Hang in.

As awful as the Longhorns football team was last year, championships are difficult to win, and I'll admit that the 2005 national title extended their honeymoon long enough for me that I wasn't too cheesed off by what happened in 2010. Flip side: As long as some of us had waited for the Mavericks to win, and the way they seemed to have the 2006 Finals in hand, every season's premature playoff ouster since that series loss is nothing but a reminder of how pathetic it was that Dallas let the Heat back in it and spit up what will probably be its one real chance to win before the Dirk window closes. The Rangers, having come up just short in 2010, don't get the UT free pass, but at the same time the World Series loss doesn't have the feel of a flubbed opportunity that may not present itself again, visceral reactions to the last week of baseball notwithstanding. Or even further back than that. After a 9-1 start to the season, Texas has since (starting with the game in which Josh Hamilton was injured) gone 7-12. But the World Series team was 15-14 through the same number of games, one game worse than this year's club. And that 15-14 group a year ago had a fully healthy Hamilton, Nelson Cruz with a 1.177 OPS, and Vladimir Guerrero hitting .340 with only eight strikeouts in 106 at-bats and a .528 slug that was only third best on the roster. And a fully healthy Neftali Feliz, Colby Lewis holding opponents to a .199 average through six starts, and C.J. Wilson near the top of the league with a 1.65 ERA. That club was tied for first in the AL West, just as this one is. If you think the rotation is deficient this year, through those 29 games in 2010 the club had used five starting pitchers – Wilson, Lewis, Matt Harrison, Scott Feldman, and Rich Harden. Feel better about that group than the current one, which features Alexi Ogando and Derek Holland rather than Feldman and Harden? But get this: After those 29 games a year ago, Texas had yet to make a roster move with its pitching staff. The Rangers have already used 17 pitchers in 2011 and in fact began the season with 13 pitchers. Last year they used only 12 through this point on the schedule. The bullpen is a huge concern, but at the same time yesterday's extra-inning affair was apparently (and shockingly) the first time all year that Texas lost a game it led after six innings. One thing 2010 taught us as Rangers fans was to be patient. Tommy Hunter hadn't shown up at this time last year – and wouldn't for another month – and he still won 13 games. Ogando was a month away from arriving, too, and he gave Texas a 1.30 ERA and a strikeout per inning out of the bullpen. Is it out of the question that Tanner Scheppers can be that guy, someone who gets here in June – yes, the plan has been to groom him as a starter, but clearly he'll be used in short doses once he's back from his latest lower back setback since he has only one appearance (two innings) under his belt in the last month – and works in the upper 90s with a wipeout breaking ball that big leaguers haven't seen, solving the bridge inning issue from the right side the way Ogando did a year ago? There won't be a Cliff Lee on this year's trade market, but remember that Lee won only four of his 15 regular season starts for Texas. There will be available starters who can give the Rangers more than that (though, to be fair, Lee was acquired for October and earned his place in this franchise's history with the work he did in the post-season – and that's the guy that will be hard to find in July). Ian Kinsler will be better than he was in April. So will Cruz. Hamilton will be back, as will Feliz. Elvis Andrus will be more dependable defensively. Lewis won't continue to put up a 5.70 ERA. And maybe most importantly, as pitchers get healthy and others advance from the minor leagues or arrive via trade, the bullpen is not going to simultaneously feature David Bush and Brett Tomko and Ryan Tucker all year. Cody Eppley 2011 might be just as effective as Darren O'Day 2010. Might. Remember, despite not having any real room to stretch out financially last summer, Jon Daniels (now the 11th-most tenured GM in the game) traded for Lee and Bengie Molina and Jeff Francoeur and Jorge Cantu and Mark Lowe and Cristian Guzman. There's exponentially more money muscle now. Martin Perez and the phenomenal Robbie Erlin and David Perez and Roman Mendez and Barret Loux and Justin Grimm and Joe Wieland and Robbie Ross and Miguel De Los Santos and Luke Jackson aren't going to help the big club this year, but Scheppers and Eric Hurley and Yoshinori Tateyama might, and I'm not sure yet which category to put Neil Ramirez into. As for that first group, and the tier behind it, and the tier behind that one, some among those guys are going to help this year in another way, moved at trade time, and don't be surprised if Matt West, who flamed out after four seasons trying to make it as a third baseman taken in Round Two out of Houston Bellaire High School, gets asked about by teams shopping veterans and looking for one more tack-on player to finalize a deal. Flashing 99 mph with the makings of a swing-and-miss slider, with an arm that has zero wear on it, puts him on the Watch List map. Plenty of teams will be interested in Chris Davis, too, as well as a growing number of prospects on the left side of the infield. Leonys Martin's landmark deal isn't official yet, but he's working out with the Rangers at extended spring training right now and will instantly change the nature of the organization's center field depth. Center fielders are popular at trade time. Keep an eye on the Brewers. They've now lost three straight, sit 2.5 games back in the division and 5.5 back in the Wild Card chase, and are just now getting Zack Greinke back. There was a point in the first half last year when Texas lost four straight in Kansas City and Minnesota – but then rattled off eight straight series wins. Then Texas dropped four in a row to the Orioles going into the All-Star Break, with a trip to Boston and Detroit and home series against the Angels and A's looming after the Break. The would lose exactly one game per series in that stretch to open the second half, going 10-4 and extending a 4.5-game division lead to 8.5 games in the process. Hang in there. Ignore my kneejerk in-game tweets – while I've learned to take both losses and wins in stride at my advancing age, I'm still recklessly emotional in the moment (especially when the baseball is sloppy) – and hang in there. This is a really good baseball team, one that's getting Feliz back Friday and maybe Hamilton just a couple weeks after that and that has plenty of reasons to believe that it can and will play much better over the next 133 games than it has over the first 29, a stretch that, in spite of the injuries and poor starts and occasional defensive lapses, still has this team sharing the division lead just as it did at this point in 2010. We're at the point on the schedule that's roughly equivalent to four minutes left in the first quarter, which last night had the Mavericks trailing the Lakers, 18-12, and depending on which horse you had in that race, giving up at that point might have been a regrettable choice.