The Ticket radio station fires producer Mike Bacsik for Twitter comments
Mike Bacsik, the producer at “The Ticket” KTCK-AM (1310), suspended by the station Monday for remarks he made through his personal Twitter account, was fired Tuesday.
Dan Bennett, market manager for Cumulus Media Inc., parent company of The Ticket, said the suspension was issued to allow further investigation. “When we got all the facts and were able to look at the entire situation, we made our decision,” Bennett said.
Bacsik said he was called into the station late Tuesday afternoon and told he was fired after a story on the incident was aired nationally on cable television’s CNN. He said he had hoped to be back working on Norm Hitzges’ late morning sports talk show next week.
Bacsik said he understood why he was fired but was disappointed. He said he wished the station had given him a minute of airtime on Monday to say “how truly sorry I am.”
Bacsik, 32, said he was “drunk at a bar” Sunday night as he watched the Mavericks lose Game 4 of their NBA playoff series to San Antonio. He began sending disparaging tweets that included “Congrats to all the dirty mexicans in San Antonio” and “If I get cancer and I’m going to die I wil blow NBA offices.”
A former major league pitcher, Bacsik is most known in baseball for serving up Barry Bonds’ record-breaking 756th home run in 2007.
Bennett said Bacsik had been “a good employee” and there had been no previous issues. But Bacsik’s final public communication while a Ticket employee reflected poorly on the station.
Bacsik joined The Ticket fulltime on March 1, 2009 to produce Hitzges’ show. He also co-hosted a weekend sports talk show in an effort to learn the business and reach his ultimate goal – hosting his own weekday talk show.
“I know words on paper can sound cold and harsh without emotion,” Bacsik said. “But for the people of San Antonio who probably will never forgive me, I say I am sorry.”
They traded elbows, bruises and fouls, two old Lone Star rivals cracking each other, and somewhere from this scrum the ball fittingly found its way to the man with the bandaged, busted nose
Manu Ginobili(notes) rose from the corner and buried a long, arcing shot, thrusting one more dagger into this Texas blood war.
These San Antonio Spurs don’t scare easily, and that explains as much as anything why they’re one victory from flooring the Dallas Mavericks. They entered the West playoffs as a No. 7 seed and could emerge from their opening series as the conference’s heavyweight. Ginobili’s fearlessness has always given the Spurs reason to believe, but this also now spreads from the youngest on their roster.
George Hill(notes)? DeJuan Blair(notes)?
“They’re not afraid of anything,” Tim Duncan(notes) said.
The Mavericks now realize as much. On Sunday, the teams combined for three flagrant fouls, one technical and an ejection. Eduardo Najera(notes) slung Ginobili hard to the court by the neck, and this was after Ginobili already looked like he’d gone three rounds with a school bully, his fractured nose hidden beneath a mound of tape and gauze. Jason Kidd(notes) andDirk Nowitzki(notes) also received hard fouls.
“It was a brawl, a street fight,” Nowitzki said.
Hill and Blair felt right at home in the middle of it. Young and hungry, both from hardscrabble backgrounds, they have given the Spurs an edge, a toughness, they haven’t always had in recent years. They look the part – between the two of them they have more tattoos than the Spurs’ past three championship teams combined – and also play it. With Duncan making just a single shot and Ginobili missing 12, with Tony Parker(notes) looking almost as ordinary, Hill carried the Spurs’ offense, shedding his defenders with a series of crossovers and step-backs, throwing in five 3-pointers on his way to 29 points, just two fewer than the Spurs’ three stars totaled.
The Mavs couldn’t keep a body in front of Hill or Blair, who scrapped and fought, frustrating the Dallas big men with his limitless energy.Richard Jefferson(notes) scored 15 points and Antonio McDyess(notes) hounded Nowitzki, each also fitting just like the Spurs dreamed they’d fit. Three minutes into the second half, the Mavs led by 12. By the end of the third quarter, they were down seven, losing their grip on the game and maybe the series.
Over the course of a week, Gregg Popovich’s dog pound had somehow transformed from poodle to pit bull.
“We’re not going to back down, we’re not going to take hits and let them keep doing it,” Hill said. “…We can deliver the blow, too.”
