Fall Instructs, 2025: Day 1.

The Rangers have turned dozens of teenagers pro in 2025. I pulled up a seat alongside the brand new path that four of them are charting together.

Having done this semi-annually for more than three decades, including these last 23 years when this team has trained in Arizona, the playbook is fairly well set. Wake up savagely early, get on a plane before there are shadows on the ground, and reclaim just about the entire clock time on the way to Phoenix by clearing a pair of time zones to the left. The idea: get a full experience on the backfields that first day, and don’t waste any of it traveling.

So I was awake at 4 a.m. on Wednesday in Dallas — 2 a.m. Phoenix time — in the air by a little after 7, and touched down at 7:30 Mountain Time.

By time I’d gotten to the rent car center and then completed the 45-minute drive to Surprise — with its familiar quiet and rejuvenating bustle-less-ness, pierced every once in a while on the drive up 303 by formations of Luke Air Force Base trainees soaring sonically overhead while getting their own drills in — I parked around 9 and walked back to the cages. The piped-in music was loud, as it always is, but that sort of thing doesn’t rattle your routine once you’ve done this as long as I have. It’s normal. It’s just soundtrack.

But then I heard something decidedly not normal, and I was awake.

It was the sound off Jack Wheeler’s bat.