding their No. 5 starter from Oakland -- they could use the off day to buy everyone in the rotation at least five days of rest, or they could use the off day to keep Matt Harrison on his regular four days of rest and start him again on Friday, but either way, the No. 5 starter is going to pitch in two of the Rangers' upcoming seven games against the A's, and that's why you have to look very carefully at all of the variables and make an objective decision on who's going to give you the best chance to win between Perez/Feldman, rather than automatically siding with experience and against the rookie. My own inclination is to roll with Perez, but I'll be very curious to see which way Texas ends up going with this.

● For what this is worth, Feldman is still flailing around in a really odd sabermetric quagmire -- over that seven-start period where he's posted a 6.99 ERA, he's also delivered/allowed 7.2 K/9, 2.4 BB/9, and 1.0 HR/9, thereby sustaining his season-long trend of allowing far more runs than what the defense-independent variables suggest should be the case. Of the 132 major league pitchers who have amassed at least 100 innings this season, the 1.47 R/9 disparity between Feldman's FIP (3.85) and ERA (5.32) ranks as the second-highest mark -- and, unfortunately, that has a lot to do with Feldman coaxing cruddy results with runners on base (220 PA, .286/.332/.480) and even cruddier results with runners in scoring position (131 PA, .293/.336/.529).

This may very well go down as Feldman's best major league season from a peripheral standpoint, but he's trapped in baserunner strand rate hell right now, and, more and more, you wonder if the Rangers will have any sort of interest in bringing back Feldman in 2013 at his option price or a discounted rate on the basis of those good defense-independent numbers, or if they're going to be happy to see him walk at the end of this season.

● Mike Napoli went 2-for-3 with a monster home run and two walks (one intentional, one unintentional) in his grand return to the lineup last night, and despite still being physically nicked and dinged up, he'll reportedly split playing time evenly with Geovany Soto down the stretch, with Soto now being designated as Yu Darvish's personal catcher in light of the recent success that Darvish has enjoyed with Soto as his batterymate. There are two things that spring to mind here, the first being that Napoli began tearing the cover off the ball after he ended up missing two-thirds of June 2011 with an oblique strain ... I strongly doubt there was a 1:1 correlation between him getting that extended break and engaging beast mode after he returned, but you'd at least like to think that this latest one-month layoff recharged Napoli's battery a bit after a pretty rough season.

The other thing that comes to mind here is that I believe this is the first instance of Ron Washington outright appointing a personal catcher to a starting pitcher since the C.J. Wilson/Matt Treanor pairing in 2010. I have no idea whether we should expect the Darvish/Soto status quo to continue to yield such positive results, and I'm certainly hesitant to tie a meaningful correlation between Soto beginning to catch Darvish and Darvish going into hyperdrive, but I have uncovered a couple of data points which strike me as interesting:

Darvish, 4/9-8/6: 440 takes on pitches in strike zone, 75.9% called strikes
Darvish, 8/12-present: 118 takes on pitches in strike zone, 85.9% called strikes 

And:

Darvish, 4/9-8/6: 194 takes on pitches in lower third of strike zone, 60.8% CS
Darvish, 8/12-present: 43 takes on pitches in lower third of strike zone, 74.4% CS

I wouldn't try and glean anything definitive from these numbers, and these differing results aren't necessarily a product of superior pitch-framing by Soto compared to Napoli/Torrealba ... but, for whatever it's worth, Darvish is getting a materially higher called-strike rate on pitches that do fall within the boundaries of the strike zone than he ever got with Napoli/Torrealba, and maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't dismiss that out of hand.

62/94

It was the sort of affair where the final score belied how close the game really was, where 'Rangers 9, Mariners 3' was a clear misrepresentation of how precarious the lead had been for the vast majority of the night ... and, on the one hand, that doesn't really matter so much, because I suppose the only thing that really matters in the end is that the Rangers managed to blow up the scoreboard within their allotment of offensive chances. No, you're not especially thrilled that it took them seven-plus innings to score more than two runs at home against a last-place ballclub, but they eventually figured it out, and it's the timing that matters far less than the fact that they did finally get it done.

That's one way of looking at how it all played out. The other way of looking at it is that even with Joe Nathan and Mike Adams (and a DL-residing Robbie Ross) unavailable, they probably weren't going to need more than two runs of support, because Yu Darvish and Koji Uehara had it all down on lock. If you run with the assumption that Alexi Ogando would have successfully nailed it down in the ninth inning with just a one-run lead, then there you go. And, yeah, it's still the Mariners you're talking about, but there isn't another pitcher on this staff who evokes more confidence right now, who has a better chance of stretching two runs of support into a late-game lead for his club, than one Yu Darvish.

