Josh Hamilton's 28 homers in the first round of the Home Run Derby last Monday night and the ever-growing national adoration for the outfielder was a perfect microcosm as to why my interest in the game has grown immensely from a year ago.
Simply put, Hamilton and, to a lesser extent, the Texas Rangers, this season have re-energized an extreme baseball cynic into, at least, a casual fan.
I was once a huge baseball fan, back in my childhood until I was about 13. But after that, the game just wasn't interesting enough to me anymore to so much as even watch a majority of a game. Maybe it's because of the steroids thing or maybe the game just didn't move along enough for someone from this ADD generation. It could also be that I have lived all that time in Dallas, where our baseball team is consistently either awful or underachieving.
After all, the Rangers have a total of one playoff win (that would be one game, not one series) and have never been in a World Series or LCS of any kind.
In the eight years I've been here, there has been hope for the Rangers, specifically in 2004 when a young infield of Mark Teixiera, Ian Kinsler, Michael Young. and Hank Blalock led the AL West in September and finished only three games behind the Angels.
Then, two trades happened and put the Rangers on a downward spiral for a couple years.
A former number one overall pick named Adrian Gonzalez and Chris Young were traded to the Padres for Adam Eaton and Akinori Otsuka. Before that, Alfonso Soriano was traded to the Nationals for Brad Wilkerson and Terrmel Sledge. In total, that's three all-stars for four guys who are not playing for the team anymore.
But yet, through the 2005-06 seasons, the pitching trio of John Danks, Edinson Volquez, and Thomas Diamond were hailed as the future of the Rangers' historically bad pitching. "DVD" was broken up when Danks was traded to the White Sox for Brandon McCarthy, who has been injured more than healthy in his time in Arlington.
Ranger fans will obviously never know if "DVD" would have become a show worth seeing. But the second of the prospects to be dealt made the Rangers a pleasure to watch again.
I barely remember seeing the news of Volquez being traded for Hamilton anywhere. And really, I didn't care in the least bit. This was going to be a season where I didn't buy into what the Rangers were selling.
Looking back on it, Hamilton's meteoric rise as a Ranger, although not covered in depth by the national guys until about May, started in spring training when he batted a just plain stupid .556 in March. But, in April, the Rangers looked to be headed toward another season of below-.500 baseball and general indifference from their fans.
After that 7-16 start, the Rangers have gone 44-32 behind their four all-stars in Kinsler, Young, Hamilton, and Milton Bradley. Make no mistake, though, Hamilton is why this is such a likable club.
If I can go back to being a cynic for a second, it's slightly concerning that the best-felt of feel-good stories can really only be those like Hamilton's archetypal "God-given talent thrown away by drugs, cleans up and recaptures God-given talent" storyline.
As one popular sports blog jocularly put it this past week, "We shouldn't be teaching our kids not to take drugs, we should be teaching our kids to take drugs, quit them, and then be adored."
However, the way Hamilton goes about his life and his career now transcends whatever reservations the American sports fan, or the American in general has about adoring a guy coming back from drug addiction. Something seems genuine about Hamilton, and the best I can explain of it is that everyday he walks out onto the field just grateful for the opportunity to play a game and get a second chance after falling so hard just a few years ago.
The Rangers won't win the AL West this season. The Angels will likely stay too far out in front to be caught, and Texas' starting pitching will probably be neither as consistent nor healthy enough to make a run at any type of playoff spot.
But yet, that reality probably won't be too bad for Rangers fans, as like in 2004, there's hope for the team once again.
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