One moment illustrated that. Nowitzki became entangled with Blair while waiting on a free throw. Blair stepped into Nowitzki, who flung Blair’s arm off him. The officials hit Nowitzki with a technical, and Blair smiled as he slowly backed away.
“Dirk being Dirk, me being me – and that’s not good,” Blair would later say with a laugh.
Blair celebrated his 21st birthday just three days earlier. Hill will turn 24 in another week. The Spurs don’t usually win with players so young and with their stars contributing so little. Still, all of their championship teams owned the same trait: From Mario Elie to Stephen Jackson(notes), from Steve Kerr toBruce Bowen(notes), from Malik Rose(notes) to Fabricio Oberto(notes), the Spurs’ supporting casts were cut from the same sturdy fiber that Hill and Blair now share. There’s a reason why Jaren Jackson left the Spurs with a championship ring and Hedo Turkoglu(notes) didn’t. To survive in San Antonio, one must not only withstand the heat of the playoffs, but also Popovich’s personal fire.
Flame-retardant players aren’t easy to find. The Spurs took Hill late in the first round of the 2008 draft, and nearly every other team in the league asked why. The Spurs had moments where they wondered, too. They liked Hill’s length, toughness and work ethic, but a horrendous summer league performance left them questioning whether he’d ever have the offensive talent to match. Hill looked even worse when he initially arrived in San Antonio to work out in the summer. In one pick-up game, he was outplayed by the teen-aged son of Spurs director of player personnel Dell Demps. Popovich went from wondering whether Hill could make the roster to debating whether to he needed to clean out his front office.
But the more time Popovich spent around Hill, the more he found to like. He has since called Hill “my favorite player of all-time,” and there are reasons for that, too: When Popovich barks, Hill looks his coach in the eyes and listens. From players to coaches to management, the opinion is unanimous: We trust this kid.
A year ago, that wasn’t yet the case. On the eve of the postseason, Popovich declared, “These playoffs aren’t for George.” As it turned out, they weren’t really for Roger Mason(notes). Popovich eventually realized his mistake, and Hill contributed in the final couple games of the Spurs’ first-round loss to Dallas.
This season’s playoffs didn’t start much better. Hill sprained his right ankle the first week of April, then tweaked it by stepping on a photographer in the team’s regular-season finale against the Mavericks. He started the playoffs, but was soon given a seat on the bench early in the second half of Game 1 after failing to secure a routine inbounds pass.
Hill’s ankle still troubled him a little, but that wasn’t the true problem. “He just wasn’t ready mentally,” one team official said. “The playoffs are different.”
Hill responded with seven points the following game and 17 in Game 3. On Sunday, he courageously led the Spurs out of their hole. San Antonio has now won three straight games in the series and needs just one more victory to advance to the second round. Suddenly, the West has never looked more open. This also goes back to something Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told a Dallas radio station about the state of the Western Conference field shortly before the postseason began.
“You look down the list,” Cuban said, “and nobody’s afraid of anybody.”
The seventh-seeded Spurs and fifth-seeded Utah Jazz hold 3-1 leads in their series. The sixth-seeded Portland Trail Blazers, like the Jazz, had seen their roster splintered by injuries, yet they just evened their series against the Phoenix Suns. The eighth-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder were supposedly too young, too inexperienced to handle the champion Los Angeles Lakers and they’re headed to L.A. with the series split after four games.
The Mavericks never figured they’d be within a game of elimination this early in the playoffs. They were supposed to be deeper and tougher than previous seasons, a legit title contender, and yet even they had to admit the obvious about Sunday’s letdown.
“We didn’t have composure down the stretch,” Brendan Haywood(notes) said.
Neither team expects the physicality to let up in Game 5. There will be more elbows, more bruises, more hard fouls.
“It’s just getting started,” Mavs guard Jason Terry(notes) vowed. “…It’s going to get a lot worse.”
The Mavericks also reminded themselves of a few other things. They’ve got Game 5 at home and, if they can get to it, Game 7. If they can contain Duncan, Ginobili and Parker as well as they did in Game 4, they’ll take their chances. They’ve also lost the series’ past two games by a combined seven points, so they can’t be thatfar off. Anything to help them believe.
