2018 Offical Texas Rangers Season Thread

[Hoss163]

Profar !!!

[Dale Moser]

Good lord Gallo takes a hack...

[Smart]

Good to see Profar coming around after all these years..

[Smart]

Emily Jones is so hot....I lufff her...

[MBV77]

Emily Jones is so hot....I lufff her...

She farts when she puts on her makeup


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[mikemorvan]

I hate Khris Davis.

[Smart]

She farts when she puts on her makeup


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I'm good with that.. She could ask me to pull her finger for all I care..

[MBV77]

I'm good with that.. She could ask me to pull her finger for all I care..

LOL!


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[Hoss163]

Man these young players sure have some potential if they just could get some consistent pitching.

[brrdnk]

Nice 2 run blooper for Profar.

[mikemorvan]

M a z a r a !!!

[jlinville]

Not sure what to think about the ticker I just got that Jon Daniels just signed a multiyear extension.

[Smart]

Not sure what to think about the ticker I just got that Jon Daniels just signed a multiyear extension.

Hopefully there is some truth to the owners saying this was a mini rebuilding year and minimal spending. Gotta get done with Prince and Choo's ****ty contracts and start planning for the future. Hopefully Daniels can work some of the 2010 magic again.

[cookemerkel]

Great story from Newberg on Mason Englert and his family.

A Rainbow in the Clouds

On one side of the room sat 25 people, mostly family with a sprinkling of scouts, and they were quiet and still, almost solemnly so, facing five young men sitting at a table 15 feet but a whole new life away.

All those years of travel ball, practices, and lessons, the all-in investment of time and support and the surrender of family vacations, the survival of youth sports drama and adversity. Ratified once and for all behind a mahogany table lined by bottled water, microphones, and five neck-ties peeking out from underneath the sweetest baseball jersey an 18-year-old could dream of buttoning up. It’s possible that the moment, serene and surreal, had simply overwhelmed what had been swelling inside each of them for a parent’s lifetime.

It was ceremonial for the most part, but for Mason Englert and four of his newest teammates — Cole Winn, Owen White, Jonny Ornelas, and Jayce Easley — the press conference announcing their integration into pro ball and the Rangers organization was the actualization of something that five ballplayers and five families had worked toward for years.



Father’s Day weekend will be different for Tom and Leeann Englert this year. There won’t be a baseball game they belong at.

“I can’t remember a time over the last twelve years or so that Father’s or Mother’s Day wasn’t celebrated on a baseball field,” says Leeann, an Assistant Principal at a middle school in Mesquite. “It has always been an honor and privilege for both me and Tom to celebrate our special days with baseball. It’s our amazing children who have given us the title of Mom and Dad, and on the baseball field we have filled those roles with the greatest of joy and thankfulness.”

For Tom, a behavioral specialist for Mesquite ISD and an educator for 24 years, the connection runs even deeper. While Leeann was a varsity swimmer by her sophomore year in high school (freestyle and medley, both individual and relays) and has cousins who played volleyball professionally and for Team Canada as well as amateur hockey, plus a brother who was a pro golfer, Tom’s background was on the diamond. His father Ralph Englert pitched in the Cleveland Indians system in the mid-’50’s, and Tom pitched in college himself.

“Father’s Day was always about baseball, for me and my dad and then for me and Mason,” Tom says. “This will be the first year it won’t. It’s a bittersweet time.”

Tom coached Mason until he was 14. As a man who learned the game from his own father (“He mentored me as a player, shared with me everything he knew, kept me in line . . . a demanding but loving guy”), it was natural for him to pass those things on to his son. And his son was hungry for it. “Mason was the kid who would be waiting for me with his glove by the door. ‘What are we gonna work on today, Dad?’ As time went on, though, it changed: ‘Here’s what we’re gonna work on today, Dad.’”

Mason is Tom and Leeann’s oldest.

But not their first.