We've come full circle, I think. The Darvish hype machine was operating in overdrive mode during the winter months and throughout spring training, remained fairly strong through May/June, trailed off into near-nothingness as he floundered through late July into early August ... and now, as the hour grows late in the regular season, I get the sense that we've crossed a new hype threshold. Up until the last 30 days or thereabouts, the buzz was tied more to the potential and the hope that Darvish would achieve ace status than him actually having achieved it. Right now, though, it feels like this is more about the hope and potential having actualized, and the growing belief that Darvish is developing into the No. 1 starter that we dreamt on right before our very eyes.

Over his last five starts, Darvish has spun 36 innings of 2.00 ERA baseball on 16 hits and eight walks against 43 strikeouts and just one home run -- and while I attempt to work through the question of "What's more impressive: the enormous reduction in the walks, or the fact that he's been allowing one-quarter of one home run per nine innings over an extended period of time?", my mind is further blown by the fact that he has held opposing batters to a .132/.191/.215 (.184 wOBA) over those same five starts. From August 17th-present, that .184 opponents' wOBA has been the lowest mark posted by any of 95 qualifying major league starting pitchers. The second-lowest mark belongs to Max Scherzer, at .214. Thirty points of separation between No. 1 and No. 2. Ridiculous.

I could continue spitting statistics, but there is one particular sequence from last night that stole the collective attention of the masses, that served as further confirmation of what Darvish can do to hitters when he has the command and the confidence and the inclination to do so:

A 62 mph bender, the slowest pitch Darvish has thrown as a major leaguer, and a pitch which had Munenori Kawasaki backing out of the box before the pitch had even reached its target -- and then put-away 94 mph heat. We talk so much about the importance of a pitcher achieving just the right amount of separation between his fastball and change-up -- not too much, not too little -- and maintaining a consistent slot/arm speed to aid in the intended deception, but I'm not sure what you can do about fastball/curveball separation of this degree. It doesn't feel like there's deception at work here so much as a simple case of "alright, here's two pitches with 32 miles per hour of separation and great location; see if you can do anything with either of them." And Kawasaki couldn't.

The first half of his season was marred by the walks, but he was still a deserving All-Star, a pitcher whose merits outweighed his deficiencies. His last four weeks have been legitimately ace-caliber. We're six and a half weeks separated from a potential World Series Game 7, and now that we've seen that Darvish can do what he's doing right now over a span of two, three, four, five starts, we're now left to dream on the very real possibility of him being the post-season rotation monster that helps carry this ballclub over the finish line once and for all.

The Rangers Are 85-58

So Joe Nathan's human after all, I guess.

We Have Updates On Hamilton And Beltre ... And Profar Starts Today

Via the Twitterati:

No Adrian Beltre or Josh Hamilton tonight for the #Rangers. Both ok, just sitting for precautionary reasons.

— Emily Jones (@EmilyJonesFSN) September 13, 2012

Mike Olt, MRI confirms plantar fasciitis, likely out 10-14 days. Adrian Beltre, MRI slight inflammation, no structural issues, day-to-day.

— Jeff Wilson (@JeffWilson_FWST) September 13, 2012

Josh Hamilton gets injection in left knee. Should be ready Friday. Mike Napoli will be activated Saturday.

— Jeff Wilson (@JeffWilson_FWST) September 13, 2012

Rangers have Jurickson Profar at second base today. Kinsler DH. Young at third. Martin in center.

— Anthony Andro (@aandro) September 13, 2012

So, in essence:

● Josh Hamilton seems okay, although this is yet another case of him requiring pain-alleviating injections -- presumably cortisone -- to treat a problem; he received a cortisone injection in his right knee two summers ago, so I guess this equalizes things a bit between the two knees (though not in a good way). 

● Adrian Beltre also seems okay, and, frankly, I'm not too devastated by the fact that he'll get a few full days off away from the responsibilities of hitting/fielding. In the interim, we get Michael Young at third base, and, well, you know what you may be getting into there, but as long as this doesn't deterioriate into a longer-term issue, it's going to be okay.

● Mike Napoli is coming back, and will have a couple of weeks to get his bat going again against ML-quality pitchers before the post-season, where, I assume, he will garner at least a 50/50 playing time split behind the plate, if not more.

● Mike Olt isn't coming back anytime soon, and between this medical problem and his inability to get the bat going in his limited opportunities at the big league level this season, you tend to think that the chances of him making the post-season roster are withering away.

● Jurickson Profar lives forever. Maybe.

