The Rangers lost 2 of 3 in San Francisco, bringing our record to 3-5 against three trash teams. We have division games coming up that could turn our season around because division games are way more important, but that would require a complete 180 in our play. The season looks pretty hopeless right now.

However, the future is never hopeless with Jon Daniels at the helm, and one example why came in our lone win of the series on Sunday. 22 year old prospect Kolby Allard got his first start of the season was prettyyy pretty decent! Four innings (had a hard count of 80 pitches), two hits, two walks, and one run from a sac fly. It’s not great, but also not bad.

Allard was also pretty decent for us last year. In his first seven starts after arriving on deadline day, he went 7-1 and had four quality stars (two of those QS’s were one out short but I count them anyway). Also not bad!

It may not sound exciting and he’s no burgeoning star or anything like that, but he’s surely an early success story in the rebuild considering the trade that got him here. All it took was one spare reliever named Chris Martin. Dude had pitched for us for two years after rehabbing his career in Japan, and he was as spare as a spare 33 year old veteran could get.

Martin did have a solid stretch of not sucking too much for us last year, so for some reason the Braves thought he could be a setup man. Sure enough, in game 1 of the NLDS when they called him in to protect a 3-1 lead in the 8th, he had a season ending oblique injury in warmups and the Braves season went up in flames. Just a truly worthless asset.

Jon Jon Daniels being able to flip that for what is so far a respectable 22 year old starter is very commendable. We also got Nick Solak from the Rays for another spare reliever Peter Fairbanks last year. Nick Solak is not a spare though; he’s hitting .281 in his career so far and could end up rookie of the year if he goes on a hot streak. Two solid trade rapes for our boy JD.

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Until very recently, it had been almost ten years since we’ve seen JD trading for prospects. He was mostly unloading them for guys like Cole Hamels so we could rack up a bunch of one seeds from 2010-2016. We almost forgot just how damn shrewd he was in stockpiling those prospects in the first place. As long as Jon Daniels is around, the rebuild won’t last long.