The Texas Rangers have stumbled through the beginning of the season. A malady of injuries has befell the returning champion cast. Josh Jung went down first with a severely broken wrist. Young lefty stud pitcher Cody Bradford followed with a broken rib. Top outfield prospect Wyatt Langford pulled his hamstring a month later. Nathan Eovaldi strained his groin the day after that. Dane Dunning and Josh Sborz both went down with shoulder injuries. Mere days later Mad Max Scherzer revealed the devastating news: the lack of feeling in one of his pitching fingers might be a nerve issue. This is the sort of injury that could put the 39 year old warrior on the shelf for good. Young outfield star Evan “The Little Savior” Carter was scratched from the lineup Saturday due to back stiffness.
The seemingly cursed season has not felt like the title defense it was sold as in the offseason. There is seemingly no better representation of this than the lack of organ at the ballpark. The cavernous, sterile dome that the Rangers call home lacks a soul. Named after an insurance company, the boring shopping mall offers fans a plethora of ways to get ripped off. The stadium that debuted in 2020 does little to offer the viewer anything at the expense of the entire vibe and atmosphere. Even the precious A/C is used in an exceptionally stringy capacity. It is blasted a bit at the beginning, but use soon subsides. The Ranger fan is forced to sit in a tiny chair with no leg room as the stale air suffocates the cavernous dome. This is a perfect microcosm of what is wrong with the Rangers. The entire point of building a new stadium was to blast the A/C so the fans could watch the game live and enjoy it. The perfectly fine Ballpark in Arlington was reduced to hosting tawdry third rate events and was replaced with a hilariously avaricious vessel. The new stadium lacks any charm at all. It is utterly bereft of any spirit or identity. Much like the handling of the team’s 2023 success, money and success can exist irrespective of class.
Going to a Rangers game simply does not feel like going to a Rangers game anymore. After walking in the stadium and seeing the insanely overpriced garbage, fans realize two things, often subconsciously.
“This does not smell or sound like a baseball stadium.”
After wading through a poorly staffed and overcrowded concourse, the average fan finally arrives at his overpriced seat. He then sets whatever junk he just paid 600% markup for down and tries to figure out a way to sit that does not involve his knee being in the back of the person in front of him. Over the putrid, disjointed blasting of rap music from phones an even more repugnant sound overwhelms the fan. Some sort of highly distorted, unintelligible slop comes spilling out of the main ballpark speakers. Disoriented by the strident blast, the average fan sits in his tiny seat, already down $500, and wonders what the hell all the awful noise is.
As the game marches on, this same fan is brutally waylaid again and again by dissonant nonsense. At no point during this insipid screed of hip hop, overplayed rock, and EDM does the fan ever feel like they are at a baseball game. The effusive level of nonsensical stimuli deluged upon the Ranger fan ruins the game in the same way that having ads on every surface does. It is an intentional degradation, a melting down of priceless heirlooms for scrap. From the ads on the mounds, jerseys, outfield walls, outfield facades, stadium name, walls around the concourse, ect… It is all a purposeful squeezing and pimping of the product to the point of no return. The greedy owners and Commissioner have pushed the game to the brink of death with their selfish and greedy decisions. The ads on the jerseys while the majority of fans are blacked out from watching their favorite team is a perfect representation of where the game and country are: you pay more for a worse product.
The organ in baseball provides ambiance and levity to the ballpark. It gets the fans going in a traditional, non-invasive way. It can also be used to build tension. Having a talented organist is a great way to reach out to a plethora of audiences of all ages. Hearing a classic organ riff appeals to the mind in a way a highly distorted and compressed rap beat never will. Having an organist also eliminates the need for a bunch of obnoxious and unfunny video bits. Going to a Ranger game in 2024 is like going to a minor league hockey game except everything is marked up 600% instead of 200%. Utterly soulless in both intentions and execution, Globe Life Field is everything that is wrong with baseball and America.
