* 6 am: 0 percent chance of rain
* 7 am: 0 percent chance of rain
* 8 am: 0 percent chance of rain

At about 6:55 it started pouring.  Diagonally.  And didn’t let up for a couple hours.

A team with the best record in baseball can turn into the worst-playing team in baseball over a three-week stretch, fill-in thirty-something third base umpires from AAA are sometimes unable to see a glove with a ball inside of it make contact twice with the right arm of a player while his body is not in contact with a base, and weathermen are sometimes 100 percent wrong.

Winds change.  You never know.  The hard-to-believe realities of this set of numbers, on both sides of the page, could be replaced, three weeks from now, by something altogether different, and better.  As hard is that might be to imagine right now, it’s no more implausible than what’s been happening over this run of brutal-in-all-phases baseball.

I don’t know.  More than ever: I don’t know.  You reach the season’s one 20-games-in-20-days stretch with the silver lining of a season-long 11-game homestand in the middle of it.  And then you start that Arlington stretch by dropping the last two of three to Cleveland, which had lost eight games in a row, and then getting swept in four by a Toronto team that came into the series eight games under .500.

In those two home series your offense hits .232/.303/.329 collectively, inferior to the awful .217/.273/.395 production that Josh Hamilton has given the Angels over the first twelfth of his eighth-of-a-billion-dollar contract.

In the final six of those seven games, all losses, Texas failed to score more than two runs, matching the most futile such stretch in the franchise’s 42 seasons.  The offense managed to scratch out four hits with runners in scoring position over those six games – the same number they picked up last night alone.

Think about this: Texas has given 30 of its 70 starts to pitchers who weren’t supposed to get any starts this year unless something went wrong.  Things happen, and at least one or two of Nick Tepesch and Justin Grimm and Josh Lindblom and Ross Wolf were going to have to take the ball a handful of times.

But nearly half of the club’s starts?

And in spite of that, it’s been the offense, so rarely a problem here, that’s made this team so tough to watch lately, staking out leads almost as rarely as victories.

Old players looking old, streaky players in ruts, Elvis Andrus basically lost, young players displaying the sort of inconsistency that, in most cases, is inevitable.

All at once.

There’s been a noticeable lack of energy offensively, which has made games tough to watch, and baseball tough to write about.

When Texas took a look at Mark Teixeira in the outfield in 2003, it seemed like an experimental way to get the young phenom extra big league at-bats on a lousy Rangers club.  Adrian Gonzalez’s 2005 cameo in right field was shorter-lived than Mike Olt’s pair of games at the same position in 2012, or Mike Lamb’s 2002 escapades behind the plate.  Joaquin Arias wasn’t going to unseat Michael Young or Ian Kinsler up the middle in 2007, and so the long-rumored center field experiment got underway in camp that spring – until it wrecked his shoulder.

The idea of Jurickson Profar as an outfielder feels like none of those situations.  Don’t get me wrong – I’d be shocked if Profar were to put the infielder’s glove away the way Eric Davis and Adam Jones and B.J. Upton did.  But this also differs from Teixeira and Gonzalez and Olt and Lamb and Arias (and Dean Palmer), because it’s not just an effort to give a young player at-bats by hiding him somewhere defensively.  Texas plans to win something this year, needs energy on offense, and is getting very little production in left field.

Gary Pettis is going to spend about a week crash-coursing with Profar to try and get him ready to play a representative left.  It’s not where he’ll be long-term, but for now the club thinks he might be able to help the Rangers win games by playing more often than he doesn’t, and if he’s able to get a game or two in each week in the outfield, that’s an easier proposition.

It feels a little desperate – Profar admits he’s never played any outfield, even as a Little Leaguer – but the offense has been in fairly desperate straits.

Because of the way this latest stretch of baseball has gone, last night felt fluky at times, lucky at others, on the precipice of a further dose of doom still others, but if you stretch your memory enough you could see something vaguely familiar: a 12-hit, eight-run attack, with nine of the hits (including five for extra bases) coming from the 3-4-5-6 spots, a dominating bullpen effort with the club’s key relievers lined up just right, the type of energy you expect out of a contending team battling another contending team and out of a crowd smelling a shark-chum “W.”

It was only the second nine-inning game in June in which Texas was able to roll Neal Cotts, Robbie Ross, Tanner Scheppers, and Joe Nathan out together, and that’s as much an indictment of the offense as anything, as Rangers starting pitchers have had so few leads to pitch with this month, and Ron Washington and Mike Maddux are by-the-book bullpen managers.

And Cotts, Ross, and Scheppers were brilliant, throwing 4.1 perfect innings until Nathan’s shaky ninth.

High-five for you, A.J. Pierzynski, and you, Nelson Cruz, and absolutely the Cotts-Ross-Scheppers incarnation of Cerberus, though on second thought I don’t want to jeffbaker any of you and so instead here’s a coffee nod in your general direction, from a healthy distance.

That, last night, was more like it.  A lot more like it.

Joakim Soria is eager to jump on board, too, and he made the manager smile yesterday with a live batting practice session during which the ball came out of his hand just fine.

He’s set to go out in a couple days on a rehab assignment with Frisco, where he’ll arrive just as Mitch Moreland is leaving, several days after Moreland’s own arrival coincided with the end of Ian Kinsler’s own short rehab stint.

All due respect to Leury Garcia and Chris McGuiness, and whoever Soria replaces, but this team is so much stronger with Kinsler and Moreland, two of this team’s three best everyday players in 2013, and with Profar as a 10^th man that Washington will use, and with Soria joining a bullpen that really needs another power arm from the right side.

And the way Martin Perez is dealing at Round Rock (4-0, 1.13 in his four starts since returning from the big leagues, with an opponents’ slash of .216/.281/.307), he’s going to be back in this rotation very soon, perhaps the next time he takes the ball.  Whether that’s for Tepesch or Grimm or Lindblom, we’ll see Perez again soon enough.

The winds can change direction pretty quickly, as we’ve seen with the Rangers since late May.  And with Toronto and Houston and San Diego and Kansas City and Miami, bad teams a third of the way into the season who have been good to really good in June.

Maybe there’s a gale force of momentum that Texas can carry into tonight and tomorrow and Thursday afternoon before Oakland heads off to Seattle in advance of a return to the O.co waste management treatment plant for series against the Reds and Cardinals, the NL’s two best teams.

Can Texas win four more baseball games than Oakland over the next 15 weeks?

Of course.

At the moment, though, in spite of whatever has gone on the last three weeks, all that matters to me is whether the Rangers can win one more game than the A’s tonight.

It would be a pretty good time tonight for Yu Darvish to earn the first win by a Rangers starter in June.

Still, based on what we’ve learned in June, it’s certainly possible things bounce right back the other way tonight and Darvish and Texas and this offense give back the game they just gained.  Can’t always trust the forecast.  Winds change.

Not literally.

Though if the jet stream hadn’t taken the weekend off, and if there were a little more English on a couple Jays cannons toward the right field foul pole, who knows?

