Can’t get revved up about the Texas-NY game

Truly I wish I could become more enthused about the Rangers and the Yankees in the American League Championship Series.  It would be the Rangers first time to head to the series if they win. Even though the Yankees lose sometimes it is hard to beat the best team money can buy.

I listen to sport radio some when I am riding around in my truck and have come to conclude the audience is a bunch of guys, ex-jocks, gamblers, Type ones who want to see the best teams money can buy. Maybe I am wrong, but that’s my take on it, having done no research. It would stand to reason that is where the money is at on the radio. You hear lots and lots of beer ads, I can’t think of any others but that is just a temporary mind block.

Colin Cowherd of ESPN Radio, whom I think is immensely talented, typifies his listeners it seems. He plays up the teams in his big markets, Dallas, New York, a little bit of Houston, He touts the Kobe Bryants, the Brett Favres, the Alex Rodriguezs because they are the best. He hates that TCU and Boise State are on the BCS Top Ten and Alabama and Texas are not. Why? Because the Tide and Longhorns  are the best. Cowherd does not appear to mind at all those who call him an idiot because he doesn’t buy into media fairytales when it comes to sports stories. In short, his mantra is “Give me the richest players and you will there find the best.”

All of which is true to a certain extent. The best players bring the play way up in the game. But there are also times when you need a miracle. The Miracle Mets. The Miracle on Ice. The Dream Team.

Sometimes you need the Jason McElwains. You may remember the You Tube videos or the TV stories. McElwain was an autistic kid, team equipment  manager for the Greece Athena High School basketball team in Rochester, N.Y. The team was playing its last game of the season. McElwain was a senior and this would be his last game. The coach gave him a jersey and  hoped he might even play. He did. McElwain hit six 3-pointers and another shot for 20 points in three minutes. Even if you don’t like sports you have to love stories like that. And that, is my point exactly.

I haven’t followed the Texas Rangers much this year because I no longer live near the so-called D-FW “Metroplex” as I did in the past. I realize some might say that is ridiculous especially my friend who never went to Texas A & M and is a huge Aggies fan, or my friend who lives in El Paso and is — I suppose he still is or at least he was — a Raiders fan. That is partly because he lives closer to California than Dallas or Houston. But that is just me. I only have a few teams and even among those I am not fanatical. I do know Nolan Ryan is running the team (he  is the Rangers’ president.) Even if I didn’t know it, I could have seen it from the final playoff game between Texas and Tampa Bay that the stamp of that old workhorse the Ryan Express, one of the game’s best, was on the team when ace Rangers’ pitcher Cliff Lee went the full nine innings. That is something you would see Ryan do and some of the old pitchers before there was a reliever for every inning after the seventh.

Right now, I am more interested in football, particularly my old high school team and the Texans. Also, my college team and the local college team. Perhaps for some in Dallas the ALCS is a nice diversion from the 1-3 Cowboys which seem to be going down like the good ship Titanic.

That doesn’t mean I won’t watch the Rangers-Yankees game, or at least some of it, tonight. And, sorry to be a fair weather friend to a team that I like and one that I liked long, long ago — in that bygone world of Maris and Mantle — when it possessed something more akin to magic than to a gigantic automatic teller, but I probably won’t be that interested until if and when the Rangers beat the Dollar Bills Yankees. Good luck on that Nolan.