Pitchers. And. Catchers. Report.

It’s always an occasion for celebration, every year. For me, now more than ever.

I think about this work of art just about every day. And probably not for the reason you might think.

It’s emblazoned, of course, because of what it represents, because of what warranted it. But for me, the most striking image within the image is because the impossible happened.

Corey Seager was more animated than me.

Of course, nobody was less animated than me in that moment. But I’m pretty sure I’d only seen Seager truly in his Rangers feels, at least visibly, once before that — when he hit The Home Run five nights earlier — but I can assure you that, I’m betting just like you, I was coming out of my skin that time with 100 times the insanity that our shortstop was.

Won’t ever forget either moment. The first: the most frenzied I’ve ever been at a sporting event. The second: the quietest.

I don’t expect I’ll ever experience anything like the latter again (and I’m totally at peace with that). As for the former, I want that back, more than any (sports) thing. Based on the calendar, the first anniversary of the Newberg Report reboot is Friday. But for all intents and purposes, Year Two launches today, as Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, and Jonah Heim and Kyle Higashioka, and the rest of the Rangers’ pitchers and catchers dutifully report to Surprise.

I’ll do so myself, soon enough. I’m on a Year Two mission to chase that feeling again.

Of course, the Rangers will have to do their part. If you’ve read my stuff for 27 years, or 27 days, you know I’m gonna lean into baseball positivity as vigorously as I tend to veer the other way when the stewards of the football team and basketball team butcher things. Baseball — and let’s be honest, this baseball franchise — is the foundation of my happy place, the environment in which I’m easily able to avoid being breathtakingly negative. Like yesterday, when my sports leader Bob Sturm and I worked through a 2025 Rangers primer. It was — right on brand for me — obnoxiously optimistic.

And here we are. Can the Rangers win again this year? I mean, Win? The objective data-sifting models think their chances are pretty good, relative to their foes in the AL West. And for the last 20 years, the people in charge of talent acquisition upstairs at Globe Life Field and, before it, Globe Life Park, along with the owners who fund the effort, have proven to be very interested in finding ways to get better when in-season opportunities are presented, and warranted, and, most years, very good at executing on those opportunities.

A year ago, when we launched this site, I wrote this:

You know how much I love the build when it comes to writing about the Rangers: how we got here, where we stand, where we go from here. That won’t change — but now there’s a whole new (and awesome) prism for us to look through, and I can’t wait to dive into the challenges now facing a world champion and the concept of how the Rangers are facing up to those.

That dive has spanned 294 stories in the past 365 days.

A new dive begins today.

For 20 years, I wrote for myself, first strictly by email and then through a combination of email and website. Many of you were right there with me on that journey, and are the reason I stuck with it. It was a completely homerish, fan-focused, sometimes irreverent, often not-journalistic effort, and I loved it. Then The Athletic came to Dallas in 2018 and asked Bob to put together a staff, which led Bob to ask me if I’d be up for breaking out of my comfort zone and signing on with him. The combination of the names the website had staffed its national desk with (Rosenthal, Stark, Gammons) and my indestructible respect for and belief in Bob elicited an easy yes.

And then, four years later, the New York Times bought The Athletic, and a year after that the pink slips started flying. Somehow the folks in charge decided that moving on from Bob — who was not only comically prolific and excellent but, I would have thought more importantly, writing about one of the most formidable traffic-driving teams in sports media — was a good idea. They clearly forgot to dump the Rangers blogger-turned-“contributor” whom they were (very occasionally) assigning stories to in 2023, even as they’d promoted the team’s beat writer (Levi Weaver) to a national desk without replacing him. But, sort of akin to the TV landscape that magical season, I was there to drop a story only every once in a while. Thankfully, my former Athletic editor Mike Piellucci had invited me to write for D Magazine as well.

Then, in late December of 2023 (maybe only because I happened to ask), The Athletic decided my work product wouldn’t be needed in 2024. A text to Bob was in order. Because he’d been bugging me for months, seemingly days after he’d launched SturmStack that August, to follow him once again — this time to Substack. Not to be part of his team, like he’d offered in 2018. Just because he thought this platform was too good to be true for what he wanted to do and, he thought, for what I’d be able to do with it.