Foolishly, maybe, I went right back to Weather.com as I was getting ready to leave the office last night.  It told me there was a 0 percent chance I was going to be driving through rain on the way home.  From 6 pm until 10 pm: 0 percent.

It poured all the way home.

I’m going to try and shut down expectations, at least while this team is getting healthier and refinding its edge.

I’m gonna try.

I’m going to resist the urge today to envision tonight’s Yu Darvish-Josh Donaldson battles and to imagine that this is the night that Elvis Andrus hits like Elvis Andrus and to wonder whether Nelson Cruz can build not only off the two-missile effort but also the brilliant at-bat he had in the seventh (strike looking, strike looking, ball, ball, ball, double rocketed to left to push the lead to 8-6) and settle into one of his hop-aboard stretches of thunderstorm offense.  I’ve got 10 hours to be productive between now and then, and I’m not going to waste any of that time checking the weather.

Not like it’s supposed to be.

I’m not giving up on the team.  That would be crazy.  The only years since the inaugural playoff season when Texas had a better record through 66 games than this season’s 38-28 mark were 1996 (40 wins), 1998 (39), 1999 (39), and 2012 (39).

Those were all playoff seasons.

So were 2010 and 2011, of course, and the Rangers weren’t any better at this point on the schedule in those two World Series seasons (38-28 and 36-30) than they are now.

I would have looked further back than 1996, but I kinda didn’t feel like it.

The A’s just swept the Yankees, holding New York to eight runs in three games (that included enough innings for four games), and over those same three days Texas lost at home to Cleveland, lost at home to Cleveland again, and lost at home to Toronto, scoring a total of five runs (three on solo homers).

Losing to inferior teams, at home, is a bad plan.

Oakland is really damn good.

This is gonna be a helluva pennant race.

And I’m as locked in as ever.

But I need a little break from the keyboard.

I haven’t really taken time off from writing (other than being out of town or in trial) in 15 years.  And I don’t know how long this break will be.  Probably a few days.  Maybe less.  Maybe more.  I’ll know when it’s time to write again.

I’m busier at work than at any time in my nearly 20 years of practicing law.  My copy of “Infinite Jest” arrived in the mail yesterday.  I need to finish that Adrian Beltre painting I started for Max in the fall.  I’ll have plenty to do to keep me fully occupied.

Part of me wants to write about the Kinsler-Andrus-Profar decision (the imminent one more so than the long-term one), or the number of wins Rangers starting pitchers have in a dozen June games (rhymes with “hero”), or a story idea I have that’s centered on Detroit righthander Doug Fister, or this developing situation.

The other part of me, for now, prevails.

I’ll probably still be around on Twitter, but for now that’s it.  If Justin Grimm fires a gem tonight, I can’t promise I won’t be right back in this chair, but if Chi Chi Gonzalez deals in Spokane’s opener tonight, I promise to leave that one to Scott.  Same thing if Joey Gallo pushes his streak of seven home runs in six Hickory games further tonight against Delmarva, or if C.J. Edwards hogs the spotlight in that same game.

Some better baseball at the big league level, and a healthy run of it, will probably end this little hiatus.  A string of tough at-bats.  Some late-inning tenacity.  A little swagger.

It’s not really about the losses and wins.  It’s more about how they’re happening.

The longest homestand of the season.

Mm-hmm.

I hope you’ll choose to stick around, but whether you do or don’t, at least stick it out with this team.  They’ll be fine.

Appreciate your patience.

To answer your question:

I don’t know.

It was a throwaway tweet, issued Sunday afternoon in a decidedly unedgy moment, as I vegetated in the pool thinking about what was missing from the Rangers, missing from a team decimated by injury and offensive malaise and uncharacteristic baserunning and fielding slack that, in spite of all of it, still found itself in first place.

Sure, it’s probably just nitpicking, but based on the emails and tweets, I think a good number of you knew what I meant.

It’s the guy you might not want to be around after a loss.

It’s Michael Irvin.  It’s Will Clark.

It’s absolutely not Dennis Rodman or Vicente Padilla or Sean Avery or Milton Bradley.

It’s Pedro Martinez.  Roger Clemens.  Paul O’Neill.

Jered Weaver.  Grant Balfour.

In his own way, Cliff Lee.

As we saw Sunday, Jose Bautista, and then last night, Zack Greinke.

There’s no questioning Adrian Beltre’s makeup or toughness, but he doesn’t appear to have that screw-loose edginess that I’m talking about.  Elvis Andrus, my favorite Rangers player ever next to Beltre, doesn’t.  Neither does Yu Darvish, though I can imagine him becoming a Lee-type assassin down the road.

A.J. Pierzynksi has some of it, obviously, but Pierzynski at age 36 on a new team isn’t the same as 36-year-old Torii Hunter was last year, his fifth with the Angels.

You don’t draft for need or for position, and you certainly don’t draft for edge, but you can bet that when an organization has a frontline talent in development, if he has that extra thing, too, it matters.

It might be part of Rougned Odor’s profile, or Lewis Brinson’s.  On the mound, Luke Jackson might have it, and it’s pretty clear Keone Kela does.

When Jason Parks saw Georgia high school infielder Travis Demeritte play back in October, he wrote some things that popped about the kid outside of the bat speed and plus arm.  Just as recognizable to Parks were the “very high baseball IQ” and “remarkable field awareness,” part of what made the teenager “a likely candidate to over-perform projection.”  Over several days, Demeritte, for Parks, was a “[w]ow player [who] plays the game with purpose and passion,” a “total gamer” with “well above-average feel for the game” who “will be around game forever.”

I read those things Thursday night after Texas used its second first-round pick, awarded for the loss of Josh Hamilton to the Angels, on the 18-year-old Demeritte.

Those things were never said about Joaquin Arias.

Now, those comments from Parks (who also tweeted on Draft Night that Demeritte was his favorite player at that October event, a “baseball rat” with “plus-plus makeup” who “knows his assignments and yours,” which paints another cool picture) don’t necessarily translate to edge – you’re not going to make that sort of impression on scouts in a five-day glimpse at a Perfect Game USA showcase tournament – but talk to some of the folks involved in deciding it would be worth investing nearly $2 million in that player rather than all the others the club could have singled out, and you hear some of it.

Don’t get me wrong: The most exciting part of the Demeritte picture that’s being painted right now, eight days before the Arizona League kicks its summer season off, is the electric bat speed (Rangers Director of Amateur Scouting Kip Fagg: “one of the faster bats I’ve scouted in a while”) and raw power potential that the Rangers believe will play at third base if he doesn’t end up sticking at shortstop or sliding over to second.

But in every conversation you have about Demeritte you’re going to hear about his contagious energy and those things that, one way or another, fit under the hard-to-define category of edge.

As far as talent rankings go, Demeritte was considered by Baseball America to be the number 56 draft-eligible high school or college player going into last week.  MLB.com had him at 50.  Baseball Prospectus/Perfect Game had him at 52.  ESPN was the most bullish with its number 41 ranking.