It was December 27, 1998. Tom, a middle school teacher and coach at the time, had been in Brunswick, Georgia for nearly two months, training to be a Border Patrol agent. Leeann, his wife of seven years and partner for nearly twice that long, had taken their kids, six-year-old Madison and her two-year-old brother Morgan, from their home in West Texas to visit their grandparents in Canada. It was Madison and Morgan’s first Christmas apart from Dad.

The trip had come to an end, and Leeann was driving to the airport in her mother’s car. She hit a patch of black ice on the highway and lost control. Another vehicle broadsided the back side of the car. Leeann was bumped and bruised. Madison and Morgan were injured more seriously.

Tom got word and was on a plane for Alberta almost instantly.

The children didn’t live long enough for Tom to get there.

Madison’s heart valves were used to save the lives of two newborn babies, and a cornea was donated to a father of two.

Tragedy can open or close a heart. For Tom and Leeann, both 27 at the time, coping was not easy.

“Leeann was suffering PTSD and was understandably depressed, and I think I was trying to drink myself to death,” Tom recalls. Within weeks, they learned Leeann was pregnant. Grief and stress caused her to go into pre-term labor at 27 weeks, but with the help of their specialists and lots of bed rest, the child made it to full term.

They named him Mason. [Noun, builder.]

Doctors and faith rescued the health of the child, and of his parents. “Mason pretty much saved our lives,” Tom says. “When he was born, it was like we had a purpose again and we started slowly to heal.”

A sister, Jordan, was born 18 months later, and another, Jillian, arrived four years after that. Leeann spent a total of six years at home with the kids before returning to teach at Pirrung Elementary, where Mason and Jordan went to school. She and Tom, as they both had since college, were back to dedicating their lives to kids — both their own and hundreds of others.

“Everything really started to get better,” says Tom. “Things were not the same and we knew they never would be. It’s like two separate lives that are totally incompatible with each other. You can’t and wouldn’t trade one for the other. It’s as if the tragedy, in a very painful way, reaffirmed that being parents is all that really mattered to us in this world.”

Children bring with them lessons, and they are all born at the perfect moment.

And, eventually, there might come the time for their wings to spread. The reality settled in for Tom on Tuesday, in a tunneled interview room at the base of a ballpark, five days before his 26th Father’s Day. “I’m still numb from all this. It will probably wear off by the weekend and emotions will run full force. There have been so many Father’s Days that we spent ring-chasing on the field. There will be a huge void on Sunday and most every day from now on since Mason and I did lots of things together. It seems I’m going to have to redefine who I am.”

The impact isn’t lost on Mason, who said goodbye to his family and boarded a plane for Arizona immediately after the press conference. “My Dad has meant everything to me as a person and as a baseball player. Everything I know is because of him. My original love for baseball comes from watching games with him as a little kid. My skills would be nowhere close to what they are now without him, both the physical aspects of the game and the mental side. Everything I am as a pitcher, including my competitiveness and persona on the mound, stems back to what he taught me in the backyard or before practice when we would work extra together.”



Rangers Senior Director of Amateur Scouting Kip Fagg has a team of 16 area scouts and seven crosscheckers, plus several special assistants, on whose recommendations he leans heavily on Draft Day. But he had his own book on Mason. “He’s my guy,” Fagg said of the 6’4” righthander, whom he scouted personally three times. “And I’ve got a big gut on him. He’s an ultra-competitive pitch-maker with stuff.” A shoulder impingement following Mason’s junior year led to a decline in velocity, but not in the Rangers’ estimation of the player. “We had seen him plenty when he was right, and our guys knew him and his makeup.”

Josh Simpson, who covered the Texas area for the first time in 2018 after two years as a Four Corners scout, didn’t have the history with Mason that fellow area scout Randy Taylor and crosschecker Bobby Crook (who managed him together in the Area Code Games) did, but he saw enough. “The competitiveness was the first thing that sparked my interest after I watched him pitch a complete game when he was sick,” Simpson says. “Then you get to know him. You see the drive and the passion Mason has for pitching and how he wants to not only be good but be the best. His family support is unbelievable, and his maturity level is top of the chart.”