Dude. He was right. I’ve gotten the strong impression Bob wishes he had made this decision for himself before The Athletic made it necessary. I know I wish that for myself. I wish I’d have asked my (final) editor at The Athletic about my long term earlier; the thought of starting this newsletter up in August 2023, rather than six months after that, makes me insane. How often a week would I have written as the Rangers looked to be frittering away a healthy division lead that summer? How often a day would I have written as the Rangers survived that final week and flew to Tampa and then flew to Baltimore and then flew to Houston and then . . . good grief. I would have hit “send” so many times that October.

But no sense in looking back. (Well, I don’t really mean that. Looking back is pretty fantastic.) The point I’m trying to make is htat, while 2024 didn’t pan out the way you and me and Chris Young and Bruce Bochy and Corey Seager hoped, I had an absolute blast putting together the story of that season, piece by piece. And now we get to do it again. Writing for myself (and for you) like I used to is the best.

And here’s the thing: I strongly believe that those six years at The Athletic, and what is now a three-year run and counting at D Magazine, made me better at this. I’m a better writer, I think, thanks to a series of exceptional editors. I’m more professional about it (usually). I took on some journalistic tendencies that I’d never had to before, and as a result I started leaning into research and on-the-record commentary more than I ever had.

Substack has given me the opportunity, if I do this right, to combine all of it.

About that obnoxiously optimistic thing, that pair of ⅞-full mugs that I’m often double-fisting. I would challenge you to find a story that Rangers media has treated negatively while I’ve managed to force a positive spin on it. Now, do I double-down on the positive stuff? Damn right I do. But I’m also capable of negative when my raw emotion as a Rangers fan steers me that way.

It’s just not what I want to write. I’m just about as big a fan of Texas Rangers baseball as I think I can be. I love the game. I love so much about the game. I have since I started swinging a bat from the left side at age four. My appreciation for every aspect of the game — in the batter’s box, on the pitching rubber, in the field, in the dugout, in the C-suite, on the backfields in Surprise that are likely getting manicured at this moment — has evolved in every one of the 50 years since I opened my first Dr Pepper Jr. Rangers goody bag (T-shirt [Dr Pepper logo], cap [Dr Pepper logo], stickers [Dr Pepper logos], a knee patch [Dr Pepper logo], game tickets, boring vouchers for probably-cool things) and continues to evolve.

I expect this space to continue evolving as well. Now I have a better feel for what works best on the Three Up, Three Down gamers. How much more frequently you guys want trade spitballs and mailbags and prospect rankings/projections (work on the season-opening Top 72 is underway). How much less often certain features need to be rolled out, at the expense of the types you want more of. What you want in the weekly Sunday Hops. How interested you guys are in the (very) occasional forays into other local sports. How well the certain-to-become-more-common collab pieces are received.

All of your feedback is heard; keep hitting me up with it.

I’ve got a running list of stories, some ambitious and others more quick-hit, that I have whiteboarded and want to write. The timing on those, I’m happy to say, is unknown. There will be developments the next six weeks in Arizona that none of us have anticipated, and we’ll pivot when those happen. We’ve counted the days down to today. Soon, we’ll be counting them down until we can get the real thing going on March 27 against the Red Sox.

Then we will ebb and flow for six months, and maybe even seven, in lockstep with the team.

Can’t wait. Can’t ever wait.

Soon I’ll be out in Surprise for my semi-annual visit, with plans to follow Sebastian Walcott around like I was a Dr Pepper Jr. Ranger again but getting plenty other things done. Watching, talking, listening, absorbing. And writing.

You guys are the thing that allows me to do this, and I don’t ever take that for granted. Thank you for subscribing and for reading and for interacting over this first year. I’m hopeful you will continue making this community what it is, and what it can be, in Year Two.

With the Athletic and D Magazine experiences, I’ve got a little more objectivity in me than I used to, but at my core I’m still a committed Rangers fan writing for other committed Rangers fans. Some stories will be heavily information-based with a pinch of emotion sprinkled in. Other times, the opposite. Usually positive-minded; occasionally, not.

But I’m always chasing the feeling. The one that animated Corey Seager 15 months and 11 days ago. The one that absolutely shut me down.

Thanks for doing this with me.

(EHStock)