Following an unimpactful 2009 draft class (David Buehler notwithstanding), the Dallas Cowboys made something of a splash in 2010
The team traded up to land former Biletnikoff finalist Dez Bryant in the first round, and traded up again in the second in order to steal Penn State linebacker Sean Lee–”steal” being the operative word here, as some see Lee as the bargain pick of the draft. Dallas may have won some help in the secondary in the fourth round with the selection of Akwasi Owusu-Ansah, a cornerback/safety and small-school stud from IUP.
However, Dallas’s “best player available” strategy may have hurt them, at least insofar as draft grading is concerned. Most experts deemed the offensive line to be the team’s greatest need, which they addressed to some degree in the sixth round with the selection of Sam Young, a Notre Dame tackle with great workouts and unimpressive game film.
So while there’s little doubt that this draft yielded some serious talent for Dallas, the failure to address needs might explain some of the lower grades doled out by national experts:
ESPN.com: B-
NFL.com: A-
CBSSports.com: B-
Dallas Morning News: C
The News argues that, aside from Bryant, Lee will be the only selection to make an impact this season; which may be true. We love the selection of Bryant. We love the selection of Lee. We kind of love the selection of Owusu-Ansah, as well. But the question marks at safety and tackle, which stuck out before the draft, remain in its wake, at least to some degree. This, with apologies to Jerry and co., hinders us from giving the team a more glittering grade.
On paper, this looks like a really close series. I would be surprised if it didn’t go six or seven games. There are a few key areas, matchups, and players that I think will swing the series one way or the other. They are:
1. Who stops Dirk? The Spurs no longer have Bruce Bowen or Robert Horry or David Robinson–no shut down defender and no athletic big alongside Duncan. Dirk should have his way with the Spurs in this series. Duncan won’t guard Dirk much–he can’t chase Dirk all over the place. Matt Bonner will probably see some time guarding Dirk, as will Richard Jefferson and Antonio McDyess. The only one of those who can cause any problems for Dirk would be Jefferson, but he’s been such a bust this year in San Antonio, I wouldn’t expect much out of him in the postseason. Gregg Popovich does not like to double team, so I’m guessing that he plays Dirk straight up with one of those three guys–and because of that, Dirk should have a very high-scoring series. In the playoffs, you go as far as your star carries you–and Dirk should be able to carry Dallas against the Spurs.
2. Kidd vs Parker. Which point guard imposes his will on the series? Parker always lights up Dallas, and Kidd has been playing great basketball since the big Wiz trade went down. Offensively, Kidd can punish Parker by backing him down, but Parker can return the favor by blowing by Kidd on the other end. Parker’s play has been good, not great, this year–and I still don’t think he’s found his stride since returning from the injury. Kidd seems to be very motivated. Advantage: Kidd.
3. Manu vs Matrix. Ginobili has been playing out of his mind for the last month and a half. If he keeps it up, he could be enough to tilt the series to the Spurs. I’m guessing we will see a lot of Marion on Manu. Marion has been great at shutting down big scorers (think Durant). Whoever wins this battle might just see his team win the war.
4. Small Ball? There is a thought that the Spurs will go small: Parker, Hill, Manu, Jefferson, and Duncan. Jefferson plays Dirk, and the Spurs try to out-quick and out-athlete the Mavs. It could work. Or, they could get killed on the boards. Could also make for a VERY entertaining series.
5. Benches. Both teams have good benches. If Jason Terry is hot, the Mavs have a great chance. If Terry lays bricks, it will be a tough series for Dallas. If the Spurs get consistent three-balls from Mason and Bonner, and get dirty work on the glass from Blair, they have a good chance. Will Roddy B. get to play? I don’t think so–not much more than a couple of minutes a half. Put it this way–if he plays a lot, things may not be going well for Dallas. In the last five games of the regular season, when the push for the number two seed was on, Roddy didn’t play much at all. I think that tells us what Carlisle thinks about having him on the floor when it matters.
In the end, I’m taking Dallas in seven. I’ve watched each team very closely this year–I bet I’ve seen 75% of both team’s games. The Spurs have been very good lately, beating the Lakers, Celts, Magic, Cavs, Suns, and Thunder. That’s huge. But Duncan has lost a step, Parker doesn’t look right, Jefferson still looks lost, and–most importantly–they don’t play defense like they used to. The Spurs have the experience and moxie and head coach to win a series like this, but I think Dallas is the more complete team–and they have the home court. This is the best Dallas team I’ve seen (at least on paper) since the late 80′s, and I don’t expect them to lose in the first round.
