The Unnatural

Everyone interviewed for this story, from Rangers management to the parents of players, asks the same thing sooner or later: How the hell does he do this? And, also, they wonder: Why the hell does he do this? They're in awe of his commitment to the minor-league system of a major-league team that in the past often exhibited bush-league behavior by throwing big money after bad players.

But Newberg and Hindman, both in their mid-30s, don't care much about the yesterdays. That's not why these guys spend their free time poring over the statistics of kids playing in the nowhere leagues. They're all about the promise of tomorrow, when the first-round pick clicks and the undrafted nobody zips through low-A and lands in Arlington the anonymous hero. Look only at this year's team, thus far a worst-to-first success story in which the overpaid famous are all gone, to be replaced by the young heroes of Newberg's books: Mark Teixeira at first base, Michael Young at second, Hank Blalock at third. These are the "kids" Alex Rodriguez once grumbled about having to baby-sit; these are the kids, all in their mid- to late 20s, Newberg has been trumpeting as the Rangers' potential saviors ever since they were selected. While the rest of us wonder how this ragtag bunch of discount wonders managed to lead the American League West in mid-July, Newberg proudly and silently wears that toldyaso grin.

"Every day you wake up with hope," says Hindman, who has been contributing to the Newberg Report almost since its inception. "There are kids you notice that something's starting to happen for them, and every day you look at what that kid did last night and imagine that kid being in Arlington. It's a good way to start the day. There are no problems. It's what-if, best-case scenarios. It's the joy of minor-league baseball. Anything is possible for these kids."

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When we were kids, back when Steve Garvey and George Brett and Willie Stargell and Reggie Jackson were household names even in homes where no baseball was ever watched, Newberg and another friend and I would get together during summer afternoons to trade players' cards. We would buy them in bulk, in long boxes containing complete sets made by Topps or Donruss or Fleer. Sometimes we would leave the boxes unopened, in their plastic shrink-wrapping; occasionally we would bust open the collections and fondle the colorful cardboard and try to chew the dry slabs of gum that came in those wax packages.

I was more interested in the front of those baseball cards, the action poses of diamond heroes slugging and mugging for the camera. Newberg was interested only in the backs of the cards, where every statistic was contained, from the player's height and weight to what he hit in college. That was how he connected with players--not by seeing them on TV and reveling in their on-field heroics, but by knowing who they were and how they got there.

"I knew which guys were traded for which guys," he recalls. "They didn't even have to be Rangers. I always cared about player personnel and how teams are built. That always fascinated me, and I figured that would be something I wanted to do someday. Of course, I came to realize that getting a job running a major-league baseball team was about a hundred times more scarce than actually getting to play major-league baseball, but it was always something that I was interested in as long as I can remember."

But his passion for the pastime would not manifest itself till years later--1998, to be exact, and Newberg likes to be exact about such things.

Back then, he was a regular contributor to the Rangers message board on The Dallas Morning News' Web site, and there weren't many; this was, after all, when the Internet was still more rumor than fact. Newberg was writing about a 25-year-old right-handed pitcher the Rangers acquired in January, a nobody who had excelled in the Independent Northern League named Jeff Zimmerman. Newberg loved his story as much as the guy's potential--this dude from Canada who'd gone undrafted, played two seasons at Texas Christian University, ended up pitching in France in 1994 and wound up in Texas after faxing sign-me letters to every team in major-league baseball. Newberg became Zimmerman's biggest cheerleader on the site, while touting a few other prospects killing time, most notably Ruben Mateo, the outfielder who was poised to become this team's next Juan Gonzalez.

"I'd read maybe an article or two about Jeff in Baseball America, so I knew his background, and being a relief pitcher he's pitching every other day, and so I'm posting what he's doing, and I'm figuring out the Ranger bullpen, as always, needs a little boost and this Zimmerman guy's gonna help," Newberg recalls. "And I'd actually gotten the chance to see Mateo play in the minors a few times, and I've always been in love with big outfield arms. When I see a guy who can throw, he can do anything offensively and I have a soft spot for that. So I'm writing about Mateo and Zimmerman, and nobody else really knows about these guys, or really doesn't care."