And The Beat Goes On: April 22nd

I fully expect that my musical choices are getting to be a bit too ambient and house-like for the masses here ... but since this is the year of "I do what I want," let's go ahead and roll with some Jazzelicious nevertheless:

Let's keep this one relatively short and simple.

● Richard Durrett hits the high and low points of yesterday's twin bill. 

● Adrian Beltre will have an MRI performed on his strained left hamstring tomorrow to determine the severity of the injury, but he insists that the severity of the injury is not akin to what we saw with his hamstring injury late last summer, when he landed on the shelf for more than a month. This is being classified as a day-to-day injury at this point, but it's pretty reasonable to expect that Texas is going to slow-play this as much as possible, and try to ensure that there's no residual grabbing or soreness in the afflicted region before turning Beltre loose again.

● Randy Galloway writes about Pudge being the most beloved Ranger in franchise history, and invokes the fan disgust that manifested after the John Hart regime didn't bring him back after the 2002 season. Tim Cowlishaw offers a column on the Pudge era as well, but it's paywalled, and if I could dig up the link, I'd offer an article here that I read recently about how newspaper paywalls can be modestly effectively stopgaps in terms of plugging up ever-widening revenue holes, but are the most effective when they permit a reader to access, say, 10-20 pages in a given month before blocking access altogether. The DMN model basically tells you to pay up or die, and though I'm beginning to go off on something of a tangent here, I was particularly surprised that the DMN didn't make their tornado coverage -- which was an historic local event that virtually EVERYONE was talking about -- freely accessible to non-subscribers, given the quantity of traffic that no doubt wandered over to the DMN on that day and left unfulfilled.

● Ron Washington says that the basepaths seemed wetter than usual during Game 2 yesterday, and that created difficulty for the Rangers' baserunners, with Washington's response to the Tigers' gamesmanship -- he did specifically avoid that word -- being pretty on point: "You do whatever you can to slow it down. It's tactics. I'm happy to see it, because that means there's awareness of what we're capable of doing. If it's in people's heads, it gives you a little bit of an advantage.''

● Bryan Dolgin has a podcast up with Round Rock hitting coach Brant Brown, and one of the interesting takeaways are his remarks on Leonys Martin, who's hitting .359/.438/.578 thus far this year:

"Mechanically, there's a lot of things that [Martin's] cleaned up that allows him to be a little more efficient to the baseball and then mentally kind of easing in to the way we play, the way things are, and getting used to his comrades," Round Rock hitting coach Brant Brown said. "Obviously, the hot start has helped with confidence." 

Keith Law was pretty critical of Martin's swing mechanics as recently as last July, so stumbling across comments of this sort does lead one to believe that some, if not most, of the weak points in his mechanics have been corrected or otherwise addressed, and that there's some semblance of sustainability in his early-season performance -- not a continued 1.000-plus OPS, of course, but hopefully something quite a bit better at the AAA level than last year's sub-.700 OPS showing