Just so there's no confusion, beginning at 7 tonight you won't be able to post comments to Unfair Park. Our crack IT staff informs me this outage will last no longer than 30 minutes -- but they said Tuesday night's maintenance outage would last no more than an hour or two, and it went till the wee small hours of Wednesday morning and didn't do much to correct our server issues keeping us from posting items at present. (This item here is but a brief break in the inaction, trust me.) So, fingers crossed.
When service is restored, I'll delete this item and pretend the whole thing never happened. At least, till it happens again tomorrow. And if this is the last thing I ever post to Unfair Park, I love you all. Yes, even you.
Oh, and so I'm not completely useless, here's Will Leitch's Texas Rangers preview posted today to Deadspin. Actually, it's a Texas Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux what-do-he-do:
Rangers general manager Jon Daniels, who has turned the franchise around before his 33rd birthday, says Maddux is "the most prepared and the best communicator," which sounds like corporate speak to me: I half expect Daniels to congratulate Maddux on his ability to think outside the box and not jump to conclusions. But maybe that's it: Maybe the job of pitching coach is such a fungible, mercurial one that someone who shows up and treats it like an actual job, with charts and graphs and tendencies and scary Excel documents, really can make a difference. Maddux appears to have wanted to be a pitching coach since early in his career, and his strength appears to be "understanding the art of pitching." This seems like a corollary to the What Makes A Good Manager formula: Being a substandard player who spent a lot of time on the bench. Those who can't do, teach.Update Friday morning: We're fully operational again. Far as you know.
