Are the Rangers for Real?
It’s hard to believe in the Texas Rangers – REALLY hard – because they’ve spent the vast majority of their existence being terrible. A compelling case could even be made that they are the single worst franchise in the history of American professional sports. They have never won a playoff series…ever. In fact, they’ve only won one playoff game in the 36+ seasons they’ve made Arlington home. That’s almost 6,000 games played with only a single postseason win to show for it. This transcends mere futility…it’s EPIC futility.
Looking solely at their own sport, only two other teams have never made the World Series: the Washington Nationals (formerly Montreal Expos) and Seattle Mariners. The Mariners franchise has been in existence for 16 fewer years than the Rangers (who were founded in 1961 as the Washington Senators), while the Nationals/Expos are eight years younger than the Rangers/Senators. And though these two younger franchises share the Rangers’ frustration of never appearing in a World Series, both not only won more than one playoff game, they’ve won playoff series (Expos in 1981; Mariners in 1995, 2000, 2001). To add insult to injury, 10 teams who began play after the Rangers first came into existence as the Senators in 1961 have appeared in the World Series, including eight World Championships.
But that’s just baseball. The three other major sports also emphasize just how pathetic the Rangers have been all these years. Modern football coincides with the Super Bowl era, which began when the first Super Bowl was played in 1967. Only five NFL teams have never appeared in a Super Bowl, four of which have combined for 35 playoff appearances among them. Only the Houston Texans, whose inaugural season was the Rangers’ 30th in Arlington and 41st overall, have never won a playoff game.
In basketball, there are seven teams who have not appeared in the NBA Finals since 1961, all of whom began play after the Rangers/Senators were founded. These seven teams have combined for 54 playoff appearances among them. Only the Charlotte Bobcats, whose inaugural season was the Rangers’ 32nd in Arlington and 43rd overall, have never won a playoff game. The supposed benchmark of professional sports futility, the Los Angeles Clippers, have won 20 playoff games during the Rangers’ existence.
As for hockey, there are 13 teams who have not appeared in the Stanley Cup Finals since 1961, all of whom began play after the Rangers/Senators were founded. Every current franchise has made the playoffs, with the Atlanta Thrashers and Columbus Blue Jackets being the only two who have never won a playoff game. These franchises began play 27 and 28 years after the Rangers/Senators were founded, respectively.
My point in undertaking this rather laborious and overly drawn out statistical exercise was to show just how ridiculous the Texas Rangers have been over four decades. It’s almost statistically impossible to be that bad, yet they have somehow managed to do so. But there just might be hope yet, as emerging from this Mount Everest of damning historical evidence is a young, exciting team with a flare for the dramatic…a team that appears poised to reverse the miserable fortune of their predecessors.
Today is May 17, and we are almost a quarter of the way into the season. This is traditionally the time of year when temparatures in Arlington skyrocket, while winning percentages plummet. Yet here the perennially abysmal Texas Rangers sit at 23-14, having won seven straight to catapult them to a shocking 4.5-game lead in the American League West. Only two teams in all of baseball have a better record than the Rangers right now, and only one (Toronto) in the AL. These aren’t completely unchartered waters, as there have been a handful of decent Ranger squads over the years, but this may be the first time they’ve managed to look this promising with such a young core of players.
Many of these youngsters are making significant contributions to this team’s success. Their big league roster includes 20 players who are age 25 or younger, and another 12 who have not yet reached 30. This doesn’t even take into account the dozens upon dozens of minor league prospects still working their way up through baseball’s top-ranked farm system. The future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear extra-strength Blu-Blockers.
Will this season’s early success eventually result in this franchise’s first-ever playoff series win? It may not be this year, but it’s definitely coming soon. Believe it.
LOST Thoughts – S5 E16 & 17
Here are my thoughts on the fifth season finale of Lost, “The Incident”:
- We finally found out the identity of Jacob! It turns out he’s not Christian or elderly future Jack or even Alpert playing Wizard of Oz. He’s…some random dude we’ve never seen before. Given all of the ghostly implications leading up to this, when the opening scene led off with a shot of homemade pottery in a dimly-lit room, I started wondering if Jacob was going to end up being Patrick Swayze.
- Even though we’ve never seen Jacob before, it turns out just about everyone this side of Nikki and Paulo has – though they certainly didn’t realize it at the time. Jacob materialized just in time to play their guardian angel so often, the only thing he was missing was Victor French as a sidekick.
- The shocking part of little girl Kate’s convenience store heist wasn’t that she shoplifted a lunch box, it’s that it was a NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK lunch box. She seems like she would have been more of a Poison or Skid Row fan.
