Welcome: The First Post

Welcome to Texas Ranger Baseball.

My name is John Paul Cook and I am a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Oklahoma (you can see my OU website here). I lived in Dallas for most of my life before I moved up here for school, and I remain a die-hard Texas Rangers fan.

My original plan was to name this both this blog and this blog's URL "Hello Win Column," for the late great Mark Holtz's signature phrase that marked every Ranger victory. However, this name was already taken by a blog that was only posted to once in July 2006. I've emailed the moderator of the site to see if he will relinquish the name, but I'm not going to hold my breath. So, for now and possibly for always, the URL for this page will be http://texasrangerbaseball.blogspot.com/.

I got inspiration to build this site from the already-established Rangers blogs such as Baseball Time in Arlington, Lone Star Ball, and The Newberg Report. While I never frequented the comments section on any of these pages, I often found myself wanting to write and post my own thoughts and analyses of the Texas Rangers.

While I would love it if people were to actually follow and read my blog, I'm mostly just doing this because I love the Rangers. If my mother is the only one who reads my postings, that will be just fine with me (thanks mom).

If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, etc., please feel free to send me an email or post a comment.

My primary goal is to write at least one posting every day. For now, I am just going to keep that in mind and see how it goes. Hopefully I will have worked out a good system for how to do this by the time the season starts.

If there is actually someone out there reading, enjoy!

John Paul