4:30 p.m. CDT Update: Well, that changed quickly:

Beltre to DH. Kinsler to 2nd. Profar to bench

— Jean-Jacques Taylor (@JJT_ESPNDallas) September 13, 2012

Beltre apparently talked Ron Washington into starting him tonight, which is, of course, commendable, and says a lot about Beltre's drive and personality and desire to help the team during what the Rangers likely perceive to be a dogfight with the A's ... but on the other hand, Beltre is a tremendous asset, a big determinant in how far this team is going to go, and the only thing you hope is that him continuing to go so hard and even playing through this latest injury isn't something that's going to hamper his performance when the significance of the games soars into the stratosphere during October.

Twenty-Eight And Growing

A few quick things this morning:

● Rather than blindly attempt to make a trenchant point about a start which I admittedly saw very little of, I'll make this more general observation about Ryan Dempster after he spun seven more massively successful innings (7.0 IP, 7 H, 2 ER, 8 K, 1 BB, 0 HR) last night: yeah, his post-trade ERA (4.11) is both decidedly and unsurprisingly higher than that anomalous pre-trade ERA of his (2.25), but the thing that strikes me as curious is how his FIP (3.43 before the trade; 3.54 since then) and xFIP (3.73 before the trade; 3.66 since then) have both remained so steady despite the jump to a tougher league and ballpark, and how, peripherally speaking, he has continued to perform like a four-plus-win pitcher. The Rangers hoped that he would suffice as a fairly cheap Colby Lewis replacement, and they have not been disappointed.

One other thing that strikes me as a bit curious, though, are the suggestions (some tentative and some possibly faceituous) that Dempster should be deployed as the Rangers' Game 1 playoff starter, with some extra credibility being being wafted in the direction of that argument on the basis of Dempster being a "veteran" and such. The question you really have to look at closely when you're evaluating such matters as the post-season rotation is, "if the ALDS goes five games, who do I want on the mound twice?," given that your rotation in (hopefully) the following rounds is going to derive from how you set your ALDS rotation ... and, yeah, I'm quite pleased with how Dempster has been going, but unless a whole lot goes awry in the next few weeks, it's hard to imagine being able to feel better about Dempster as a potential two-game starter in the first round than either Matt Harrison or Yu Darvish.

● The primary story stemming from last night's game, of course, was the overcrowded Ballpark infirmary, as Adrian Beltre made an early exit after spraining his left shoulder on a second-inning dive (his status going forward remains unclear, as his MRI won't come back until Thursday), Josh Hamilton departed early with left knee soreness, and Mike Olt left in the seventh inning after another flareup of plantar fascitis; Mike Adams has also been dealing with a sore trapezoid muscle in his right shoulder that will require him to spend a few more days out of action (a problem which evidentally contributed to his struggles two nights ago), and Roy Oswalt continues to deal with right flexor muscle problems, although that's a less troubling matter given how far Oswalt's stock has fallen.

On the one hand, you loathe the thought of Beltre's white-hot rhythm at the plate possibly being interrupted by this setback, or the shoulder problem possibly turning out to be anything more than a trivial day-to-day matter -- but on the other hand, Beltre has been candid about not feeling as good this September as he did last September, and even though you really hate to see him sidelined for even a couple of games against his will, it's within the realm of possibility that Beltre's body needs this couple-day break to enhance the likelihood of him having enough left in the tank in October.

● Watching Joe Nathan close out Cleveland with relative ease in the ninth inning sent my mind drifting back to this early-July post, in which I outlined how the Rangers' bullpen was on pace for one of the greatest shutdown-to-meltdown ratios of any bullpen in recorded history. We're a couple months further down the line, and the potentially historic significance of this bullpen has receded a bit, but we're still looking at a situation where the best SD-to-MD ratio of any bullpen in the last 39 years belonged to the 1990 Athletics, with 3.2 shutdowns for every single meltdown ... and the Rangers, for their part, now sit at roughly 3.0 shutdowns for every single meltdown in 2012, a mark which stands out as the best in baseball at the moment. This bullpen isn't perfect, but it's awfully damn good when it counts.

The Rangers Are 84-57

BOOM

Tuesday Afternoon Rangers Notes: When You Can't Do It All

Before I launch into these couple of bullet points (and any others that I may tack onto this post), I feel compelled to say that it's been killing me not being around as much lately. Your priorities shift, you get busy, your available time dries up, and then things like this happen, and that kills me. You start out not missing it that much, and then you realize that there's something missing from your routine, something that you've come to depend on, and that's when you realize that you do, in fact, miss it a lot, and that it's really not so easy to neglect a product that you've invested thousands of hours into over a span of many years.

So, yeah, there's that, and if the last week or so has hammered home any sort of point at all, it's that the stage is going to have to expand here, because I just don't think I can do it all anymore. And with that sobering realization/admission aside ...