But they all projected him to go ahead of his talent projection in the draft: MLB.com and ESPN projected him to go 23^rd overall, while Baseball America had him going 30^th.

Of course, those were educated guesses, as 23 and 30 were the Rangers’ two slots Thursday night.  It was no secret that Texas was heavily in on the kid.

Then again, ESPN’s Keith Law heard Philadelphia was considering Demeritte at number 16.

And Baseball America noted, in reviewing Round One last week, that “[w]hile [Demeritte] ranked No. 56 on the BA 500, this isn’t an overdraft.”

It’s the intangibles that led analysts to uniformly suggest in advance that the player’s draft projection was higher than his talent rank.

All of which may have you wondering why Texas didn’t pop Demeritte at 23 instead of taking the chance he wouldn’t be there at 30.  Club officials will tell you a big reason is that they didn’t expect Oral Roberts righthander Alex “Chi Chi” Gonzalez (rumored by some to be on the board for some teams drafting late in the top 10 or 12) to fall to 23, and they believed things could shake out after that to allow them to take both Gonzalez and Demeritte.

They did shake out that way, and the Rangers couldn’t be more fired up.

Gonzalez, like Demeritte, was slotted higher in every one of those publications’ mock drafts than he was in their talent rankings, and you can draw your own conclusions there.  Gonzalez was one of those helium guys in the weeks leading up to the draft, maybe because his stuff played up more and more as the college season wore on.  Maybe because he’s thought to be a potential fast-tracker.  Maybe it’s that he’s relatively polished (a “high floor,” Parks suggests) or maybe it’s the unique cutting action he gets on his fastball or his swing-and-miss slider.

All four publications had Gonzalez going between 15 and 20.  The Rangers weren’t going to let him get past 23, and were cautiously optimistic Demeritte would be there at 30.

Peter Gammons said on MLB Network that if the Rangers didn’t take Gonzalez, Oakland would have popped him with the very next pick.  (Not that I’m sitting here thrilled that the A’s won Game 162 to set things up that way.)

And Jim Bowden said on XM Radio that if Texas didn’t call Demeritte’s name at 30, Atlanta was set to do it at 31.

At one point yesterday, the Rangers had signed 18 of their 41 draft picks – while the other 29 teams had signed 15 picks combined.  Among those were Gonzalez, whose $2.215 million bonus is 15 percent above slot, and Demeritte, whose $1.9 million bonus exceeds his slot by almost 10 percent.

Second-rounder Akeem Bostick, a raw, projectable South Carolina high school righthander whose cousin Brandon is a Green Bay Packers tight end, signed for $520,600 in an $899,400 slot.  Essentially, Texas gave Bostick, projected in publications to be perhaps a fifth- or sixth-round talent, the equivalent of third-round money in a second-round slot (helping the club to go over slot elsewhere, and not only for the two first-rounders – keep an eye on a couple high school arms that the Rangers took late on Day Three).

Bostick will join Demeritte on the AZL squad, whose season opens on June 20.  Gonzalez heads to Spokane, whose Northwest League schedule kicks off this Friday.  Whether the 21-year-old gets the ball Opening Night or not, expect the Rangers to manage his innings this summer before cutting him loose in April.

Scott’s daily recaps are about to go from four a day to six, and I’m fired up to see what Gonzalez and Yohander Mendez and Kyle Castro do on the Spokane mound and how Demeritte and Isiah Kiner-Falefa and – as of July 1 – Jairo Beras jump out of the gate in Surprise.

Jurickson Profar was in the midst of putting up relatively ordinary numbers for Spokane in the summer of 2010 (weeks after Baltimore took but failed to sign Gonzalez in the 11^th round, three rounds before Texas chose tonight’s starter, Nick Tepesch), but we soon began to understand how special a player he was on his way to becoming, and not just because he was holding his own against college-groomed competition at age 17.  He had that extra thing, too.

Read Jason Parks’s comments about Travis Demeritte above, and they’ll look familiar.

I’m not saying Texas has another Profar on its hands in Demeritte.  That would be silly.

But if he’s another Rangers prospect who not only has the objective pluses but also wields those added intangibles, the ones Arias didn’t have but Brinson and Jackson do, the ones that separate Felix and Clayton, Yoenis and Bryce, Yadier and Zack and Cliff, then I may go ahead and pre-order my Myrtle Beach Demeritte jersey, even if it’s a couple years before he’ll get to put one on himself.

I wish @JURICKSONPROFAR wanted to be a catcher in 2009.  Or now.

I mean, how ridiculously great would that be?  The game IQ, the footwork and arm strength and athleticism and quickness, the setting up (and Jurick-baiting) of hitters, the perfectly timed trips to the mound, the leadership, the potential for Posey-like offense from the position.

The smile.  The confidence.

Man, the confidence.

Never mind the un-catcher-like build.  Had one of the dozen or more teams that wanted to sign Profar as a pitcher succeeded, you can bet he’d look different in the lower half after four years of strength and conditioning work.  He’d have gotten there as a catcher.  Ever seen what Christian Bethancourt looks like (or what Jorge Alfaro looked like when he signed)?

Just imagine how he’d fit right now.  The Rangers are super-fortified at shortstop, with Elvis Andrus locked up for years, Profar and Leury Garcia ready to contribute, and prospects like Luis Sardinas and Hanser Alberto and Luis Marte and Alberto Triunfel and Luis Terrero maturing on the farm while Rougned Odor and Odubel Herrera and Ryan Rua and Janluis Castro keep second base occupied.  How great would it be if Profar were ready to step in behind the plate and answer that roster question for the next decade?

It’s not going to happen, and I’m not suggesting it should.  This is not going to be like the times I used to wonder aloud what Chris Davis as catcher would have looked like in Texas.

But as long as Profar makes plays like he did to start the Boston third last night, blindly gathering and lunging and tagging and selling, and as long as the Rangers’ catching situation remains an annual action item, I’ll probably continue to wonder.

After Joe Nathan made an athletic play on the third of his six ninth-inning pitches to retire Jose Iglesias, I noted on Twitter that both he and the reliever he succeeded, Tanner Scheppers, were college shortstops.  Reader Jeramy Nowlin one-upped me, pointing out that all three outs in the quiet ninth were on plays made by onetime shortstops: Nathan, Andrus, and Profar.

The club could stand an upgrade, system-wide, at catcher.  And suddenly the organization’s lack of depth at the big league and upper minor league levels on the corners is being exposed a bit, as Adrian Beltre and Mitch Moreland are dealing with hamstring injuries, Murphy and Nelson Cruz will be free agents in their 30’s this winter (and at least one of them could force the team to confront a huge mid-season issue), Mike Olt is working to come back from an offensively debilitating vision issue, Engel Beltre and Joe Benson are interesting but on their final options and probably not ready to help a contender, and the organization’s real promise on the four corners lives for the moment in Class A and lower.

But when Texas makes its picks tonight in Rounds One (23^rd and 30^th overall) and Two (62^nd) of the amateur draft, don’t assume that the club is going to try and find a college corner bat that it thinks can fit into the frame before players like Lewis Brinson and Nomar Mazara and Nick Williams and Jairo Beras are ready.  Don’t expect catcher to be the Rangers’ priority.  Don’t be surprised if they haul off and add another shortstop.  Or two.

