A unanimous vote.
The reality is that most ballplayers eventually suit up for more than one team. If they’re lucky enough to hang around that long.
Actually, if the breaks fall right as far as luck goes, getting to play ball in the big leagues at all is plenty fantastic, and even if it’s just one club then so be it. So says Jason Botts. Guilder Rodriguez would also like a word.
Truth be told, a guy has had his share of very good fortune if he gets so much as the chance to put a pro uniform on. Ask Shawn Gallagher or Jovanny Cedeno, or Tobin Swope or Jason Smiga.
There just aren’t a whole lot of Rusty Greers, or Robin Younts, or Dustin Pedroias, guys who debut in the same uniform they retire in, with no changes of address in between.
It’s a business, and there are people paid well to make a lot of pieces fit a payroll puzzle every year, and win, and if in their best judgment the right decision is to move on, well, there’s a Dallas Cowboys Weekly signed by Terence Newman and a beaten-up Roy Tarpley poster serving as reminders that nostalgia with blinders can be bad sports business.
Now, that’s not to say the teams are always right.
(Tyson Chandler.)
(Mike Napoli.)
(Demarcus Ware.)
But they have to set emotion aside, ignore sentimentality, and look forward.
It’s not unusual that Derek Holland is most likely going to throw his next big league pitch wearing a different jersey. It’s normal.
So are pitching injuries, sadly, and contracts that end up heavy. There are scenarios under which I’m sure Texas would be comfortable bringing a healthy Holland back, but at $11 million the club felt like the better business decision would be to opt for the contracted ability to pay the 30-year-old (whose last fully healthy season was 2013) $1.5 million to terminate the obligation, and proceed from there.
The Rangers have as much right as the other 29 teams at this point to sign Holland for 2017. It could happen. Odds are against it, of course, as he’ll be looking for a clearer path to getting the ball every fifth day than he might have with the Rangers, and the club will look for someone it projects to fit higher in the rotation. But you never know how Holland’s market might develop. He could be back.
If he’s not, I’m going to remember well the kid who went 13-1, 2.27 in his first full pro season (at three levels), and who, three years later, threw one of the most insanely great games in franchise history.
That, right there, is forever.
Careers are not.
Careers with one team are not.
Extraordinary moments are, however, and Derek Holland gave us one of those.
He gave a lot more, too. There have been few local athletes during Holland’s time with Texas who have been as generous and philanthropic with their time.
He was a skinny kid who went to high school in Newark, Ohio and then Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, Alabama, two towns whose combined populations could fill a big league ballpark without the need for standing room. He was the 748th player taken in the 2006 draft, signed by the Rangers 11 months later in the final year that the now-defunct draft-and-follow rule existed.
The odds he overcame were staggering — that is, until he started pitching in the minor leagues. The odds shifted almost overnight from “if” to “when,” and “how good.”
The Rangers will move forward, and so will Holland, and if they do so without each other it could turn out to be the right thing for both. That’s not what the team and the player envisioned when they signed the five-year, $28.5 million contract extension in March 2012, 149 days after his epic Game Four performance, that included two club options, the first of which the Rangers bought out on Monday. But that’s where it is today.
After averaging 195 innings in 2011, 2012, and 2013 — 203 per year if you include the post-season — the lefty managed to log just 203 frames in 2014, 2015, and 2016 combined. His velocity was down this year, and with it his strikeouts. He was more hittable than he’d been in any big league season since his first, and though he finished the season healthy, he was left off the ALDS roster, leaving little doubt where his off-season was headed.
Chances are the Rangers are going to use the $9.5 million savings on a player they believe will fill a greater need than they felt Holland would have. And Holland will have his first-ever opportunity to pick where he plays, not that he wanted to leave. But disappointing departures sometimes lead to productive scenery changes, and fellow Rangers free agents Ian Desmond and Carlos Gomez can tell you all about that.
Holland will pitch somewhere in 2017, maybe here, though probably not, because this is sports. But until the Rangers win a third pennant, and maybe beyond that, he wins the vote, hands down, as the starting pitcher most deserving of a World Series ring in franchise history.
He may not feel like it today, but Derek Holland, the sports epitome of a guy who made his own luck, is one lucky guy.
