Josh Hamilton Free Agency (UPDATE: Signs with Angels)

Thus ends the era of the Rangers "fan".

 

Way too much overreaction in this thread.

Last year, Pujols and CJ Wilson signed with the Angels, and they were supposed to be awesome, while St. Louis was supposed to totally fall apart (especially with Berkman missing the whole season as well). The Rangers farm system is built to keep them competitive for the long haul. They may be a bit worse, but they'll still be right there in the mix for the playoffs.

 

I agree with you, they're still going to be competitive...though I don't think they have the pitching in their farm system to remotely make up for what they've lost. Missing out on Shields, Greinke, etc is a big deal for them...particularly after letting Dempster walk as well.

but his statement about the Ranger "fan" going away might not be far off the mark.

This is a franchise that didn't sell out their one game playoff against the O's last season...ON THE HEELS OF WINNING TWO AL PENNANTS IN A ROW AND BEING THE BEST TEAM IN BASEBALL FOR MOST OF THE YEAR LAST SEASON!

Antecdotally, the new "Rangers fans" I know won't be around next season. They cite the nosedive....losing Michael Young...etc.

If the Angels play to their potential, I think the Rangers have lost far too much over the course of the last couple of offseasons to remain competitive with them. Whether the Angels will play to their potential is an entirely different matter.

 

Yeah, offense could still be good, but pitching is a big question mark. Very dependent on Darvish to pitch well again and Feliz to come back and stay healthy.

 

True - but that tends to happen with a lot of the daytime weekday playoff games. I went to one of those for the Astros in the late 1990's when Astros-fever was taking over Houston and it was nowhere near sold out. It's ridiculous that they don't play all the playoff games at night and just put them on different networks simultaneously.

Rangers fans are ultimately no different than Astros fans or Angels fans or just about any other fanbase outside of Cubs and Red Sox fans, I don't think. They'll be there if the team turns out good; or they'll disappear if the team sucks.

 

Sorry - it was 2001:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_National_League_Division_Series

We had 35,000 people for both games 1 and 2, which were weekday afternoon games. We also didn't sell out one of the weekday afternoon 1998 home games - a year where lots of people had us as the best team in baseball.

 

No one seems to realize that the Angels lost quite a bit of pitching too, and while Hamilton is an upgrade over Tori Hunter, last year Hunter was very good. I also seriously doubt Trout is as good.