The tired, annually recycled point is that you don’t draft for need in baseball.  And if you’re doing it the Rangers’ way, you focus on the middle of the field, adding as much pipeline talent as you can on the mound, and behind the plate, and at shortstop and center field.  Take the best player available, stay in the middle of the field when all else is equal, and let’s roll.

Worry about sorting out playing time in Myrtle Beach and Hickory and Spokane and Surprise later.

Your prize shortstop may just become a second baseman, when the time comes.  Or a third baseman.  Or a center fielder.  Or a pitcher.  Or a Marlin.

Just probably not a catcher.

Yeah, but—

No, not a catcher.

Jurickson Profar in five years.

Brandon Wade/DMN

]]> http://newberg.mlblogs.com/2013/06/03/cutting-edge-analysis-on-a-monday-off-day/feed/ 0 mlblogsnewberg1 Brandon Wade/DMN ProfarJurickson8546-crop http://newberg.mlblogs.com/2013/06/01/june-1-trot-coffey/ http://newberg.mlblogs.com/2013/06/01/june-1-trot-coffey/#comments Sat, 01 Jun 2013 19:59:59 +0000 Jamey Newberg http://newberg.mlblogs.com/?p=2129240 ]]> (* Trade Rumor Offerings To Chew On For Fun, Even Yuks)

Not to be confused with veteran reliever Todd Coffey, the TROT COFFEY is a mailing list-only Newberg Report update on various trade and free agent rumblings unearthed, if not hatched, by the media or player agents:

• Much was made last night of the Royals playing Thursday until after 3 a.m. and then flying to Texas overnight, and how that might affect an already struggling club in the opener of its three-game set in Arlington.

But there’s a prevalent theory in baseball that a beatdown travel situation like Kansas City was subjected to Thursday night usually affects the team not in the first game of the next series, but in the second game.  That could work to the Rangers’ advantage here, as today’s matchup (Nick Tepesch-James Shields) is the one that shapes up to the be the toughest of the series for Texas, which sent Derek Holland out last night and will start Yu Darvish tomorrow.

I’m not sure whether Shields flew ahead of the team on Thursday (as I’m sure last night’s starter Wade Davis did), but the Royals lineup didn’t, and if Tepesch is sharp this afternoon, Game Two could shape up to be more evenly matched from a pitching standpoint than it might have been otherwise.

• Speaking of Shields, whose contract includes a $12 million club option for 2014, I’d love it if the Royals were open to shopping him next month.  But given that they parted with Wil Myers and Jake Odorizzi in the December trade to get him, I doubt they’d move him for anything less than a Jurickson Profar-led package (especially given the state of Dayton Moore’s job security).

• Got lots of Frisco-related notes for you.

• Alexi Ogando threw an extremely efficient 60 pitches over six innings in his rehab start for the RoughRiders last night, 42 for strikes.  The remarkable part is that, through four frames, he’d thrown only 31 pitches – and 26 for strikes.  The four hits and four strikeouts, and even the zero walks, can be misleading given that AA hitters will swing at balls out of the zone that big league hitters won’t, but Efficient Alexi is almost always Good Alexi, and last night’s effort was encouraging.

• Mike Olt returned to action in the same game, after a five-week absence due to vision issues, and while he fanned twice, he also went deep in the eighth inning.  There’s been word that Olt could return to Round Rock after the weekend with Frisco.

This would be an outstanding time for Olt to round back into form and get hot.

• Right-handed reliever Justin Miller, back in action himself after April 2012 Tommy John surgery, was scored upon for the first time since joining Frisco on May 17.  In 4.2 innings since his return (carefully spaced out with at least two days of rest between appearances), the 25-year-old has given up one run on two hits and three walks, fanning six.  Having been placed on the 60-day disabled list on April 11, he’s eligible for activation on June 10, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he sees Arlington at some point this summer to give the big league bullpen another power righty.

• Another right-handed reliever in the Frisco pen, Roman Mendez, on his second of three options this year, was also seemingly headed toward a big league debut this summer, but reinjured his throwing elbow Tuesday night.  Diagnosed with a stress fracture (an injury he suffered in 2012 as well), he had surgery yesterday and will miss the rest of the season.  Bummer.

• Outfielder Joe Benson, who I need to write a long post about soon, homered for the fourth game out of six since joining Frisco a week ago.  In 164 plate appearances this year for AAA Rochester in the Twins system, the former legitimate prospect hit .192/.256/.285 with one home run (10 extra-base hits overall).  In 21 plate appearances for Frisco, he’s hitting .389/.476/1.167 with the four homers (five extra-base hits).  Benson did come out of the game after grounding out in the fifth inning, apparently due to a groin issue (unrelated to the knee and wrist injuries that crippled his 2012 season).

• After .881 and .879 OPS seasons in 2010 (27 homers, 66 extra-base hits) and 2011 (23 homers, 50 extra-base hits), spent primarily in AA, Benson appeared to be on a direct path to Minnesota before his disjointed 2012 season.  Healthy this spring, the center fielder triggered this comment from Twins manager Ron Gardenhire: “He can bring a lot to the table.  I’m talking he can be a starting [big league] player.  I’m not talking about a bench player.  This guy can be a starter if he gets back all of everything he had before he got hurt.”

• Minnesota designated Benson for assignment a week ago to make roster room for 28-year-old righthander P.J. Walters, a journeyman who’s been outrighted off 40-man rosters three times in his career, including by the Twins themselves in October.  In two Minnesota starts this week, he’s allowed six runs on 18 hits over 12 innings.

• Benson, like Engel Beltre and Wilmer Font, will be out of options after this season.  Expect all three to be up in September, if not sooner, and if not traded beforehand.

• As for Michael Kirkman, who is out of options now, his roster spot appears to be safe for the moment, based on comments from the manager and general manager, but he really needs to string together some efficient outings, especially as others like Ogando and Colby Lewis and Kyle McClellan are getting closer to returning.

• Joakim Soria, whose Tommy John surgery was roughly at the same time as Miller’s, is slated to throw a bullpen today after a pectoral strain in mid-April set his own rehab program back.  He’s apparently on track to pitch in minor league games in the next week or two, with a potential big league return in early July.

• No peeps lately on how Neftali Feliz is coming along on his rehab.

• Strange thing about the nine home runs Darvish has surrendered this year: Six have been hit by batters hitting in the bottom third of the lineup (DeWayne Wise, David Ross, Matt Dominguez – twice, Don Kelly, Jhonny Peralta), and in none of the nine counts was Darvish ahead of the hitter.  Tack on the Marwin Gonzalez perfect game-busting single (on the first pitch of his at-bat), and you see a bunch of situations in which Darvish has let inferior hitters get him.  Seems addressable.