Just in case you forgot how important high school football is in Texas, the residents of Allen will soon have a $59.6 million stadium that will leave no doubt.
Next month in the booming north Dallas suburb, ground will be broken on a state-of-the-art, 18,000-seat facility that will feature two decks, a video scoreboard, four concession stands and 12 restrooms. It is scheduled to open in the fall of 2012.
“The community supports our kids in everything: Football, baseball, basketball, band,” Allen coach Tom Westerberg said. “It isn’t just athletics. They really support us with everything we do.
“The new stadium has been discussed for a number of years and the bond was passed. We are very excited to get this project done and get in there and play.”
But before you start throwing out stereotypes that Texans care more about touchdowns than textbooks, understand this:
The stadium was part of a larger $120 million bond package passed in May 2009 that included nearly as much money for a state-of-the-art auditorium for performing arts;
The town approved a bond package of $219 million in November 2008 that called for the building of two new elementary schools, the purchase of 45 school buses and improvements to many of the other elementary and middle schools in the district;
The money for the project could only be used on capital expenses not general education;
And, this is Texas, after all. Last year, the Allen football team played a game before more than 50,000 fans at the new Texas Stadium.The facility will replace Allen’s existing stadium, built in the late 70s when the suburb – located 25 miles north of Dallas – was much smaller. In the past few decades, the area has seen amazing growth.
The high school, built in 2000, has more than 600,000 square feet and serves 3,900 kids – and that’s just between 10th and 12th grades. It is one of the largest in the state and the only one in the district.
A new stadium has been planned since the school was built, but since the area kept growing, capital money went to additional schools first.
“We finally maxed out on growth,” said Tim Carroll, the public information director for the district. “This is something that we have wanted to get done for a while, but we had to build schools first.”
Carroll points out the money being used for the stadium and the performing arts center could not be used for anything else.”In Texas, funding is completely separate between capital projects and general (education) fund,” he said. “If we don’t build the stadium, none of that money could go to teachers or classrooms.”
The proposal passed 63-37.
“This was not that controversial in Allen,” Carroll said.
The stadium will be built in a horseshoe-fashioned sunken bowl with wide concourses. The field will be artificial surface.
Students have their own section in one end zone – in a fashion similar to many colleges – to create a wall of sound. The band – the largest in the country with more than 600 members – will be on the other end. There will be a wall of honor for former greats from the program.
And, of course, plenty of seats.
There will be roughly 5,000 reserved seats with seatbacks – all of which will be sold as season tickets. Another 2,700 will be sold as general admission; 4,000 will go to the students and 1,000 will go to the band. There will be seating for 5,300 visiting fans on the other side of the field.
The school’s current facility has only 7,000 seats, though Allen brings in 7,000 more temporary seats each game. School officials are confident they will have little trouble filling the new stadium.
“I know there are people in Allen that didn’t come out to the old stadium because they knew there wouldn’t be seats,” Westerberg said. “Now we should be able to alleviate that problem with this new building.”
Allen, which won the Texas 5A state title and finished as the No. 2 team in the RivalsHigh Top 100 football rankings in 2008, is one of the powerhouse teams in the state.
Allen is 67-12 since Westerberg took over as coach in 2004. The Dallas Cowboys have just 53 wins over that same time frame.
“The old Eagle Stadium was very good to us but just got too small,” Westerberg said. “We hope the new field will continue to be a home-field advantage for us.”
Carroll said he can understand how this project may look in a time of financial concerns, but he said it makes sense in Allen.
“(The cost) may appear high to other parts of the country, but it compares to what people are doing here,” he said. “It becomes an economy of scale.”
He points out that the town has only one high school – and that the stadium will be used for more than just football.
“This facility will be used by the entire community,” he said.
