Pitchers & Poets: Why I Want the Rangers to Win the World Series

All-Natural Beef about Nolan Ryan is available online!

But wait, you say. The Rangers were once owned by the unpopular pre-presidential George W. Bush who often sits smiling in a box on the field level. Their current CEO, Nolan Ryan, is the scowliest jowliest man in all of baseball and more than likely a fascist. And the two are friends! Plus there was that whole Tom Hicks/MLB Rescue debacle. Cheering for the Rangers, you say, is basically the baseball equivalent of voting for Rick Perry in an important primary straw poll.

To this I give you Hank Steinbrenner. And Tony LaRussa. And Chase Utley’s hair. The negatives are out there for every team (though they are harder to spot for the Rays and Brewers, I admit). But Hank Steinbrenner’s ####### comments don’t make Curtis Granderson any less exciting. Tony LaRussa’s faux-intellectual over-managing doesn’t make me want Lance Berkman to lose at what might be his last shot at a ring. And Chase Utley’s hair doesn’t make Vance Worley any less surprising.

So what I’m telling myself here — because really I am who I’m talking to — is that it’s okay to root for the Rangers because Nolan Ryan’s pompous arms-crossed in a windbreaker aura is not enough to cut into the joy of a Ron Washington press conference or Neftali Feliz fastball. The needle in my heart has flickered. The animal inside me is not a beast but some clawed and antlered thing. And though most of my exes don’t live in Texas, my favorite one does. That’s enough. Go Rangers.