What a Ride

Now that the dust from the World Series has settled, I can sit back and reflect.

Yes, the Rangers got their hides tanned by the Giants. They couldn't hit and therefor they couldn't win. It sucked.

Oh well.

The bigger picture is that the Rangers made an improbable run to their first World Series ever.

The ride was wonderful and it's something that only a certain few baseball teams can appreciate. A few years ago, the country watched all the Boston fans go crazy as their curse was lifted with the arrival of a title.

It was a good story, but the Red Sox have been a flagship team over the years. They weren't a city joke like the Rangers have been.

Texas has been so bad over the years, it's been comical. They've lost since they came to Dallas in 1970. In that time, teams like the Marlins and Diamondbacks have been created and have won a World Series title. Even the Rockies made a run a few years ago. The Rangers had more than a 20 year head start on these teams and still lagged far behind in success.

As the playoffs began this season, Texas had exactly one playoff win in 40 years. One. Teams have had long championship droughts (hello Cubs and Indians fans), but very few are like the Rangers where there isn't a person that can remember at least a good playoff run.

That putrid history is what made this year so much more special. There is nothing like your first championship run in sports. The genuine excitement of the crowd, the way the team takes a city by storm...imagine what Charlie felt like when he first entered the chocolate factory.

It's a feeling you can't ever recreate again. Sure, Rangers fans will still celebrate a championship should one come in the future, but the journey has been taken already. We've seen an ALDS and ALCS series celebration. It's not new territory anymore. There isn't a mix of exhilaration and disbelief from loyal fans who have watched a lifetime of bad baseball with the hope that this moment might one day come.

So excuse me if I don't get angry when fans talk smack to me after the World Series loss (oddly, it's not the Giants fans doing the talking, but a collection of fans from teams who's seasons ended long ago.) If you think a team has a failure of a season because they didn't win the championship, you are missing a lot. Just go back and look at Texas during the 2010 season.

Sincerely,

Claw and Antlers.

Fight For Your Right To Own

What a crazy day in Rangers history. The 14-hour court auction to determine the new owner of the baseball team ranks just behind the 10-cent beer night fiasco in Cleveland during the 1970's (where drunk Cleveland fans stormed the field to party causing such a fiasco, the game had to be stopped) in terms of unstable moments for a franchise.

Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan had both been planning on leading a group to acquire the Rangers and most people thought the ownership group would move into place at the beginning of the season. Greenberg was even on local sports radio talking about his philosophy about owning a team.

Then the poop flew right through the fan.

Turns out the previous owner Tom Hicks had taken a few liberties in his financial dealings including leveraging the Ballpark in Arlington (home of the Rangers) as one of his holdings during business moves. The problem is, Hicks didn't actually own the ballpark.

Oops.

Now Hicks was declaring bankruptcy and trying to sell off the Rangers without consulting all of the creditors he owed. Naturally, that did not sit well with those whom Hicks owed money to.

The following months, also known as the 2010 baseball season, turned into such a mishmash of back and forth ownership proceedings, it's a wonder that the baseball team could actually play games.

But play the Rangers have and with the help the of mid-season trade for Cliff Lee (NO idea how that was able to happen with a team technically owned by Major League Baseball), Texas is now the overwhelming favorites to win the AL West and go to the playoffs for the first time in over a decade.

Yesterday, Greenberg and Ryan went to court to legally attain that team they'd been waiting to get for a year. Alas, a new problem arose.

Mark Cuban had decided he wanted the team.

Oh yeah, Mark Cuban, the crazy, intense, pontentially explosive owner of the Dallas Mavericks wanted to get into baseball. He had tried once with the Chicago Cubs, but had been denied by the other frumpy baseball owners who were no doubt frightened of what kind of change Cuban might bring to their stubbornly evolving sport.

So like a jilted lover, Cuban was going to go after another team and dare the owners to try and vote him down again. And therein lay the issue:

Cuban is a smart businessman, but he's also a very emotional owner. If he had made up his mind that he was going to get the Rangers, there might be no way to stop him because he'd possibly pour his entire fortune just to win the bidding. He'd been denied and this was his chance to thumb his nose at the baseball boys club by resurfacing.

It took 14 long hours of court bidding before Greenberg and Ryan threw out a bid that Cuban refused to top. By the time the new owners were celebrating, only people on the west coast would have been awake to hear the news.

And that's what I love about this process. Greenberg and Ryan didn't just walk up and purchase a team with ownership trouble. They fought for this team. You don't get into a bidding war unless you really want something and they went to the wall to hold off Mark Cuban. As a Rangers fan, I'm beyond happy because I see an ownership group that are proud to own this team. When you're proud of something you tend to take care of it.

I would have been happy with Mark Cuban too, he's already proven what he can do by taken a joke of a Mavericks team (previously owned by scumbag buisnessman Ross Perot Jr. who only owned the team to finalize a real estate deal and make a gazillion dollars) and turned that pile of garbage into an NBA contender. But Greenberg and Ryan wanted the Rangers longer.

Greenberg has been visiting the Rangers clubhouse for the better part of a year to get to know his players. He really wants to be a part of this thing. Now he is. And it's about damn time. Finally, the Rangers can look forward instead of running in place.

Oh the times, they are a changin'.

Is Big Brother Watching?

I just watched The Insider on television last night. If you haven't seen it, the movie stars a pre-Gladiator Russell Crowe as an insider for a big tobacco company. He agrees to go on 60 Minutes to talk about all the evil that goes on in that industry.

The issue of the movie is that after Crowe's character goes through all sorts of hell after interviewing with 60 Minutes (death threats, harassment, divorce), CBS corporate pulls the plug on the interview because the corporate bigwigs don't want the tobacco company to sue them and drive stock prices down. So the moral of the story is that apparently corporate big wigs now control the news. It's very paranoia inducing and I'm sure dozens of conspiracy theories were created after the movie hit the theaters.

Maybe it was the movie waking up that cynical part of brain, but I get the same "big brother" vibes from ESPN these days. Scott Van Pelt was suspended for ripping into baseball commish Bud Selig about his otherworldly salary last year ($18.5 million).

If Van Pelt had used a curse word or had some other blatant violation that could cost the station money, then I would understand a suspension. But Van Pelt was punished for speaking too harshly of Selig, who incidentally is presiding over an 8 year, $2.4 billion broadcast deal with ESPN.

So apparently ESPN personalities should stick with those witty 30 second bursts they have on Sportscenter before showing two minutes of clips while they act all toady towards LeBron James. Unless you're name is Stuart Scott, then you need to go from proper English Stuart to ghetto fab Stuart ("Cleveland arrived in New York yesterday to complete a three game road trip throughout the Hudson River Valley......ahem.....LeBron James was in the hizzzouuse beotch!")

Why does ESPN even bother to have radio shows then? The whole point of a radio show is to have more creative freedom than you would on an hour long television show where you have 30 seconds to write a lead and then show highlights. Seriously, does anyone bother to listen to a radio show that is only sports scores and updates for three straight hours?

Van Pelt and others like him work a gazillion hours a day and talk sports all day every day. If they want to pop off about something, they have as much right to do so as anyone. In fact, it makes them sound like an actual sports fan and not just a sports computer. Let'em play ref!

If Van Pelt or any other ESPN anchor goes too far on their radio show, you can bet the court of public opinion will strike back. Then ESPN corporate can get involved and dole out a punishment. But I don't want my radio content determined by bean counters and corporate types. I've met plenty of those, they're generally smart, dull, self-absorbed, and more worried about their wallets than entertainment.

Sounds like a great person to determine radio show content doesn't it?