• The great Gregg Fleisher points out that Josh Hamilton, in the year between June 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013 (including the one playoff game), is a .234/.306/.450 (.756 OPS) hitter with 183 strikeouts in 156 games, and that Rob Deer was a lifetime .220/.324/.442 (.766 OPS) hitter, with an average of 191 strikeouts for every 156 games played.

• Hamilton is one-fifteenth through his eighth-of-a-billion-dollar contract.

• Lots of national writers and local talk show hosts are talking about Philadelphia trading Cliff Lee and how that might look here.  Says Lee, who can block trades to 21 undisclosed clubs: “I definitely want to win.  I want to be on a winning team.  That should be what it’s all about.”  The Phillies are 26-29, 6.5 games out of first and 8.0 back in the wild card chase.

• Texas is not trading Jurickson Profar for Cliff Lee.

• Texas is not stupid for not trading Jurickson Profar for Cliff Lee.

• And you are not stupid for thinking Texas is not trading Jurickson Profar for Cliff Lee.

• Lee’s contract pays a little more than $16 million the rest of the way this year, $25 million in 2014, $25 million in 2015, and either $27.5 million (if kept) or $12.5 million (if bought out) in 2016.  So, as of today, it’s a deal worth either $78.5 million for 2013-2015, or $93.5 million for 2013-2016.  That’s a ton of cash, and Philadelphia would have to subsidize the deal at some level if it expects to get legitimate young players in return.

• I do love Cliff Lee, and if the parameters made sense would love to see him back in Texas.

• Jim Bowden (ESPN/XM) suggests Seattle could shop 32-year-old righthander Hisashi Iwakuma and would make sense for Texas to pursue.  He’s inexpensive and very good, and I doubt the Mariners (with their own hot-seated GM) would entertain moving him.

• Nick Cafardo (Boston Globe) thinks the Rangers, Red Sox, Yankees, and A’s are among the teams with interest in 24-year-old Japanese righthander Masahiro Tanaka.

• Buster Olney (ESPN) thinks the Rangers, Braves, Nationals, Pirates, Dodgers, and Tigers could each be a fit for Joba Chamberlain should the Yankees consider trading him.

• The Rangers placed righthander C.J. Edwards and lefthander Victor Payano on the disabled list, and I wouldn’t get too alarmed, because the Rangers are known to do things like this from time to time with their young pitchers at the lower levels of the system.  The organization, while carefully monitoring workloads, prefers to have them pitch in pennant races and playoffs to shutting them down before the late part of the season.

• Oakland has lost two of its last 14 games: to Ross Wolf and Barry Zito.

• Robbie Erlin gets his first big league start today for San Diego.  He made two relief appearances for the Padres a month ago.

• The White Sox released outfielder Ruben Sierra Jr. and signed outfielder Josh Richmond.  The St. Paul Saints of the independent American Association released righthander Danny Gutierrez.

• The draft starts Thursday.  Texas picks 23^rd and 30^th in the first round, 62^nd overall in the second round, and 99^th overall in the third round.  Rounds one and two will take place Thursday night, with the rest of the draft spanning Friday (3-10) and Saturday (11-40).

• In what is his third mock draft, Jim Callis (Baseball America) projects Kentucky high school lefthander Hunter Green and Arizona high school shortstop Riley Unroe as the Rangers’ picks at 23 and 30.  In his first mock, Callis had Texas taking California high school first baseman Dominic Smith and Green.  In his second mock, Callis went with Green and Plano West outfielder Billy McKinney.

• Keith Law (ESPN) projects Georgia high school shortstop Travis Demeritte and Stanford outfielder Austin Wilson as the Rangers’ first-rounders (though with the latter pick, Law says it’s “hard to pin down, as I’m hearing the Rangers are all over the place – hitters and pitchers, prep, college and junior college”).  In a previous mock, Law went with Demeritte and New Jersey high school lefthander Rob Kaminsky.

• Jonathan Mayo (MLB.com) predicts Texas will take South Carolina catcher Nick Ciuffo and McKinney.

• John Sickels (Minor League Ball) has Oklahoma high school catcher Jon Denney and North Carolina high school righthander Hunter Harvey going to the Rangers.

• Kiley McDaniel (Scout.com) has Texas taking Samford outfielder Phil Ervin and Florida high school shortstop Oscar Mercado.

• Jeff Passan (Yahoo! Sports) broke the story yesterday that MLB has shelved the idea of an international draft until at least after the 2016 season (when the current CBA expires – and international draft proponent Bud Selig will no longer be Commissioner), and as a Rangers fan this news should make you very happy.

• And a final draft note: Due to work commitments, I won’t be staying up all night on Thursday to deliver a much-too-long writeup Friday morning on the first two rounds.  I’ll get to that report – it just won’t be the next morning.  But Scott will send emails out as the Rangers make their two first-round picks and one second-rounder that night.

David Foster Wallace wrote that in 2006, in a 6,500-word piece called “Federer as religious experience” that he penned for The New York Times’ Play Magazine.

I can’t remember who recommended the article to me, but it was sometime in the last year or so, more than four years after Wallace took his own life.  I’ve always been fascinated with Federer’s strangely un-superstar-like persona, and with Wallace’s ability to write, though I hadn’t paid as much attention as I’d have liked to either giant.  Here was a two-birds’ chance to catch up a little bit.

I printed the article as soon as I found it, and put it in a spot on two different desks where I’d see it all the time and not forget to set some time aside for it.  It sat for a long time, though, many months, crossing over at some point from something I couldn’t wait to get to, to something I couldn’t wait to get rid of.

A couple nights ago some friends invited my wife and me to play a little tennis, something I don’t think I’d done since before kids, since before the Rangers had played in a single playoff game, since before I was out of law school.  But it sounded great.

It was a blast.  I think I probably have some sort of addiction to sports muscle soreness, and I got a heavy dose Sunday night that ought to carry me all week.

I’m not sure when the last time was that I’d flipped on a tennis match, but I woke Monday morning and watched Nadal-Brands and then Berdych-Monfils while I got some work done.

And I finally grabbed the Wallace article.

And kept thinking it could have been written about Yu Darvish.

These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.  His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact.  His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy.  All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play.  Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game.  

It’s a brilliant article by an exceptional writer, and it made me wish Wallace were alive, sharing his gift with us still.  I know he was a big tennis guy and doubt he’d have invested himself that way on a baseball subject, but I bet he’d have been able to recognize that Darvish is different, to see the beauty and genius of his game.

I’m a huge fan of John Perrotto’s “Scouts’ Views” feature in his “On the Beat” series for Baseball Prospectus.  A couple weeks ago he shared this comment on Darvish from an unidentified big league scout: “For me, he’s the best pitcher in the game now.  I’ll know I’ll get my share of arguments, but he’s downright filthy and throws seven different pitches for strikes.  He’s made the cultural adjustment, and he looks a lot more comfortable than last year.  He was pretty good last year as a rookie, but he’s dominant now.”

