Patience is a word that’s thrown around plenty during the opening month of the baseball season. Don’t overreact to a small sample, don’t read too much into two or three weeks of results. <\/p>\n
Sounds nice in theory, but the Texas Rangers<\/a> aren’t buying it. <\/p>\n The Rangers gave us a major personnel change earlier in the month (Neftali Feliz<\/a>(notes)<\/a><\/span> to the ninth, Frank Francisco<\/a>(notes)<\/a><\/span> to set-up) and they were at it again Thursday night, sending Chris Davis<\/a>(notes)<\/a><\/span> down and promoting touted 1B Justin Smoak<\/a>(notes)<\/a>.<\/span> Davis’s performance on the field prompted the move: he’s at .188 following an 0-for-3 Thursday, with 17 strikeouts over 48 at-bats. A .311 slugging percentage and one RBI through 15 games doesn’t feed the cat. <\/p>\n Smoak was the 11th overall pick in the 2008 draft and he’s been compared to Mark Teixeira<\/a>(notes)<\/a><\/span> for a while, though his power hasn’t developed as quickly as most expected. He was off to a strong start in Triple-A (.326\/.500\/.587, 16 walks against six strikeouts) and you can’t blame the Rangers for wanting to give him a shot now. Even in shallow leagues, this is the type of player you should grab immediately if he’s available. Arlington is a fun place to spent your summer, especially if you’re an offensive player. <\/p>\n We could write more, but right now, the news is the thing. Go do what you need to do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Patience is a word that’s thrown around plenty during the opening month of the baseball season. Don’t overreact to a small sample, don’t read too much into two or three weeks of results. Sounds nice in theory, but the Texas Rangers aren’t buying it. The Rangers gave us a major personnel change earlier in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4321,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}