The Rangers identity for years was that of dopey losers. They were sort of like the Boston Red Sox, if Massholes were obsessed with football more than baseball. The Yankees have not won a pennant since 2009 but are still perceived to be winners and constant contenders. The Rangers are defending champs and it still does not feel like it. That goes beyond snakebit loser identity and is a reflection on ownership’s penurious mindset. Even on the heels of the impossible run they pinch pennies before the champagne is even dry. Jokish product placement “parade,” lack of offseason spending, price hikes, and worst of all: not buying the trophy that was initially promised. A replica of the World Series trophy that had a button that would play Eric Nadel’s World Series call was promised to the fans. It was never ordered. The exceptionally talented Nadel was denied his chance to be immortalized in his own regard. This repulsive and backwards decision was the exact sort of move that categorized the offseason: ownership not following through on things they told people they would do because the team finally won and thus ownership had leverage.
The Rangers are on the cutting edge. Not on developing pitching methods like the Rays, or cheating methods like the Astros. No, the Rangers are on the cutting edge of killing baseball. They purposely sold their TV rights to a joke company at an exorbitant price. They knew the company would not be able to pay and had no intention to distribute the games to a wide audience. This meant over 90% of the target audience would be unable to view the games. This is especially true when considering the MLB blackout policy that prevents fans from watching games online, even after paying up front for the entire year Premier Package. Ownership knew selling the rights to such a company would result in a minimized viewership and fan interest, but of course did so anyway because they thought they would be able to collect enough on the backend of the lawfare to justify robbing the fans of being able to watch the game. Baseball, as America’s Pastime, often reflects the state of the country in some way. In this way we see that it is selfish malice, not incompetence, that drives the decisions from the top.
It is so tiresome to be a baseball fan and not be able to do basic things like watch a VOD or listen to a game properly without some laughable invasive nonsense preventing one from doing so. Want to watch the Ranger game that just ended that was blacked out? The VOD is also blacked out for hours. Insane. Even if you are willing to listen to the radio feed, the end of innings are upcut by ads three times louder than the broadcast. 30 years ago you could record games on VCR and watch them without ads. Now when I want to watch a VOD I get an unskippable pop-up ad in between innings. On a VOD. These are all problems that exist with the most expensive package MLB offers, not an illegal stream or service. In other words, in the age of the internet when access has increased to a ludicrous level, MLB went backwards and wants to impose blackouts and forced ads on VODs. The mindset of limitless usury and avarice is one that has characterized stooge Commissioner Rob Manfred’s tenure.
Understanding ads on every surface of the park goes hand in hand with blackouts and ad spam over VODs and live games. The entire point of watching something live is you do not have to watch it with ads. MLB ruining their old games with forced ads? Why? You cannot go backwards in such an overbearing way and expect people to keep coming back. The sport might have a neurotic enough core audience to keep it alive, but MLB is doing everything it can to destroy and devalue the game. If the most neurotic, hardcore (fully $ubscribed) fan cannot watch his own team live, listen to a decent radio feed, or even watch the game after without a timer what’s the point of having a subscription? MLB and the Rangers have shown what it is like to spit in the face of your fans for over a decade. Shameless usury and degradation to the point of turning the stomach of even the most loyal fan has been the modus operandi of MLB since Rob Manfred took over.
The Rangers went to Colorado this weekend to face off against the only team in the NL with single digit wins. The Rangers are at risk of being swept. This season will be defined by what was not done in the offseason, not any particular series. Expect the Rangers to sputter all year, unable to get anything going to find a true rhythm. Many fans will blame injuries for this, but the team underperformed throughout April before injuries got truly bad. Josh Jung was the first big name to go down, but his replacement, Josh Smith, has been incredible. The Rangers floundered for weeks and weeks after that before the rest of the injuries hit. Corey Seager was ice cold and still is. Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter could not find their rhythm early and then gotten banged up. The bullpen is still pretty bad but the two big names they added, Kirby Yates and David Robertson, have been great.
Ultimately the season will end in disappointment. The real tragedy is the degradation of the game itself, not this one lost season.
