Peace Out, Darren O'Day

Lost on waivers to the Baltimore Orioles, per multiple sources. Buck Showalter gets another ex-Ranger to play with, albeit one that didn't land on the Rangers until three years after his ouster from Texas.

O'Day was something of a revelation here in his first two seasons, producing nearly 120 innings of roughly 2.00 ERA baseball out of the Texas bullpen in 2009-10 after being claimed off waivers from the Mets on April 22nd, 2009 -- a mid-afternoon transaction resulting in a memorable frenzied rush to fly O'Day up to Toronto for that night's game, which ultimately saw O'Day (donning a Kason Gabbard jersey) give up the game-winning base hit in the 11th inning after C.J. Wilson created a two-on, one-out mess.

[Two other notable things about that game: (1) Derek Holland made his major league debut that night in Toronto, spinning 2.1 scoreless innings in relief, and (2) Michael Young smashed a game-tying, two-out, ninth-inning home run to keep the Rangers alive and force the affair to the bottom of the ninth inning.]

In 2011, however, O'Day threw only 16.2 underwhelming innings after losing a couple of months to hip surgery to repair a torn labrum, and losing a couple of more weeks to shoulder inflammation in September. He found himself resigned to No. 2 on the ROOGY depth chart behind Yoshinori Tateyama, and with Tateyama's 2012 option being picked up the other day, and with Cody Eppley and (possibly) Johan Yan being on the 40-man roster, it was going to be hard for the Rangers to justify devoting 10 percent of their 40-man roster to righty specialists.

So, much love DOD. It's tough to say goodbye to players that we like, but he did just about everything that the Rangers could have reasonably asked for, and no doubt ended up being one of the better cheap Rangers acquisitions of the Jon Daniels era.

And we'll also always have moments like these, which may have signalled the beginning of the Rangers' fan base actually being able to create organized, player-specific chants out of thin air (albeit ripped off from soccer):