P. Francis -- better known in these here parts as GhettoBear04 -- makes his debut as a member of the Baseball Time in Arlington roster, with a sparkling look at why regression to the mean should make gutheads and statheads alike appreciate the Rangers' magical 2010 season all the more. No doubt that P. Francis is now 1-1 in his BBTiA tenure. Should we expect this (probably handsome) writer to continue to bat 1.000 for the rest of his career? Of course.

(More info about the BBTiA roster addition.)

Congrats, GB, and well done!

For those of you who didn't get a copy of the calls from Jamey Newberg last night, they're posted over at BBTiA. Sincere thanks to Jamey for sharing them with us. We've added a copy of Nadel's recap of the final play of the game, from the radio post-game show; this version has his explicit hat-tip to his old partner, Mark Holtz. If you missed it, and especially if you remember Holtz, you owe it to yourself to give it at least one listen. The emotion in Nadel's voice as he credits Holtz is tangible.

Up front: Apologies if somehow I've overlooked any discussions that followed the four-part series from a year or so ago. I've done some digging, but couldn't find answers to my questions, and so I'm bringing them to y'all in hope of some guidance.

I've had no problem installing MAMP and Sequel Pro, and loading the Lahman BDB. I'm looking forward to learning some SQL and running some queries. My next step, though, in an ideal world, would be to also get a Retrosheet database up and running using Chadwick. I've downloaded the latter, and after some frustration with Snow Leopard, I think I have it working.*

*I think. I had to completely uninstall, download, and reinstall the latest version of Xcode tools to get gcc (the C compiler) to  work; this seems to be an issue with Snow Leopard that others might have to deal with, as well, but I don't have the technical knowledge to say much more than that. And as you'll see below, I'm not exactly sure what to do next, so I haven't really tested my compile of Chadwick yet.

Here's the thing: I'm not a programmer, and despite the much-appreciated efforts of tangotiger and Colin Wyers to document the process from the Windows side, I'm not sure what to do from here. I could probably try to do what I want to do using their instructions, file structures, programs, batch files, etc. with VMWare Fusion and Windows 7, but part of the fun here is to figure out how to do this on the Mac, right? And before I start madly downloading Retrosheet .zip files left and right, I'd like to have some sense of how to get them properly parsed.

So: anyone feeling like helping out a lost soul? Thanks in advance...

Over at Baseball Time in Arlington, Joey Matches breaks down the Cliff Lee trade, providing details on each aspect of the move.

And MJH also gives his take on the deal, with analysis of the short-term ramifications for the Rangers and the long-term outlooks for Justin Smoak and Blake Beavan.

Great insights from both on why the Rangers might have been willing to pull the trigger, and why the Mariners might have valued the package more highly than most.

Terrific stuff; check it out.

T.R. Sullivan has just tweeted the following:

Matt Harrison will not make his next start on Wednesday. Derek Holland could take his place in rotation.

If it's true that Holland is replacing Harrison in the starting rotation, and that this move is not just a one-start deal, I think you have to love it. Sure, you could argue that several more starts at AAA wouldn't hurt Holland. But this is the sort of aggressive move that the Rangers should be making with their top young pitching talent this season. I'm willing to bet Holland's ready, and that he'll pay the Rangers' own wager off in spades.

Now, when does Scheppers arrive?