- It was nice to see Rose, Bernard and Vincent safe and sound and quietly enjoying retirement. Didn’t it kind of look like Bernard used the blueprints from Jacob’s cabin to build their love shack?
- OK, so Ben’s Dad shot Sayid to avenge Sayid’s shooting of Ben, which Sayid did to prevent Ben from gassing his Dad. Circle of life, indeed.
- Nobody is better at driving those VW microbuses in rescue situations than Hurley. The Fat and The Furious.
- There were so many satifying moments throughout the season finale, but perhaps none provided more instant gratification than seeing Phil get impaled by rebar. If only Radzinsky could have suffered a similarly gruesome fate…
- Speaking of gruesome fates, it doesn’t get much worse than Jacob being stabbed in the heart and kicked into a fire. Nothing sets off Ben quite like being deemed insignificant, except maybe seeing the girl he kidnapped and forced to be his daughter get executed right before his very eyes. That also made him a little cranky.
- So, back when the smoke monster brought forth dead Alex to demand that faux daddy Ben follow all of Locke’s instructions OR ELSE, was she doing so knowing that Jacob’s nemesis would later assume the form of Locke in order to have Jacob killed? In other words, is the smoke monster on Team Jacob, or Team Other Guy With A Rope For A Belt?
- Now that Jughead (or at least the plutonium-filled thermos extracted from within) has been detonated, what lies ahead for the final season? Will Oceanic Flight 815 land at LAX without incident, leaving the passengers to go on with their lives having never met? Will the island now be inhabited entirely by radioactive zombies? Will Miles and Chang play catch in the backyard? We only have to wait NINE MONTHS to find out! Can somebody please turn ABC’s frozen donkey wheel so we can zap forward to 2010?!?
LOST Thoughts – S5 E15
Here are my thoughts on the fifteenth episode of Lost (season five), “Follow the Leader”:
- The sweatier and more agitated Radzinsky gets, the more he’s only a trucker hat away from becoming Judah Friedlander.
- I sure was disappointed at how easily Horace was willing to cede power to Radzinsky when he became the Al Haig of Dharma and declared he was in charge now. And it sure didn’t take him long to employ questionable tactics. He really should behave more like his sitcom doppelgänger. After all, do you really think Frank from 30 Rock would ever order Toofer to hit Liz Lemon? I mean, sure, Donaghy would, but we all know that Ben is the Donaghy of Lost.
- During the five seasons of Lost so far, Kate has always looked hot no matter how dirty or shabbily dressed she may have been at the time. Well, she’s finally managed to find an outfit that sufficiently reduces her hotness: the dark blue mechanic jumpsuit. She’s no Betsy Russell.
- Sayid must have read my mind, because I’ve been thinking the exact same thing about why going along with Jack’s plan is the best move: either it will fix everything, or they’ll finally all be put out of their misery. I know Kate’s pissed because she’s suddenly only capable of looking at this as if it were a Stephenie Meyer novel, but she’s not Bella and Jack’s not Edward…although Sayid might be able to pass for an adult version of that long-haired Indian werewolf kid. (This extremely unfortunate and inexcusable detour into the ridiculousness that is Twilight can and must be blamed on my wife’s obsession with reading vampire books aimed at 11-year-old girls, which has resulted in me being mentally infected with such tween tripe.)
- Of all the reasons for Eloise to believe Jack that they are from the future and Faraday is her son, why was she finally convinced by seeing her handwriting? I know The Others have been isolated from the rest of the world all these years, but it’s hard to imagine that with all of the treachery and deceit that’s taken place on that island, they’ve never been exposed to the concept of FORGERY. Seeing people disappear and then reappear decades later could just be some sort of elaborate hoax, right? But how could anyone possibly REPLICATE HANDWRITING?!?!? You MUST be time travelers!!!
- I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Other Widmore’s hairstyle is just too ridiculous for me to be able to properly focus on his character. He looks like the love child of Russell Crowe and Bruce Vilanch.
- Hurley really shines under pressure, doesn’t he? You’d have thought Dr. Chang was waterboarding him. “Anybody got the time?” “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!! OK, DUDE, WE’RE FROM THE FUTURE!!!”
- Boy, Locke, Alpert and Ben really make quite the wacky trio, don’t they? It’s hilarious how Ben’s one-liners have been rendered virtually snarkless by Locke’s supremely confident swagger. Locke has even managed to unnerve the previously unflappable Alpert, who for once doesn’t seem to know what’s going on with the island or even Jacob.
- Speaking of Jacob, now that we’ve learned Locke plans to kill him, that poses many questions. Isn’t Jacob a ghost? How do you kill a ghost? Is Jacob’s real identity going to be finally exposed, resulting in him exclaiming, “And I’d have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!!!”?