Dallas Celebs Embarrass Themselves to Promote Super Bowl
A commenter by the name of Matt (tip o’ the hat) pointed us to the below video of local celebs singing Faith Hill’s “This Kiss” by way of promoting Super Bowl XLV. Pretty funny stuff. A few observations and questions: 1) Dirk and Romo appear to have the most fun with it. Good on them. 2) If I wanted to see Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck make out with a woman who I assume is wife, I would put a surveillance camera in their breakfast nook. Please: no more. 3) Who is the white guy in the TCU hat? Neither Zac nor I could ID him. 4) Similarly, who is the black gentleman of generous proportions? 5) How much did Scott Murray pay to be included in this video? (Update: Apologies to TCU football coach Gary Patterson. But yours is not a face, apparently, that we can pick out of a lineup. Even when you’re wearing TCU gear. Apologies, too, to Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief, whose mustache I should have recognized with my eyes closed.)
Together again, Eric Dickerson and Craig James faced an eerily pleasant situation Friday night when it came to talking SMU football
The backfield duo famously known as the Pony Express during the program’s heyday nearly three decades ago smiled and laughed while talking about the good times to come for their alma mater under coach June Jones.
And not once, for a change, did those two dirty little words that start with a D and a P come up.
They’ll probably cringe at the mere mention of the death penalty here on such a festive evening. But, that’s the point. Dickerson and James have finally outrun those ghosts from a rampantly fast-and-loose era in the defunct Southwest Conference. The NCAA could have dropped the hammer anywhere. In 1986, it chose the small private school on the Hilltop.
Friday night’s gathering at the Hilton Anatole Hotel was all about an amazing four-year period, the rise-and-conquer of SMU football from 1979-82, when Dickerson and James combined to rush for 8,192 yards and 70 touchdowns, a mark that remains an NCAA career record for a duo.
The former teammates, who led the Ponies to consecutive conference championships in 1981 and ’82, reunited to accept the PricewaterhouseCoopers Doak Walker Legends Award.
Dickerson and James are the 12th winners of the award, created by the SMU Athletic Forum in 1998 to honor former running backs who excelled at the collegiate level and also distinguished themselves as leaders in their communities. Past winners include former Dallas Cowboys Calvin Hill (2008) and Tony Dorsett (2001), former University of Texas and Houston Oilers great Earl Campbell (2002) and legendary Texas A&M rusher John David Crow (2004).
Hard-nosed Stanford star running back Toby Gerhart, a Heisman Trophy finalist, accepted his Doak Walker Award at the banquet.
After 28 years, well after Dickerson joined the NFL Hall of Fame and James wrapped up a productive NFL career and became an ESPN college football analyst, the discussion of SMU has come full circle to the new rise of Mustang football.
“I mean it’s a great thing and I’m very happy to see that my university has taken a step toward turning the program around with June Jones,” said Dickerson, a two-time All-America and SMU’s single-season and career rushing leader. “I can say I’m a Mustang at heart no matter what. It was painful to watch, but to see them in a bowl game and win it, I’m very proud of them.”
The new Mustangs won nine games this season, including the Hawaii Bowl, their first postseason appearance since 1984. Jones just wrapped up the school’s most promising recruiting class in decades, and a noticeable energy permeates the campus.
“When you win games, it gets people on board,” James said. “When Eric and I were at SMU, everybody in town, it seemed like they had a Mustang Mania bumper sticker. SMU’s got a longstanding tradition in this community, and if you win people want to jump on board and support it.”
Dickerson said he and other former players felt ostracized from the program for years by athletic directors who chose to keep the program and its former players from that era at arm’s length.
Several years ago, Dickerson skeptically accepted an invitation to have lunch with SMU basketball coach Matt Doherty recently hired athletic director Steve Orsini, who were attending an event in Southern California.
Dickerson, who resides in Calabasas, Calif., said Orsini told him he wanted the former players back and that he was serious about turning the program around.
“I told him I had heard that before,” Dickerson said.
Genuinely impressed, Dickerson then facilitated a conversation between Orsini and Jones.
The rest, Dickerson hopes, becomes history.
Dickerson and James, both 49, certainly created some of their own. The two were an unlikely pair, growing up only about 50 miles apart but in separate worlds. James was a big-city star running back for the 1978 Class 4A champions of Houston Stratford High School. Dickerson was a small-town speed burner for the 1978 Class 2A champions of Sealy High School.
With no Internet, cell phones or scouting services, Dickerson and James knew of one another and their Friday night exploits only from newspapers.
“Most definitely you had the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post, so you pick up the paper and you hear about Stratford and they had this guy Craig James,” Dickerson said. “And, it’s funny when I read, I’m like, ‘That’s a white guy!’ So I wanted to know more about him.