In 11 starts this year, Darvish has only twice allowed more than a hit per inning (six in five innings once, seven in six innings another time, both Darvish victories).  Only two times has he fanned fewer than a hitter per inning (six over eight frames in his 130-pitch win over Detroit a couple weeks ago, and five over six frames the next time out, a 1-0 loss to the A’s).  Three times in 2013 he’s struck out 14 batters: His first start, when he was very nearly perfect against the Astros; on May 5, in just seven innings of a 4-3 walkoff win over Boston (his first no-decision of the season); and last night, his only other no-decision this year.  Darvish is now 7-2.  Texas is 8-3 when he gets the ball.

Roger Federer didn’t always win, either, even at his peak.

Perhaps because my brain is incapable of working in any other way, as I watched Rafa Nadal battle back to dispose of his opponent Monday morning, the mild physical resemblance to the similarly short and left-handed Martin Perez made me think about the afternoon game to come, Perez’s season debut at the front of the doubleheader in Arizona.  Perez is never going to be the career force that Nadal has been, but the talent is there to be the best guy out there on a given day.

It wouldn’t happen for Perez yesterday.

Or for Darvish, who set 14 Diamondbacks down on strikes without issuing a single walk.  The first-place Diamondbacks, owners of one of the best team OPS’s and one of the lowest strikeout rates in the National League.  Arizona brandished some first-inning Darvish Kryptonite (his first-inning ERA this year is 9.00; it’s 1.99 in innings two through nine) and then got a shocking two-run bomb from rookie Didi Gregorius (the only D-Back starter not to strike out) in the eighth.  Otherwise, Darvish was fantastic, as usual, but it wasn’t enough as Texas felt it had to rely on Jason Frasor in a ninth-inning spot when you’d rather have a more reliable reliever available.

One of the most depressing things about losing that game, maybe even more so than the fact that it sealed a doubleheader and series sweep for the other team and resulted in the Rangers’ first three-game skid of the year, at a time when the A’s and Angels are at their hottest, was that it came on the one day out of five that Darvish gets to pitch.  Hate to waste those.

Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and -coached field of male pros who’ve ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that’s said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.

The other time that Darvish punched out 14 and walked none was in his season debut, when Marwin Gonzalez hit a fastball through the box to break up his perfect game with two outs in the ninth.  It came on Darvish’s 111^th pitch.

The fastball Gregorius hit over the fence last night in the eighth: Darvish’s 111^th pitch.

And at that point, though the game was merely tied, the ultimate result felt inevitable, given the load the bullpen had carried in Sunday’s 13-inning game before the flight from Washington to Arizona for yesterday’s twinbill.

Brutal result, but that’s baseball.

Darvish will get his next chance this weekend at home, against Kansas City, before which Roger Federer will take on Somdev Devvarman in the second round at Roland Garros.

Maybe they’ll both lose, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The thing with Federer is that he’s Mozart and Metallica at the same time, and the harmony’s somehow exquisite.

I didn’t see Federer’s first-round match on Sunday, but I’m going to make an effort to catch this next one.  He’s not what he was in 2006, but there’s still some Mozart and Metallica in him, and for all the similarities between him and Yu Darvish that I can’t stop thinking about, there’s that one big difference – that while Federer is arguably on the downside of an extraordinary, virtuoso career, the arrows are all pointing in one very different direction for Darvish, poised every fifth day to be delivered 100 times with an eel-like all-body snap, lithe and uneccentric, equal parts Mozart and Metallica, and though I missed most of Wallace’s career in real time and, frankly, Federer’s too, I take great comfort in knowing that I’m going to be right here for Darvish’s entire Texas Rangers career, experiencing every first-rate, kick-ass turn religiously.

Oh, man.  Baseball adrenaline.

I got a phone call that Wednesday morning to drop everything.  A buddy had four tickets to that night’s World Series Game Four in Houston, with the White Sox able to wrap up a sweep with a victory.

Maybe I’d have been on board even if I wasn’t baseball-rejuvenated at the time.

Or maybe, having never been to a World Series game – or even a playoff win – I’d have jumped on it no matter what.

It was a crazy-great ballgame.  Starters Brandon Backe and Freddy Garcia were locked up in a scoreless battle through seven, giving way to pinch-hitters and bullpens at that point, and Chicago was a bit better in relief, holding the Astros scoreless as the Sox scratched out a run in the eighth and held on for the 1-0 win and a pile-on at the mound before a stunned, silent Houston crowd.

In that same Baseball America piece, Schwarz asked Daniels what the first order of the business was for his reshaping of the Rangers roster.  Said Daniels: “Our bullpen is a focus.  That was probably the biggest difference from the quality run we made in 2004 and this past year.”

In 2004, the club’s seven busiest relievers (Carlos Almanzar, Francisco Cordero, Ron Mahay, Doug Brocail, Frankie Francisco, Brian Shouse, and Erasmo Ramirez) posted a collective ERA of 3.12.  But in 2005, Tommy John surgery wiped out Almanzar and Francisco’s seasons.  Brocail and Shouse appeared more than anyone other than Cordero and were awful (5.41 ERA), and Mahay (6.81 ERA) pitched himself out of a defined role.  Joaquin Benoit emerged as a bright spot in the pen, and so did Kameron Loe, but the club wanted to look at him as a starter.

Mahay and Shouse, while not overpowering, had given Texas an effective look out of the pen from the left side in 2004.  The club had no such weapon in 2005.  The White Sox did.

Neal Cotts was a key starting pitcher prospect in the Chicago system as soon as the White Sox acquired him from Oakland (where Grady Fuson had drafted him in 2001’s second round) in the 2002 deal centered around Keith Foulke and Billy Koch.  He’d posted a 2.16 ERA in his first look at AA hitters in 2003, fanning 133 in 108.1 innings, and when Texas traded Carl Everett to Chicago that summer, the Rangers (whose Assistant GM by that time was Fuson) asked for Cotts but Chicago refused to put him on the list of eight that Texas was allowed to choose from (righthanders Frankie Francisco, Josh Rupe, Felix Diaz, Wyatt Allen, and Enemencio Pacheco, lefthander Corwin Malone, outfielder Anthony Webster, and second baseman Ruddy Yan).
At the time of the Everett trade, Baseball America called Cotts one of the 40 hottest prospects in the game – in an article written by current Rangers Director of Pro Scouting Josh Boyd.

Cotts got four late-season starts for the White Sox (two against Texas) and was brutal (12 runs on 15 hits and 17 walks in 13.1 innings), but he made the roster in 2004, pitching well in relief for six weeks before faltering, finishing the season with a 5.65 ERA despite passable peripherals.

Things fell into place for Cotts in 2005, as he held opponents to an anemic .179/.286/.241 slash line (even better against right-handed hitters than lefties) and posted a 1.94 ERA as a key part of what would be a stalwart relief corps for the last team standing.  In that World Series sweep of the Astros, Cotts appeared in all four games, throwing 31 pitches (all to A.J. Pierzynski) over 2.1 scoreless innings and allowing only one hit (a Lance Berkman single) while punching out two.

He was never the same.

Truth be told, in looking back at the Illinois native’s seven big league seasons with the White Sox and Cubs, 2005 stands out as the outlier.  In his other six seasons, his ERA was 5.46.  He had half as many walks as innings pitched and was too homer-prone.

