February and March can give you impressive mirages in terms of baseball. Amazing things can happen when it's February and March, and then April has to happen and sad realities set in. Going into the 2011 season, Rangers fans, who had just won a World Series, thought about the possibility of their homegrown, low-key rotation supplanted by a free agent signing like Brandon Webb, one of the best pitchers of the 2000s, and a guy who's helped the Diamondbacks stay relevant after the departures of Schilling and Johnson.
Sure enough, as the Spring Training season began in 2011, Webb was taking reps as a Ranger, and gearing towards another year of dominance. There was just one problem: Webb hadn't pitched since 2009.
After becoming a strikeout artist and lineup-killer in the mid-2000s, for some strange reason his shoulder started giving him issues. Maybe it was something hereditary, maybe it was some home injury, maybe it was the fact that he was throwing really hard for 34 games five seasons in a row, we may never know. But by 2011, he'd had multiple surgeries and sat out the remainder of his Diamondbacks deal recovering from them. The Rangers signed him for 3 million to see if he had anything left. Remember, the Yankees did this with both Corey Kluber and Jameson Taillon prior to the 2021 season, and it seemed to go well for both of them.
Brandon Webb, however, had cooked his pitching shoulder, and as workouts progressed it became clear there was still issues that needed to be addressed medically. The former Cy Young winner would never pitch for the Rangers that year, and would never pitch in the majors again. It's an insanely sad ending to a promising career, and one that acted as a cautionary tale for many fireballers that'd crop up in the years to come.
I'd always wanted a 2011 Topps card documenting his Rangers stint. Now I have one.