- For millions of men, being with two beautiful handcuffed women at the same time is a wonderful fantasy. But for Sawyer, it’s a horrible nightmare.
LOST Thoughts – S5 E14
Here are my thoughts on the fourteenth episode of Lost (season five), “The Variable”:
- When Penny asked Eloise if Ben was her son, Mrs. Hawking reflexively reacted as if she had just taken a swig of ’77 vintage Dharma milk. She no likey the Linus!
- Exactly how far is it from Dharmaville to the sub dock? Dr. Chang left his cottage with adult Miles immediately after reading baby Miles a bedtime story, so that had to have been around 8:00 p.m. When they get to the sub to pick up Faraday, it’s the middle of the night. Then, when Faraday insists on rushing directly to Jack’s cottage, it’s already broad daylight. Either it’s a 12-hour round trip by VW microbus, or the island is actually part of the Aleutian Chain during Summer.
- It didn’t take but one “Freckles” to come out of the mouth of domesticated Sawyer to trigger Juliet’s “hell hath” reflex mechanism. I love how she just immediately whips out the sonic fence code for Kate, right after shooting Sawyer a look that would have resulted in a brutal rolling pin assault, had this been a Snuffy Smith comic.
- What happened to cause Eloise to suddenly stop boy Faraday from practicing the piano and insist he immediately become the world’s youngest quantum physicist? It really seems as if she had just received some sort of directive to do so, right before sauntering into the living room. The obvious culprit would appear to be Widmore, who just might also be Faraday’s pappy. If so, exactly what sort of leverage does he have over her? A set of racy Polaroids, perhaps? One can only imagine what sort of kinky stuff those two got into back in the day, with nothing more than a tent and an arsenal of rifles at their disposal…I’ll take “Compromising Positions” for $500, Alex!
- OK, so let me get this straight…Dr. Chang thinks Faraday is punking him with all of his “I’m from the future, catastrophe is imminent,” yet his only response is to tell Faraday to stay away from him. Wouldn’t he normally consider Faraday some sort of intruder/threat requiring either imprisonment or execution? I have a hunch that Chang actually believes Faraday, but is putting on an act in front of everyone else that it’s all crazy talk, just so the garden variety construction grunts don’t find out what’s really going on.
- Why doesn’t Miles back up Faraday when Daniel tells Dr. Chang that Miles is his son as an adult? He seems intrigued by his dad, but only from the vantage point of anonymity. It’s not like he’s still sporting the ridiculous mohawk and piercings, which no doubt would have resulted in mocking derision from his father. I know Hurley’s already done the Star Wars analogy to death, but even Luke tried to forge a relationship with Vader (albeit very briefly) after the initial shock of discovering he was his father. Sure, Chang’s an a-hole, but so are/were most of our dads, right? I hope we eventually see Miles reach out to his dad…before Jughead goes BOOM!
- For being such a genius, Faraday sure is a clumsy idiot when trying to remain inconspicuous. When he’s not almost knocking Dr. Chang unconscious with a metal canister, he’s failing to grasp the concept of a concealed weapon, by brandishing his gun every time he tries to convince someone he’s just a mild-mannered nerd. Both the gunfight at the Dharma motor pool and his being shot down by pre-mama Eloise were the direct result of his “Barney Fife meets Bill Nye The Science Guy” approach.
- Sawyer hasn’t been as forthcoming with the hilarious nicknames since becoming LaFleur, but he really delivered a classic with “Twitchy.” It’s too bad Radzinsky and the jumpsuit mafia busted in before Sawyer had a chance to bestow a similarly gut-busting nickname on closeted Phil. Maybe he’ll come up with one for Radzinsky, now that his cover’s been blown. I was going to suggest “Lefty,” until I remembered that Radz wasn’t shot in the right hand.
- Faraday’s already plenty creepy as it is, but whenever he starts fixating on little girl Charlotte, my Amber Alert radar starts going crazy. Where’s McGruff when you need him? And what made things even more eerie about Faraday’s encounter with little girl Charlotte on the swing was that his speech to her amounted to a relative encapsulation of the lyrics to “Possum Kingdom” by The Toadies. C’mon, man…don’t talk about death to little girls! And don’t do it while simultaneously smiling and crying. Somebody probably needs to fit this pedo with an ankle monitoring bracelet. He’s about a bottle of lotion, a basket and a tuck away from being Jame Gumb.
- Back to the Eloise-Faraday mother-son relationship for a second…what was up with her being so mean to his girlfriend at graduation? I mean, I could understand if Faraday was dating a Kardashian or some equally reprehensible creature, but his girlfriend seemed nice enough. Certainly no worse than a retired Spice Girl, which is still several steps up the slut chain from the Paris Hiltons of the world.
Nailing The Triple Lindy 