The seventh of those seasons (2009) lasted less than two months, as the lefthander needed mid-season Tommy John surgery.

Then, while rehabbing a year later, he needed surgery to repair a torn hip labrum.

And then three more hip operations to get rid of an infection that wouldn’t go away, wiping out not only his 2010 season but 2011 as well (after the Yankees took a look that spring and released him because they didn’t think he could pass a physical and didn’t want to be on the hook indefinitely for his medical, and the Phillies reportedly shied away for a similar reason).  There was no real good reason to think Cotts wasn’t done.

As Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports tells the story, Cotts’s agent Joe Bick approached Daniels before the 2012 season and asked if he’d be interested in a look at the then-31-year-old who hadn’t pitched since posting a 7.36 ERA three years and five operations earlier.  Rangers pro scout Scot Engler, whom we discussed a couple days ago as the engine behind the Ross Wolf signing, had a history with Cotts and recommended that Texas kick the tires.

Said Bick to Daniels, according to Rosenthal: “I will tell you right now — there is no way in hell he can pass your physical because of his hip.”

Said Daniels to Bick: “I don’t care.  If he’s good enough, we’ll find a way.”

Maybe a little bit of a fearlessness as far as taking chances.

Bick told Rosenthal that Cotts’s physical amounted to heart rate, blood pressure, let’s roll.

Texas gave Cotts a minor league deal – no surprise – but didn’t even extend an invite to big league camp, something that journeymen like Mitch Stetter and Sean Green and Greg Reynolds and Joe Beimel were able to land that spring.

A week into camp, Cotts was throwing so well on the back fields that Texas moved him over to big league camp, and before long fellow lefthanders Stetter and Beimel and Ben Snyder had fallen out of the competition for a final job on the Opening Day staff, with Cotts and Robbie Ross battling until the veteran strained a lat muscle with a week to go in camp.

He wouldn’t pitch again until June.  And when he did, his velocity was down and he wasn’t very effective, and when Ross was placed on the disabled list at the end of August, Texas didn’t take the opportunity to add Cotts to the expanded roster in September.

Texas offered Cotts an opportunity to come back in 2013, again on a non-roster deal but this time with an official invite to big league camp.  In October, I haphazardly predicted that he would make the Opening Day staff in April.

Camp didn’t go particularly well (16 hits in 7.1 innings, though he did fan 11), and Cotts put up less of a bid than longer-shot Nate Robertson for the left-handed relief job that Joseph Ortiz ultimately seized.

Assigned to the Round Rock bullpen, Cotts got ripped in his third appearance of the year, giving up three runs on two hits and two walks in two-thirds of the fifth inning against the Iowa Cubs, and – as recounted in detail by Express pitching coach Brad Holman in an excellent interview by Lone Star Dugout’s Jason Cole – Holman pulled Cotts aside and had him tweak one timing mechanism in his delivery.  The results since then have been ridiculous.

In a dozen subsequent AAA appearances and then three this week with Texas, Cotts has thrown 23 innings, allowing zero runs on 12 hits and three walks, and setting 41 of 80 hitters down on strikes.  His rate of 16.43 strikeouts per nine innings while with Round Rock leads AAA baseball.

After exactly half of those final 12 Express efforts (an April 29 win in which he faced those same Iowa Cubs – who had scored nine runs earlier in the game – and punched out six in three perfect innings), I texted a Rangers official:

“I take it Cotts doesn’t have an out?”

“He doesn’t.”

I asked because when veterans sign non-roster deals, they often negotiate in a specified date – often the 1^st or 15^th of a particular month, if during the season – on which they can opt to take instant free agency if not in the big leagues.  I also asked because there’s no way Texas would have been able to prevent Cotts from exercising such an out if he had one and if the Rangers didn’t bring him to Arlington.

A couple weeks later, Nick Cafardo wrote in the Boston Globe, citing the freakishly strong roll the lefthander was on: “Cotts could be had, as the Rangers have a team policy that they will let go of players such as Cotts if they are unable to put them on the roster.”

Daniels told Rosenthal that three or four teams called him about Cotts after that note ran, wanting to give the 33-year-old a big league job.  Daniels refused to discuss the reliever.  He was about to give him a job here.

Texas purchased Cotts’s contract, something the club hoped for a year and a half it would be persuaded to do, on Tuesday.  He pitched that night, getting Oakland’s John Jaso and Luke Montz to ground out and Yoenis Cespedes to strike out in the ninth inning, all in the space of six pitches in what would be a 1-0 loss.

He pitched again the next afternoon, relieving Wolf with Cespedes and Jaso on first and second with nobody out in the sixth inning of what was then an extremely precarious 3-1 Texas lead.

Brandon Moss, five-pitch strikeout.

Josh Donaldson, four-pitch strikeout.

Seth Smith, three-pitch strikeout.

Cotts then worked the seventh.  After surrendering a leadoff double to Derek Norris, he got Eric Sogard to ground out to second, Adam Rosales to line out to second, and Coco Crisp to foul out to first, preserving that 3-1 lead that would stand up as Texas avoided getting swept at home.

Getting Thursday off with the rest of the team, Cotts was summoned again last night, relieving Justin Grimm in the seventh and inducing a comebacker before putting two on (walk, single), but then he got Kendrys Morales to fly out to end the inning and keep the Rangers’ lead at 9-3.

Whether Texas will have Cotts available tonight after last night’s 18 pitches is unknown, but he’s clearly one of Ron Washington’s go-to relievers at the moment, with a short-term track record as well as a long-term dues payment that the manager admittedly places a lot of importance on.  At this point, if the Rangers decide to go back to just three lefthanders in the bullpen, Ross and Cotts – who battled a year ago for one spot – are almost surely the two whose jobs are most secure, with an Ortiz option or even a Michael Kirkman designation for assignment more likely right now.

My baseball adrenaline being what it is, and perhaps spoiled as I now am, I’m dying for this club to get back to a World Series.  I’ve now been in the stands for two season-ending pile-on’s, one that I had no real emotional investment in and one that sucked, and I’m craving another.

And my vision of what that will look like has Neal Cotts showing little regard for a hip issue that almost cost him a career and heaping himself on top, just like he did eight years ago as I froze my tail off in Houston, Texas, watching a baseball season end and imagining what that would look like as my own team’s new General Manager was setting a long-term course built on scouting, player development, and maybe a little bit of fearlessness as far as taking chances is concerned.

This is not a slide puzzle, or part of Mike Olt’s latest battery of vision testing.

Those, on top, are the 24 Rangers pitchers who reported to big league camp in February as members of the 40-man roster.  Among them were Jeff Beliveau and Roman Mendez and Justin Miller and Matt West and Rule 5 pick Coty Woods.

On bottom are the 14 pitchers who were invited to big league camp even though not on the roster.