“Every week they’re 12-0, we’re 12-0, we’re 13-0, we’re in the state championship, we’re 2A, they’re 4A, they won state, we won state. I never thought I’d get the chance to play with him or meet him, but lo and behold we wound up teammates.”
Both were recruited by Texas and tell the same story why neither landed there. The Longhorns recruiter told both of them that if they didn’t sign they’d never get a job in the state of Texas after football.
They both chose SMU. One day during their senior years, James drove west down I-10 to Sealy during to meet his future teammate.
“I followed Eric closely. He ran for 300 yards a week. I was thinking, ‘Man, what the heck is this guy doing?’ ” James said. “When I finally first met him, I went to the house and said, ‘Hey is Eric here?’ He’s at the car wash. I went over there, saw this tall, skinny guy, big glasses with a ‘fro and said, ‘Are you Eric?’
Michael Irvin Out at ESPN’s Dallas Radio Station. His Replacements: Ben and Skin.
If you’re among those who dial up 103.3 on your FM dial every morning at 11 a.m. expecting to hear Michael Irvin, do not be surprised when you hear Ben Rogers and Jeff Wade — otherwise known as Ben and Skin — instead today. ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz tells Unfair Park this morning that Irvin’s contract was up, his ratings were down, and he’s out effective immediately.
“We had previously decided to cancel the show, and determined this morning to make it effective today,” he says. And, yes, Krulewitz acknowledges: The news that the former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver has been accused of rape in a civil suit filed yesterday in Broward County expedited his firing.
“Obviously it was part of the overall decision here,” Krulewitz says. “But I want to be clear: The decision was based on the fact his contract is up, and the show did not perform. The point of that is: We had previously decided to cancel Michael’s show.”
I haven’t seen the latest ratings — that’s more Richie’s beat — but the ESPN spokesman says that “from fall to fall, to take that as a snapshot since it’s the heart of Cowboys season, we’ve seen a 25 percent decline in ratings. From December ’08 to December ’09, ratings were down 28 percent alone.” He adds that those tuning in at 11 a.m. will hear a message from station general manager Pete Dits addressing the situation.
It was but one week ago that Irvin told Barry Horn, upon the second anniversary of Irvin’s show, that “I have no plans to end my radio career, period. I can’t stress that enough.”
The Rangers have a new ownership group that hopes to be approved by Major League Baseball and be in place by Opening Day.
That new ownership group comes in with big plans.
“My expectation is we will be extremely competitive and if we don’t win our division, I will be disappointed because I think we positioned ourselves to be right there with everybody else,” club president Nolan Ryan said Tuesday. “It will be very competitive. There is a lot of balance. It’s going to come down to which organization stays the healthiest and which team plays up to their capability.”
Ryan is part of a group headed by Pittsburgh attorney Chuck Greenberg that reached an agreement on Saturday to purchase the Rangers from owner Tom Hicks. The deal is awaiting approval by Major League Baseball and the lending institutions that hold the debt on Hicks Sport Group.
“Signing the agreement was an important step,” Greenberg said. “But we’ve got to keep going, we’ve got to keep blocking and tackling — sorry, wrong metaphor — we’ve got to keep playing small ball to get where we need to be. There is still a lot of work to be done.”
Greenberg will be managing general partner and focused on the business side of the organization. The baseball side will be under Ryan’s overall control. General manager Jon Daniels reports directly to him. Ryan said with the new ownership in place and Greenberg running the business side, he will have far more time to devote to the baseball side of the franchise.
“I don’t see any distinct changes,” Ryan said. “We’re going to stay with the overall plan we put in place in 2007 with developing our own players. We feel the organization is in a position to be very competitive … and the deals we’ve made in the offseason have put us in even better position. We’re going into Spring Training in a better position than we have been in the past few years.
“I’m very pleased that with the budget restraints that we were operating under, we were able to get creative, move things around and free up some money so we didn’t leave a void in the ballclub. That made a difference.”
The Rangers gained that financial flexibility by trading Kevin Millwood to the Orioles, who picked up $9 million of his $12 million salary. That gave the Rangers the ability to make other moves, including signing free-agent pitchers Rich Harden and Darren Oliver, and designated hitter Vladimir Guerrero.