● T.R. Sullivan -- and others -- have talked recently about how this team has been tested to the hilt in terms of physical/emotional stress over the last couple of years and (in particular) this year, how there are several guys battling lingering injuries and others who just don't seem to have as much gas left in the tank at this point in the season as they did in past years, and AJM talked about this a bit last week as well, pointing out that a preponderance of the Rangers' starters are on pace to appear in 155 (or more) games this season and have received few breathers in the process, which could augur unfavorably for their chances of making a deep run during the month of October.

The problem with trying to buy some of those guys additional rest now in advance of the post-season, of course, appears to be twofold: (a) Ron Washington doesn't regard the alternatives as experienced/talented/what-have-you enough to justify sitting his everyday pieces; and (b) the Athletics simply won't die, as Oakland has whittled the Rangers' lead down to three games while taking possession of the second-best record in the American League. I suspect that, in Washington's mind, this is a time where you want to ride the players who have gotten you this far as hard as you have all year long, because even though we still may not perceive the Athletics as serious threats to the division crown, the sentiment in that clubhouse probably swings the other way.

Now, granted, the Athletics face a much tougher schedule (three more in Anaheim, three games vs. Baltimore, and then a 10-games-in-10-days road trip at Detroit, New York, and Texas) down the stretch than the Rangers do, are less talented on the whole, and would need to overcome that three-game deficit on top of everything else ... but as long as the Athletics remain within such close proximity, and as long as the race remains somewhat open, I don't think you're going to see guys like Adrian Beltre or Josh Hamilton or Ian Kinsler getting full days off, and you hope that they all have enough left in their energy stores -- and, for that matter, are able to remain healthy enough -- that this doesn't cost them dearly in October, or in their upcoming clashes against AL West clubs.

● The question of who should be the Rangers' No. 1 playoff starter has been getting some play of late, and even though Matt Harrison led the way as the prohibitive fan favorite for that title for much of the season, Yu Darvish has swung the numbers back in his favor with his monster run over his last 4-5 starts in conjunction with Matt Harrison's recent struggles. I find myself leaning towards the line of thought that says "yeah, probably Darvish, but there's still a few weeks left for evaluation purposes, and you want to see who your first-round opponent is before making a firm determination. In any event, you're probably going to be okay with whichever way they decide to roll there.

Ryan Dempster, meanwhile, is all but guaranteed the third spot, and Derek Holland is on track for the fourth spot, with Scott Feldman (who had a legit case going for him until he hit the skids again) and Roy Oswalt (who was originally signed with the idea of being the playoff-tested veteran who could step it up in October, and now probably won't even be on the post-season roster) both likely ending up on the outside looking in. So it goes.

And The Beat Goes On: Sept. 11th

It turns out that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated:

● T.R. Sullivan's latest mailbag talks about the physical and mental grind that this year's Rangers squad has been subjected to (as an example of that, Adrian Beltre candidly acknowledged that he did not feel as good this September as he did last September when he won the AL Player of the Month honor), and talks about the possibility of Ryan Dempster staying with the Rangers after this season, along with an interesting reference to him being "out" on any proposed Elvis Andrus for Justin Upton deal this off-season. 

● Gerry Fraley held forth with some thoughts on the leading American League MVP candidates in slide show form this morning, and criticized Mike Trout for hitting just .275 with an .855 OPS since August 1st, which, in his view, isn't "the stuff of an MVP" -- a remark which has attracted some blogosphere attention already. Sounds like a case of unduely dinging a player because his performance doesn't match the demanded narrative.

● The Rangers will likely hit three million fans this week for the first time in their history, a mark which they nearly hit several times during their late-90s window but never quite managed to pull off. Texas has averaged roughly 42.6 thousand fans per home game this season; five years ago, that figure was a skosh over 24,000. 

● Jason Cole has the Rangers' instructional league roster available for your perusal, and the DMN talks about Mike Olt, Jurickson Profar, Leonys Martin, and Chad Bell joining Licey of the DWL this winter, an assignment which seems to carry additional weight for guys like Olt and Martin who, for one reason or another, didn't amass a full season's worth of plate appearances between the minor and major league levels, and/or who need to keep facing live pitching and continue to refine their offensive skill sets. 

● In a rare case of baseball and accounting colliding in the headlines, Robert Wilonsky talks about how one of the former lenders to the Hicks sports empire (GSP Finance LLC) is suing one of the Big 4 auditing firms because they "fraudulently issued a clean audit opinion [to Hicks Sports Group]" upon which GSP relied when they loaned HSG some $60-plus million in 2006. HSG, of course, was doomed, with Hicks loaning his own teams money from his personal funds to keep the teams afloat, and it turns out his lenders didn't like it very much when he defaulted on $500-plus million in loans once the empire came crashing down.

The Rangers Are 83-57

The Rangers Are 83-56

They're also 1-0 with Jurickson Profar starting at shortstop.

Rangers Gameday: 9/8 Vs. TBR

Source: FanGraphs