Strong.

It was awesome.

From mid-afternoon until 9:56 pm, it was awesome.

More than 100 of us gathered in a room for a few hours, and we heard Scott and Mike hold forth for an hour and we heard JD answer a thousand questions for nearly an hour and a half and, in between, we watched this incredible video and raised $18,700 for Julie McGraw and her family.

$18,700.

The McGraw family grew by more than 100 yesterday. Julie and Gary leave for Northern California this week for a neuro-clinical program they were just accepted into, and they march on the shoulders of a much larger family.

The baseball game was awesome. Cole Hamels was good, not great, but he kept the bullpen down for seven innings and his teammates battled. They competed, they did the little things, they battled, and they won on a score rather than an out, and for those of us thinking #McGrawStrong on Monday, that was pretty fitting.

And awesome.

As Devin put it: Nice night for a walk.

This is the kind of morning when I’d typically talk about the 10/240 that Robinson Cano signed for the same winter as Shin-Soo Choo’s 7/130, and how one of them came up with a huge, possibly decisive play on defense late while the other had his wrong foot on the bag on the second bunt of the bottom of the ninth, a lazy play that was pretty decisive, too, and while I’m not about to suggest either one of them is anywhere near making his contract a non-issue (though it might surprise you which is out-OPS’ing the other this year), I know which one of them at least looked like he was playing with purpose all night.

He was on the team celebrating a sixth straight win, eighth straight at home, 13th of 18 overall.

But this isn’t that kind of morning for me. I won’t even dump 100 words on Sam Dyson’s groundout-groundout-groundout eighth.

I’m thinking more today about Dyson’s bullpenmate Keone Kela, and what he did off the field on Monday for the McGraw family seven hours earlier.

It was just awesome.

Awesome on an Adrian Beltre level, and that’s about the highest compliment I can pay in the space of just a couple dozen words.

A week ago the Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs post-season odds generators had Texas flagging low in the single digits as far as percentage chances go.

Today both have the Rangers in the 24-25 percent range.

Let’s go.

It was a great night, capping off a great day. A strong day.

Thank you.