There were also the state-record 55.1 consecutive scoreless innings he logged for Forney High School this spring. But for Simpson, what sold him was the same thing Fagg had seen. “It was a different feeling that I got when sitting at the table in his house talking about baseball. He has a fire burning inside that you can feel when he talks about his goals. He’s special.”

Forney head coach Jason Farrow, who has 20 years of experience, says Mason is “without question the hardest working student-athlete I have ever coached. Obviously, the talent is there, but he put in the work to be the best he could be.” That work ethic always made an impression on Grant Roberts, a catcher at Odessa College who played travel ball with Mason for seven years. “Mason was always one of if not the best player on every team he played on, and that was on talent alone. But as we got older he had the determination and drive to be where he’s at today. He never settled for how good he was or the hype that was surrounding him at the time. He just kept getting better.”

The praise from scouts and coaches and teammates never went to Mason’s head. And that probably flowed down from Dad. “I never let myself believe he was as good as people were telling him,” says Tom. The Rangers demonstrated clearly how good they think Mason can be.

Under baseball’s current bonus pool system, every draft pick in the first 10 rounds has a slot value assigned to it. Slot values don’t dictate a players’ signing bonuses, but they do limit them. Clubs are allowed to spend the combined total of the slot values of all their picks in first 10 rounds. Exceeding a player’s slot value is fine — as long as other draft picks cooperate by agreeing to under-slot bonuses to make the math work.

Randy & Kris’s son Cole Winn, taken in Round 1 by the Rangers. signed for $3.15 million, which was $588,500 under slot.

Tim & Casey’s son Owen White signed for $1.5 million, or $242,500 over slot.

Marcial & Cruz’s son Jonathan Ornelas signed for slot value at $622,800.

Damion & Dawn’s son Jayce Easley signed for $500,000, which was $152,900 over slot.

The Winn deal, in tandem with a few under-slot signings in Rounds 6 through 10, helped enable the Rangers to sign Mason for $1 million, more than double his $464,700 slot value, and steer him away from his commitment to Texas A&M.

As someone who never let himself get caught up in the hype his son was generating — and as an educator — was it difficult for Tom to wrap his arms around the idea of Mason forgoing the opportunity to pitch for a major college program and instead turning pro? “Nope. Not for me. His dream is right in front of him. School can wait.”

Leeann, who this fall will enter her 18th year working in the schools, went through a more nuanced analysis — but landed in the same place. “Initially, I was apprehensive about the idea of Mason going pro rather than completing his college education first. However, as time went on and we gathered information, everything we learned added up. MLB still honors the college scholarship. Mason demonstrated more and more over time that he had his head on straight and showed tremendous determination in becoming a professional athlete as soon as he possibly could if the opportunity presented itself — and if that opportunity was great enough to sacrifice the traditional college experience on an amazing campus.”

Truth be told, she ultimately hoped for this outcome for Mason, who finished just outside the top 10 percent in his class at Forney with a 4.69 GPA and was Second-Team Academic All-State. “I realized that both Tom and I obtained Master’s degrees while raising our family. Education doesn’t have to follow one linear pattern, and it never ceases. I know Mason will one day also be determined to pursue his college education. In the meantime, he’s getting an amazing baseball education and experience. I’m proud he’s been given the opportunity to take the road less traveled.”

The glare of the spotlight could be greater on a local kid, but for Mason, it pales in comparison with the opportunity to turn pro with his hometown team. “I don’t think there’s more pressure. It makes it more exciting to me. It’s a really cool opportunity . . . . It’s a special thing, wearing Texas across my chest.”

He’ll first get that chance in Surprise, where he’ll join the Arizona League Rangers roster but likely have a minimal workload this summer before reporting to Fall Instructional League in September. (Rangers first-rounder Cole Ragans logged just 7.2 innings after signing out of high school in 2016, for example, and 2017 second-round pick Hans Crouse pitched 20 innings.) What should be on the forefront of his mind, and of Winn’s and White’s and Ornelas’s and Easley’s, as they move past the ritual press conference and report to Surprise?

