A whole new look

As you may have noticed Nolan Writin’ has been redone and now has the new design of the Fansided network.   I want to thank Adam Best who is the creative director of fansided.com, Wally Fish who is the MLB Director and Zach Best who has been the one who has been redesigning all of our sites, plus dealing with server issues and getting our sites onto a very stable server.  So with their hard work our sites are growing every day.

Now let’s get onto Rangers baseball and what a month of May they have had.  In eight games this month the Rangers have only lost one time this month and now have a 17-14 record.  At the end of April they had a 11-13 record so even though they started off slow they are making up for it now in May.

One thing the Rangers are learning to do is make changes when things are not working out.  When Frank Francisco struggled at the closer position, they moved him to a middle bullpen position and he now has 4 wins out of the bullpen.  They moved Neftali Feliz from the eighth inning setup position to the closer position and with today’s game he already has 8 saves.  With 17 wins, Feliz has saved almost fifty percent of the wins.

The Rangers have even mix and matched their starting rotation. Tommy Hunter was expected to break camp in the rotation and an injury curtailed his bid for the rotation and he started the year on the disabled list.  The Rangers then put Matt Harrison into the fifth starters position and sent Derek Holland down to Triple-A in case of an injury to anyone in the rotation so he would still be stretched out as a starter.

In six starts this season Harrison has a 1-1 record 5.29 ERA.  He is about to be placed on the disabled list with tendinitis in his arm.  Derek Holland who has 4-1 record witha  .93 era in six starts at Triple-A Oklahoma City.  He should assume into Harrison’s slot in the rotation and may be their for the rest of the season if he performs as well as he has at Triple-A.  Harrison may end up in the bullpen once he returns to the Rangers roster.

The Rangers are sending Opening day starter Scott Feldman (1-3 5.45 ERA) to face off against Royal’s starter Luke Hochevar (3-1 5.03 ERA) at 2:05pm at The Ballpark in Arlington.  After tomorrow’s game, the Rangers will start a three game series with the Oakland Athletics who are only one game behind them in the West.  A win tomorrow would be great, but a sweep of the Athletics’s would be even better giving the Rangers a four game lead in the West.  Once the series is completed the West should be even clearer.