That group included big leaguers who couldn’t find roster jobs but were given a chance by Texas to win a job (Derek Lowe, Neal Cotts, Kyle McClellan, Yoshinori Tateyama, Randy Wells, Evan Meek, Collin Balester), longshot journeymen (Nate Robertson, Yonata Ortega), minor leaguers off the roster that the club wanted to see against big league hitters (Nick Tepesch, Cody Buckel, Jake Brigham, Johan Yan), and Ben Rowen, a minor leaguer who started camp on the back fields but forced his own look late in March.

Texas ran 38 pitchers through big league camp, looking not only for the 12 to go to battle with out of the gate but also another five or 10, or maybe 15, it would likely take to get through the season.

Ross Wolf: Not in the picture.

Now, to be fair, the 30-year-old, though not in big league camp, was one of the 43 pitchers who appeared in a spring training game for the Rangers.  Teams bring “just in case” arms to every exhibition game so that when a scheduled pitcher can’t get out of a prescribed inning it doesn’t disrupt the plans for when the other scheduled pitchers will pitch.

Sometimes those are prospects a year or two or more away rewarded with the opportunity (Jerad Eickhoff, Jimmy Reyes, Victor Payano).

Sometimes they’re Ross Wolf, and even the hardest-core of you might decide when Ross Wolf takes the ball against the Padres in an ugly seventh inning in early March that it’s a decent time to go buy some Dippin’ Dots, or a Rangers hoodie.

Wolf did get into four spring training games, and completed 2.1 total innings that Texas didn’t have to stretch someone else out to take care of.  In those 2.1 innings, opposing hitters, some of whom were late-inning journeymen, if not just-in-case players themselves, hit .417, with five base hits and two walks.  Two of the hits cleared a fence, in fair ground.

If you asked 100 diligent Rangers fans in late March which was more likely – that Wolf would be released before camp broke, or that he would start a game in Arlington in May – the percentage choosing the latter would surely have been lower than the percentage of empty boxes in the graphic above.

I wrote the other day about Texas officials squinting their eyes and seeing a starting pitcher this spring in Josh Lindblom, in spite of the fact that he hadn’t started so much as a minor league game since May 2010.

Wolf’s last start was in 2005.  He made one start that year, in mid-May, in Class AA for the Marlins, and lasted three innings.

Before that, Wolf’s last start came in 2002, the summer in which Florida drafted him in the 18^th round out of Wabash Valley College.

The Marlins were still called “Florida” then.  The year before that, the Nationals were still the Montreal Expos, who drafted Wolf in the 47^th round out of Newton High School in Wheeler, Illinois, but didn’t sign him.

After his 11 starts (4.66 ERA) in that 2002 season, in the following decade Wolf made the one May 2005 start and 483 relief appearances.

Fourteen of those 483 games pitched in relief were out of Florida’s big league bullpen in August and September of 2007 (11.68 ERA).

Another 11 came in the second half of the 2010 season, when he posted a 4.26 ERA for Oakland.  Texas saw him three times, putting five runs on his ledger over 3.1 innings – and that doesn’t count the three of four inherited baserunners who also scored.

Wolf’s stint with the A’s came after seven years with the Marlins and a year and a half with the Orioles.  The Oakland experiment lasted a few months, after which Wolf signed with the Astros and spent the 2011 season in Oklahoma City.  Baltimore brought him back in 2012, but three weeks into the season released the righthander from its AA roster.  Texas signed him to provide bullpen depth that season in Frisco and then Round Rock and then Frisco and then Round Rock and then Frisco.

The Rangers decided to bring Wolf (2.09 ERA in AA, 4.76 ERA in AAA) back for the 2013 season.

But he wasn’t in the picture.

And he said this would be it.  He’d planned to retire at the end of 2013.

Texas put him in the Frisco rotation to begin the season.  He pitched the eighth, ninth, and tenth innings of a RoughRiders loss to Arkansas on April 6, blowing a save in the eighth and taking the 4-3 loss in the tenth.

When Texas designated Beliveau for assignment to make 40-man roster room for catcher Robinson Chirinos a week into the AAA season, the organization moved the experienced Wolf up to Round Rock, where he was expected to work out of the bullpen.

When Matt Harrison was shut down and Justin Grimm was recalled, Wolf was moved into the Express rotation.

He would make six starts, allowing more than two earned runs in none of them.

Nick Tepesch develops a blister on his final pitch against Detroit on Friday night.

That same night, Wolf held Colorado Springs to two earned runs on five hits and two walks in seven innings, fanning six.

Yesterday was Tepesch’s and Wolf’s day to pitch, and Tepesch couldn’t go.

The A’s, having disposed of Lindblom and not allowing Texas to get anything going offensively on Yu Darvish’s day, were poised yesterday for a sweep in Arlington, with Wolf getting the ball in front of an offense struggling lately to score.  In fact, the Rangers wouldn’t make any noise on this day after their fourth batter of the game.

Texas hadn’t been swept at home since the summer 2010, when Wolf was last in the big leagues.

Thanks to Wolf, it wouldn’t happen again yesterday.

He gave Texas five innings.  Allowed three hits, two walks, one run.  Got into trouble at times, and got out.

He earned his first big league win, in his first big league start.  On a day when Texas needed a win, as much as a first-place club can need a win in May.

Now, it’s far too soon to assume that this will be any more than a Brian Sikorski or Bryan Corey story, or that Wolf will even get a second start for Texas, or that he won’t go ahead and retire in five months.

But if Tampa Bay doesn’t designate Robinson Chirinos for assignment and doesn’t then agree to trade him to Texas, and if Matt Harrison doesn’t hurt his back, and if Nick Tepesch’s right middle finger holds out for one more pitch – if any of those things doesn’t happen – Ross Wolf probably never sees the big leagues again.

Here’s another picture.

That’s Scot Engler.  He’s a pro scout for the Rangers, and I’d bet more of you had heard of Ross Wolf a week ago than had heard Engler’s name.

The former University of Montana tight end has scouted baseball professionally for 13 years, these last six with Texas.

In 2001, he was with the Expos, when they drafted Ross Wolf.

In 2003, he joined the Marlins, who had drafted Ross Wolf the summer before.

Since joining the Rangers, he’s been responsible for recommending Neal Cotts, whose awesome story I’ll get to another time.  He was one of a few pro scouts Texas dispatched to Japan to scout Darvish.  He and fellow pro scout Keith Boeck were instrumental in recommending Darren O’Day.  This year he recommended outfielder Jim Adduci, who had an outstanding camp and, after a slow start, has been on fire for Round Rock and could be an option down the road, if needed.

Engler was also the one to endorse Jeff Beliveau, and then the man who took Beliveau’s roster spot, Robinson Chirinos.

Which set things up for Ross Wolf, another of Engler’s recommendations.

There are lots of Scot Engler’s we never hear about, guys who are part of the spine of this organization, guys who make the Rangers one of the elite talent-accumulating franchises in the game.

You may not be familiar with many of them, but make no mistake: They’re a huge part of the big picture.

I’ll make sure you hear about Engler again when I get around to the Neal Cotts story.

Ross Wolf, in the meantime, made sure, on one afternoon in May, you’ll never forget his name.