Time is a strange thing. The year 2016 doesn’t feel like it was all that long ago. Stars Wars: The Force Awakens surpassed Avatar to become the top-grossing film in North America. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigned for the Presidency. Kobe Bryant played the final game of his legendary career. And here in Dallas, five police officers were killed and 11 others wounded in shootings during a Black Lives Matter protest. Seven years rush by, and your 2-year-old is suddenly a fourth-grader. It’s also the last time the Texas Rangers enjoyed a champagne bath after winning the American League West.
That 95-win bunch with Cole Hamels and Yu Darvish heading the rotation and Adrian Beltre and Elvis Andrus manning the left side of the infield set a MLB record by going 36-11 in one-run games. Lucky is one way to put it; #NeverEverQuit was another. Either way Texas locked down the one-seed in the A.L., only to be dispatched in the divisional round by the Blue Jays for the second straight year. Not to mention Toronto got the last laugh, three months after Rougned Odor decked Jose Bautista in Arlington.
While the past month and a half have been emotionally taxing for the fan base (and probably Bruce Bochy), it is heartening to see the club steer out of the skid and snap back into the offensive form we witnessed the first four months of the season. Maybe the three-plus weeks of dreadful baseball we endured the back half of August and first part of September knocked down our collective expectations of October grandeur. Now the club is on the verge of returning to the postseason, and quite possibly hanging another division banner above the left field seats at Globe Life Field, too.
Before we go counting chickens, let’s reflect on the baseball desert we navigated over the past seven springs and summers. Including the Covid-shortened 2020 season, 84, 95, 84, 38, 102, and 94 are the number of losses the club has suffered the past six seasons, which is the longest stretch of sub-.500 baseball in club history. That’s 497 L’s. May we never have to suffer through something like that again.
In 2017, Joey Gallo was a future star, Carlos Gomez patrolled center field, and the team got next to nothing in return after trading Darvish to the Dodgers.
In 2018, Ryan Rua was the Opening Day left fielder, and manager Jeff Bannister was let go with 10 games remaining in the season.
Chris Woodward had his best year as the Texas skipper in 2019, finishing six games under .500 and in third place in the A.L. West, a cool 29 games back of Houston.
I wish we could all forget 2020, for a million reasons. Instead, we are haunted by Corey Kluber throwing one perfect inning at the new taxpayer-funded retractable-roof park before being lost for the season with a shoulder injury. (Do yourself a favor and refrain from Googling the stat line of Cleveland closer Emmanuel Clase, the main return in that deal and someone who would have made this disastrous bullpen so much better.) You could see the pain on the faces of the cardboard cutouts in the stands. At least that futile season landed the second overall pick in the draft. (May we pray that Jack Leiter figures things out.)
With a franchise-record 102 losses, 2021 was god-awful on the diamond. Before the season we said goodbye to the beloved Andrus as he was sent to Oakland. Little did we know the great return on our hands in Jonah Heim, who was a throw-in from the Athletics. The club made a pair of notable in-season trades, shipping Kyle Gibson to the Phillies and Gallo to the Yankees. Safe to say the swap with the Bronx Bombers paid off, as the Rangers got Ezequiel Duran and Josh Smith. Gallo is now with the Twins. (Might see him in the coming weeks.) And the team stumbled into an All-Star in Adolis Garcia after DFA-ing him that February.
Greater organizational change came in 2022, as Ray Davis finally opened the pocketbook and landed Corey Seager and Marcus Semien in free agency. After another down year we digested the firing of Woodward and long-time general manager Jon Daniels just days apart in mid-August.
We’ve been through a lot, ladies and gents—and so much more than I’ve noted here.
So we deserved to have this year feel like an absolute blast, beginning with Bochy getting talked out of retirement by Young. We received Christmas gifts with the free-agent signings of Jacob deGrom, Andrew Heaney, and Nathan Eovaldi. From April through mid-August, the offense was college-kegger-level of fun. Good to see the bats boot and rally here in September. Max Scherzer was a surprise addition at the trade deadline. The aforementioned bullpen has been built in drama, ensuring breakneck twists, turns, and dips on a rollercoaster that would put anything at Six Flags to shame. (It may have driven Jamey Newberg insane, too.)
Evan Carter getting promoted after an especially brief stint in Triple-A and immediately sparking the bottom of the order by getting on base at an (OBP) clip inspires great promise. Wyatt Langford destroying the minors doesn’t hurt, either. Seager is in line for a batting crown and most likely a second-place finish in the MVP voting behind Shohei Ohtani. Heim’s wrist is better, and the ball is flying off his bat again. Garcia surprisingly healed quickly after a patellar tendon strain and is back to hitting bombs and patrolling right field. Josh Jung, back from a stint on the IL, has beefed up the middle of the lineup and returned stability to a vastly improved defensive infield. And who knows if Scherzer’s teres major muscle can heal enough to give him a shot at throwing in October. Heck, he just threw a bullpen on Tuesday. The Rangers have navigated several landmines in the second half of the season. Battling through adversity only builds character. Maybe they can fall back on that resilience as they return to the postseason.
Now there is only one series left: at Seattle, the team Texas swept earlier this week. Win one of these four games, and the Rangers are back in the playoffs. Take two, and they clinch the West along with home-field advantage in the ALDS.
For now, the bubbly and brewski beers remain on ice. The ski goggles are still in their packaging. But at long last, we are ever so close to watching our baseball club scream, dance, and drink heavily inside a plastic-tarped visiting clubhouse at T-Mobile Park. Back in North Texas, so many of the rest of us will toast the victory in our living rooms or at a watering hole. No matter what you’re drinking, I bet it will taste sweet. The hard-earned ones always do.
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