The Rangers have been operating under strict budget guidelines mandated by Major League Baseball. Ryan commented for the first time on Tuesday that the Rangers’ spending has been monitored by the Commissioner’s Office since July when the club had to borrow money from Central Fund. Any increased spending that was not in the original operating budget and any Draft picks that were signed above “slot” had to be approved by Major League Baseball.
“Obviously, there were some restrictions on us that other clubs didn’t have,” Ryan said. “But Major League Baseball did not want to affect us on a day-to-day basis, so they didn’t encumber us. They understood we needed to operate as usual.”
Major League Baseball did approve a slight increase in the budget just after the beginning of the year and that allowed the Rangers to complete their offseason moves. Ryan also said Major League Baseball did approve the Rangers going above slot to sign first-round pick Matthew Purke.
“Just not enough for us to sign him,” Ryan said, and Purke ended up enrolling at TCU.
All restrictions will be removed once the sale is approved and the Rangers expect to be in a position to have payroll flexibility as the season progresses toward the July 31 Trade Deadline. They did not have that last year and, despite a deep farm system loaded with prospects, they were unable to get involved when Cliff Lee and others were available for trade.
“The attitude is if there is something we can do near the Trade Deadline, we’ll certainly look at it and see if it makes sense,” Ryan said. “Our mindset is if we have a chance to win, we’re going to do what we can to improve the ballclub.”
Daniels and his staff orchestrated the Rangers offseason plan with Ryan’s approval and confidence. Ryan, entering his third season as club president, continues to signal strong support for Daniels and his work as general manager, and it appears their relationship has grown stronger in the past two years.
“I think Jon has done a good job,” Ryan said. “I don’t anticipate me recommending any changes as far as the baseball operations are concerned. The baseball staff has done a good job in the offseason improving the club, and the development side has done a good job.”
Daniels has two years left on a contract that runs through 2011. Manager Ron Washington enters the last year of his contract. He was in a similar situation last season, although the Rangers had an option for 2010. That was exercised on Aug. 30. This season there is no option for 2011 but his contract could be addressed at some point between now and the end of the season.
“Last year he was in the same situation as this year,” Ryan said. “I would think it would be addressed as it was last year. I’m very happy with the job Ron has done.”
Craig Anderson stopped 27 shots to pick up his fifth shutout of the season, as the surging Colorado Avalanche defeated the Dallas Stars, 4-0, at Pepsi Center.
Chris Stewart and Paul Stastny each had a goal and an assist for the Avalanche, who have won six in a row for the first time since February 26- March 8, 2008. Brett Clark and T.J. Galiardi also lit the lamp for Colorado, which sits atop the Northwest Division with 66 points.
Marty Turco turned aside 32-of-36 shots for the Stars, who finished a three- game road trip with a 1-2-0 mark.
Clark’s power-play goal at the 5:16 mark of the first period got Colorado’s offense going. Clark’s slapper from the point proved to be too fast for Turco.
The Avalanche scored a short-handed goal with 8:30 remaining to make it a two- goal game. Galiardi gained control of the disc after stealing it away from a Dallas player along the boards in the Colorado zone. He charged down the right side of the ice on a breakaway and capped things off with a wrister that got past Turco.
Anderson made 12 saves over the first 20 minutes.
Stewart’s wrister from the right circle gave the Avalanche a 3-0 margin at the 8:54 mark of the second. That was the score heading to the third, as Anderson stopped seven shots in the middle frame.
Stastny scored a power-play goal at the 12:36 mark of the third, a period that saw Anderson make eight saves.
Game Notes
Colorado posted a 4-1 home win over the Stars when the clubs met on December 26 and the Avs have taken three of four and four of the last six encounters in this series. Dallas has also lost five of its last six in Denver…Colorado improved to 15-6-2 at home this season…The Avalanche will complete their five-game homestand when they face Minnesota on Thursday…Colorado was without defenseman Adam Foote and forward Marek Svatos. Foote, Colorado’s captain, has missed the last six games with an ankle injury, while Svatos has sat out the last three with a bruised chest…The Stars were without captain Brenden Morrow and fellow forward Jere Lehtinen. Both players have missed the last four games with upper-body injuries…The Avs went 2-for-5 on the power play, while Dallas went 0-for-4 with the man advantage.
