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Texas Rangers 2023 - They're Still Shitty?

ztejas

By ztejas
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chemHORN
chemHORN

My kid was born and I looked up to see Adolis rounding the bases on the TV in the room.  That's a good night

Jive Turkey
Jive Turkey

Haven’t been this excited to pick up the Dallas Morning News in a long time. Add it to the collection. The last titles my teams have won. 

CowtownHorn
CowtownHorn

Man, how I wish my dad could have been here to see this. Biggest Rangers fan ever. I was on the phone with him in 2011 when we needed one more strike. I’ve never heard such a crushed, disappointed rea

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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52322

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3 hours ago, Gourmand said:

Dogpiles and budweisers all around.

Congrats Rangers fans, hopefully it's an all-Texas ALCS.

Party on.

Of course you guys want to play Texas in the lcs, you are like 22-3 against Texas this season. 
 

(same reason I hope Correa and group light you up)

 

im sure mlb is dying for that potential matchup. 

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BehoId, The Underminer!

BehoId, The Underminer! 11667

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Soft focus Evan Carter article.  Maybe what was linked above, though it didn't work for me.  From the Athletic.  Evan's going to be good.  Maybe as good as Wander Franco.

 

 

BALTIMORE — Every day, Jason Carter texts with his son, a 21-year-old Rangers outfielder who just happens to be a burgeoning folk hero.

Their conversations occasionally focus on baseball. More often, they talk about something else entirely. But almost every day, there’s a familiar theme in their messages. Jason usually sends a text to Evan that includes a two-word phrase. Evan often sends something similar in return.

Slow down. 

“Have fun, slow down, and enjoy the moment,” Jason said. “Those are the kinds of messages that we send each other every day.”

That mantra cuts right to the core of what people around the Rangers say makes Carter special. Everyone can see the uncanny plate discipline, the plus athleticism, the well-rounded player. Carter, though, has thrived immediately in his emergence to the big leagues, undeterred by the third decks and the bright lights. He hit .306 with a .413 on-base percentage in his first 75 MLB plate appearances. Now in the playoffs, he has reached base in seven of his eight trips to the plate.

 

Tuesday he made a terrific diving catch in left field to end the first postseason inning of his life. Wednesday he became the youngest Ranger to homer in a postseason game. His ball off Rays starter Zach Eflin zoomed into the right-field seats and broke the game open.

Now Carter’s profile is soaring like he’s strapped to a rocket.

In the midst of all this tornadic activity, how is he handling the sudden surge of pressure and popularity? Cue the Carter creed: Slow down.

“I don’t even know if he knows that he’s in the big leagues,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said. “This guy has such a calmness about him.”

Nothing new, if you ask his father.

“That’s just something he’s always been good at,” Jason said. “His mentality of just take what you get, that’s just the way he’s geared.”

That explains the mindset. As for the physical skills? Those were honed in a 40-foot batting cage in the Carters’ basement. There the intimate rituals of a father and son hitting baseballs unfolded.

“That’s where we lived a lot in the evenings,” said Jason, who is an assistant principal and athletic director in the small east Tennessee town of Elizabethton.

They constructed the cage when Carter was in eighth grade. He wanted to go hit so often that it felt like his parents were always running around, taking him to and from a field or facility.

“It was just hard for me to come home in the evenings and then leave again,” Jason said.

One day, Jason looked around in their large basement and decided to build a cage. There they completed the setup with hooks and nets and cables. They can hang the cage up whenever they need room in the basement. But for the most part, those cables were always extended. Baseballs were always thwacking against the nets.

Jason by no means wants the credit for his son’s baseball success. Carter had plenty of other coaches who helped along the way. Really, Jason was there to support his son, a kid who always had a preternatural drive, who long showed exactly the combination of calm mind and calamitous bat that is now showing on a national stage.

Maybe you’ve heard the basics of the Evan Carter story. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, there is more to learn.

Until he burst on the scene for the Rangers in September, Carter carried a low profile even as he jolted up the prospect rankings, eventually reaching the top 10.

Carter’s public origin story has been filled with many of the usual athlete-does-good tropes. Proving the doubters wrong. Working hard. A diamond in the rough.

In some ways this is all rooted in truth. In other ways, it is incomplete.

For example: There’s a myth that Carter did not play travel baseball, did not tour the showcase scene that exposes so many privileged players to college coaches and professional scouts. That is not entirely accurate.

“We played a lot of games in Atlanta, where literally every SEC coach was watching us play,” Jason said. “We were on the really, really high-end teams. We chose not to go to the combines and those kinds of things.”

On many occasions, Evan’s mother, Susan, would drive to Atlanta and rent an Airbnb for a week.

Carter, however, did skip some of the very tip-top tournaments, the ones that draw the biggest crowds and generate rankings. He committed to Duke as an underclassman in high school. Baseball was always in his future, but a young Carter — valedictorian of his high school class — also had plans of going to dental school. All that was before the Rangers called.

There were other teams who liked him. But in the 2020 draft, with a whole senior season erased due to COVID-19, Carter did remain largely unheralded. An oft-repeated part of his mythos: When the Rangers selected him in the second round, pick No. 50 overall, TV analysts basically threw their hands up. MLB Network host Greg Amsinger listed off Carter’s height and weight, a few stats and the fact he was committed to Duke.

