Bang.

November 20 is one of those days on the baseball calendar when the ratio that’s most appropriate to focus on isn’t strikeout-to-walk or groundball-to-flyball, but instead bang-to-hype.

Teams spend hours and days evaluating which draft-eligible prospects to place on their 40-man rosters, a layered analysis that weighs not only which players are on the right path to the big leagues and most likely to be lost in the Rule 5 Draft if not protected but also which of them are least likely to stick with a new club if chosen.

And writers and bloggers spend hours and column inches predicting those decisions and breaking them down . . . in spite of the reality that the December draft historically offers marginally more impact than scouting the independent leagues. A quick review of Rule 5’s history reveals that, in the last five years, the drafted players who have played for the Rangers are Seth Rosin, Chris McGuiness, Coty Woods, Nate Adcock, and Mason Tobin, which doesn’t count Ben Snyder, who never made it to the big leagues. So, uh . . . yeah.

But we dig it because the first month of the year with no baseball to watch feels like it’s been six months since ball, and because November 20 is a day to celebrate prospects and that’s fun, and because it’s a signpost of sorts to see your team and the other 29 all drop a handful of players from the bottom of their 40-man rosters and reinvigorate things with young players to dream on.

November 20 is a day of baseball hope.

The Rangers’ decision to draft righthander Luke Jackson in the supplemental first round out of a Florida high school in 2010 carried an expectation that he’d be rostered on November 20, 2014, just like fellow high school picks Jake Skole and Kellin Deglan, who were taken 30 and 23 picks earlier, but player development in baseball isn’t like most sports. Player development is hard.

Righthander Jerad Eickhoff (15th round) was the seventh college player Texas selected in the 2011 draft (from a community college that’s hardly more recognizable than Jackson’s high school), but the only one the club added to the roster yesterday — although the ninth (Ryan Rua: 17th round), 10th (Nick Martinez: 18th round), and 18th (Phil Klein: 30th round) beat him by a few months. Outfielder Zach Cone (supplemental first round) and lefthander Will Lamb (second round) weren’t rostered on Thursday, with only one of them a real risk to lose in the draft — and it’s not the one the Rangers’ ranked higher in June 2011.

With regard to the players the Rangers signed in the 2009-10 J2 class, it wasn’t long before catcher Jorge Alfaro — signed at age 16 for $1.3 million, the most any team had ever paid an amateur player from Colombia — was considered a lock for November 2014 addition to the roster along with fellow class members Jurickson Profar and Luis Sardinas (both of whom arrived sooner, of course), while a far less heralded member of that summer’s J2 crop, shortstop Hanser Alberto, carried no such expectations when he signed for $65,000 out of the Dominican Republic, even if senior director of minor league operations Mike Daly secretly held out hope since Alberto was the first player he ever signed (then as director of international scouting).

Alfaro, Jackson, Eickhoff, and Alberto all played at least part of their 2014 seasons with AA Frisco, and all four were rewarded last night with the validation, the pay bump, and the spring training nameplate that addition to the 40-man roster provides. There’s nothing unique about the fact that all wore the RoughRiders uniform last summer — that’s the level where you often see your first-time draft-eligibles stating their case for roster protection — but it does lead to another point I’d like to make here, which is less about the decision about whom to shield from the draft or whom the Rangers, faced with a tremendous roster crunch, opted to risk losing.

On Frisco’s 2014 roster were not only those four, each of whom will be on his first option when camp breaks this March, but also the following players who weren’t added to the roster because they didn’t yet need to be:

Joey Gallo. Chi Chi Gonzalez. Nomar Mazara. Jake Thompson. Nick Williams. Andrew Faulkner. Keone Kela. Alec Asher. Michael De Leon. Pat Cantwell. Josh McElwee.

Plus a few who could have been protected but weren’t and who, if the Rangers are fortunate enough to slide them through the December 11 draft, are legitimate candidates to get to the big leagues: Lamb. Odubel Herrera. Trever Adams. Martire Garcia.

If you think the purpose of this morning’s report is solely to share the Kool-Aid, consider these two Thursday tweets from Baseball America’s Ben Badler, who’s far from a Rangers homer:

Keep hearing great things from scouts about Jake Thompson. Stuff is there for a potential frontline starter. Strong trade by the Rangers.

Going over our AL West Top 30s. Significant talent gap between the Astros/Rangers and every other farm system in the division.

Love that.

To make room on the roster for Alfaro, Jackson, Eickhoff, and Alberto, the Rangers dropped righthander Miles Mikolas, lefthander Aaron Poreda, and outfielders Jim Adduci and Daniel Robertson, releasing the first two so they could pursue opportunities in Japan, designating Adduci for assignment with the same possible outcome, and trading Robertson to the Angels, where special assistant to the GM Tim Bogar likely put in a good word.

Dropping both Adduci and Robertson leaves Texas with an outfield group of Shin-Soo Choo, Leonys Martin, Rua, Jake Smolinski, and Michael Choice (and possibly Mitch Moreland), a pretty clear signal that the club will add an everyday outfield bat this winter — not that keeping Adduci or Robertson would have meaningfully changed that — but that’s a discussion for another time.

As is the near-certainty that the roster trimming isn’t finished, even if Texas doesn’t pull off a trade of multiple rostered players for one in return before the Winter Meetings, because you can bet the Rangers’ roster will have fewer than 40 players on it when the Rule 5 Draft gets underway. Players like Adam Rosales, Michael Kirkman, and Ben Rowen are likely in some amount of roster jeopardy, for three very different reasons.

Another time on that, too.

For now the talk is about the window that’s open and isn’t going to start shutting anytime soon, which is not to say the Rangers aren’t going to prioritize winning while Yu Darvish is guaranteed to be around, but the bigger point is that you look at Alfaro, Jackson, Eickhoff, and Alberto, ages 21, 23, 24, and 22, and then at the four players dropped from the roster, ages 26, 28, 29, and 29 — none of whom other than Poreda ever had the upside the four newest roster members are thought to have — and couple that with the idea that Darvish and Choo and Moreland and Profar and Prince Fielder and Tanner Scheppers and Alexi Ogando should be ready to roll when Pitchers & Catchers Report, and that Martin Perez is looking at a mid-season return, and tack on the likelihood, by all accounts, that Texas will add a frontline starting pitcher and an impact bat and a 1 or 1A catcher before we get to Surprise, and those little Ben Badler tweets about the Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle farm systems serve to simply pile onto what’s already a big and awesome heap of hype.

And that’s what 40-man roster decisions and trade rumors and prospect rankings amount to — a bunch of off-season hype. The bang comes later, if it comes at all, and maybe in six years we’re talking about Hanser Alberto being dropped from someone’s roster so he can hook on with a club in Korea.

But we do feed on the hype, and the hope, because sports, and while yesterday’s news amounted to fairly routine procedural steps that would have landed in the agate type back in the days of agate type, the implications give us plenty to dream on, and some baseball teams are in a much better position than others to give their fans reason to believe the bang-to-hype barometer stands to swing decisively in the good direction in the near term, the long term, or both.