“Working their *** off,” says Michael Young, a former fifth-round pick who became the Rangers’ all-time hits leader and now serves as a Special Assistant to the GM. “Simple. Work, prepare, be hungry. Be a tremendous teammate. And play like you love it. We need passion, joy, competitiveness. The best teams show that nightly.”

Mason Englert won’t need a tutorial. “Now that the draft is over and I’m in Arizona, I’m just focusing on trying to go to sleep a better baseball player than when I wake up every day. There are a lot of good players here, so what happened in the draft is irrelevant. It’s going to be fun to compete with and against my teammates and try to push each other to be the best we can be.”

There’s a wall hanging in Leeann and Tom’s Forney home that they were given when Mason was born. It reads: “God sets the rainbow in the clouds.” Inspired by the Book of Genesis passage, Dr. Maya Angelou often challenged people to “be the rainbow in someone else’s cloud.” Mason, Jordan, and Jillian have been that for their parents.



“Having the opportunity to celebrate the privilege of being parents, our children have been the rainbows in our clouds,” Leeann says. “Their rainbows have shined considerably brightly for us.”

She adds, unapologetically: “This is our truth, corny or not.”

Last week, when Mason pitched Forney into the Class 5A State Championship game by going the distance in a 3-2 win over Corpus Christi Veterans Memorial, a Dallas-Fort Worth TV reporter called the righthander “Morgan” in a story on the game. It was his brother’s name. The brother he never knew. “An angel looking over Mason, maybe,” says Tom. “It gave me chills when I heard it.”

While Tom and Leeann gave Mason life, the father is convinced the son did the same for them. “In a way, he saved us and gave us a reason to keep living — and the inspiration to continue to grow our family.”

The Englerts are a special family, one that has been through the kind of trauma that’s impossible to understand and nearly as difficult to imagine. “I don’t know how special,” says Tom, as dismissive of the notion as if someone had just suggested his son has the chance to make an impact as a baseball player. “We are just people. You don’t get to pick your circumstance in life. We’ve done what many others have done and just persevered.”

The Arizona League schedule opens Monday, the day after Father’s Day. There will likely be fewer people at the game when the Rangers visit the Dodgers in Glendale than there were in Ms. Skidmore’s AP Calculus class at Forney High.

Tom Englert won’t be among them. He’ll have just had his first Father’s Day without Mason. Nothing like the one Christmas he was away from his family, but there will be growth this time, too, as a father is once again redefined.

“I can focus on my girls and pour myself into them with all the enthusiasm I did with Mason. Not that I haven’t in the past, it’s just that a huge chunk of my efforts can now be channeled their way. They have sacrificed so much, as we all have, to help make Mason’s dream come true. I am not sad or missing him in the least. This is what he has been groomed for all along. He is ready and has all the tools to reach his dreams.”

Leeann knows, though, that it’s not quite that easy for the father of the ballplayer. “For Tom, it’s been a gradual release, beginning when he turned Mason over to another coach at age 15, then at 16 when Mason got his driver’s license and no longer needed a ride to practice. Now he waits anxiously for glimpses of Mason over text, phone calls, social media. Tom fully trusts that Mason is prepared for this step, but he reminds me of the young father who paced the floors while he awaited Mason’s arrival in this world 18 and a half years ago.”

That first rainbow in their clouds.

Holidays are interesting things. They can be cause for celebration for some and a source of pain for another. Sometimes, both.

Mason will celebrate this Father’s Day a thousand miles away from the man who taught him to love the game, to play the game, to compete.

He’s lengthening the dream, stretching it out. He’s been doing it as long as he’s known which hand to put the glove on, and longer. It’s a role he’s filled for over 18 years, for a husband and wife, a father and mother.

[systemnt]

Great read.
Thanks for sharing it