“And that’s kinda all we know,” Amsinger said.

Other analysts gave generalized overviews. Former Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd said he watched Carter at a workout but did not seem overly enthused.

“There are certain players, Greg, in every year’s draft that should go to college,” O’Dowd said. “My first blush at him — and (the Rangers) saw him a lot more than me — was that he’s a guy who should have gone to college.”

Carter’s story, indeed, has elements of an old-school scouting success.

“He was the one guy in that draft I wasn’t going to lose,” Rangers scouting director Kip Fagg told The Athletic in March.

However, it’s not like Carter was an underdog to anyone who had watched him. This skill you are seeing now? It has always been there. Had COVID not canceled his senior season, perhaps 30 teams would have been lined up to draft him.

“Believe it or not,” Jason said, “when he was in probably the eighth grade we knew that he was a little bit different than everybody else.”

That’s when the cage was built. And that’s when Evan’s drive elevated to another level. The batting practice rituals were more than just soft toss. Each day, Jason says Evan entered the cage with a specific goal in mind. They set up cameras on tripods or whatever else they could find. Sometimes Mom stood and filmed.

“Whatever we had at the time is what we did,” Jason said.

Evan would take a series of swings, then stop and review the tape.

“He’s very particular,” Jason said. “It was a lot more quality than quantity.”

Quantity, though, wasn’t exactly lacking either. Carter used the cage so often he wore holes in the net. So they flipped the screens around and started hitting to the other end of the cage. When the seams started to unravel from balls, they would have to go buy a new bucket. When the holes in the nets became too big to patch, they had to set up tarps.

Turned out to be a sound investment.

“I never had to push him,” Jason said. “He pushed me.”

On the eve of his first playoff game, Carter talked about wanting to keep everything the same. Same sport, same rules, same messy hair on his head. His interviews are still filled with the word “gosh” and a certain aw-shucks innocence.

But even Carter acknowledged the playoffs might be a little different than anything he had ever experienced.

“A lot of the games that we played in recently, it’s felt like playoff baseball,” Carter said then. “So I feel as prepared as I can be. But also, I’ll never know what it’s like until we actually play.”

Tuesday, Carter arrived in the postgame interview room after going 2-for-2 and walking twice. He became the youngest player to ever reach base four times in a postseason debut.

So were the playoffs actually any different?

Cue that line again. Slow down.

“We actually kind of made that a point, for me at least today, of just like, ‘All right, postseason, we need to make sure we’re calm, cool and collected,’” Carter said.

On a Rangers team filled with big-money stars, the homegrown kid has now become their biggest story. He was called up after only eight games in Triple-A after outfielder Adolis García went on the injured list. At that time the Rangers were injured, fizzling and in need of a spark to remain in the playoff hunt. From Carter, they got just that.

“I think, from the moment he came up, he’s very poised and confident,” pitcher Nathan Eovaldi said. “He’s got a very simple approach, and he likes to stick to that.”

He is hitting in the bottom portion of the order, but that may not last long. He has a smooth, level left-handed swing, a bit of a throwback hitter. His patience at the plate is advanced to the point the Rangers wouldn’t mind if he was a little more aggressive.

Rangers general manager Chris Young has been so impressed that he made an admission while speaking on the field after the Rangers’s most recent victory.

“Evan’s not afraid of the moment,” Young said. “What he did in this series, what he’s done since he’s been called up has been tremendous. In fact, we probably should have called him up earlier.”

Said Bochy, the manager who once watched a rookie Buster Posey lead the Giants to a World Series: “For a kid of 21 years old, (I) just love the way he’s handling himself through all this.”

Wednesday, after a 7-1 domination against the Rays, fellow Rangers rookie Josh Jung sat at a dais, still drying off from the champagne celebration. Asked about Evan Carter, he started grinning.

“We joke around and say he’s our little savior,” Jung said.

Jason Carter talked to his son on the phone the night the Rangers beat the Rays to advance to the ALDS. Moments earlier, Carter had been rounding the bases after the game’s biggest hit. Barely drinking age, he partook in the beer showers and shenanigans that followed in the Rangers clubhouse. Fans online were praising the rookie with hosannas.

On the phone with his father, though, the conversation was largely normal. Funny for Jason Carter to see all the attention suddenly coming the family’s way.

“He’s just Evan to me,” Jason said.

This past offseason, perhaps the last one in which Carter will be able to walk down the street as just Evan, Carter returned home to Elizabethton. He has the coordinates from the town of 14,000 tattooed on his forearm. He started dating his now-wife in the sixth grade.

While home, father and son hit often at Elizabethton High School. And on a few occasions, they even rolled out the old cage.

Now as Jason prepares to head to Baltimore to watch his son play in the biggest games of his life, he may have some helpful reminders coming via text. Slow down, enjoy this ride.

And even with his son gone and playing baseball at the highest level, that cage remains hanging in the Carters’ basement.

It’s not coming down anytime soon.

“As a dad, I want to just leave it there,” Jason said “It’s kind of my way of thinking about him every day.”

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