In 10 days, we’ll finally have our answer.
To more than one question, if we’re getting technical. Can the Rangers recapture their lead in the AL West? Do they land a wild-card spot? If so, which one? Who could they play in the postseason? With home-field advantage, or no? And what happens if they miss out entirely?
But all of that funnels back to the same overarching inquiry, one nobody could fathom six weeks ago: are the 2023 Texas Rangers a playoff team?
That will be decided over these final three series, the first and third of which occur against Seattle, whose 84-68 record is tied with Texas for both second place behind Houston for the division lead and the final wild card berth. With the loser of Baltimore-Tampa Bay showdown in the AL East all but guaranteed top wild-card position and Toronto a game up on Seattle and Texas for the second, odds are better than not that one of the three AL West teams stays home for October.
This should be the part where I draw conclusions about what’s liable to happen. I cannot do that. Having watched so many games with so many wildly varied outcomes since March, my one certainty about this team, to paraphrase the great philosopher—and StrongSide profile subject—Steve Borden, is the only thing for sure is nothing’s for sure.
Because these are the Rangers, the group that spent the first three months trampling over every team in the American League aside from Tampa Bay. The team that employs the second-best hitter in baseball this season, who shares the infield with three other All-Stars and plays within eyeshot of another in the outfield, along with one more on the mound. The team stewarded by the most accomplished manager in the game. The team that, for all its faults, has shown mettle—to withstand the loss of one new ace and then another, to claw back into the division race after chucking a once-healthy lead down a staircase, to rally from dropping 16 out of 20 by ripping off six straight, four of which came in a sweep of Toronto. The team that cultivated more young hitters this season than it had in the previous decade.
And because these are the Rangers: the flabbergasting, exhausting, maddening Rangers. The team that—yes, it bears repeating—lost 16 games in 20 despite spending 150 days in first place. The team that, as CBS’ Mike Axisa astutely points out, was also low-key mediocre in the middle third of the season, going 32-28 in games between their electric 40-20 start and the craterous slump that began in mid-August. The team that followed that impressive six-game rally in early September with a four-game nosedive against Cleveland and Boston, neither of which are within sprinting distance of the postseason chase. The team that shelled out half a billion dollars on a middle infield and several hundred millions more on starting pitching and whose biggest offseason acquisition in the bullpen was Will Smith on a one-year, $1.5 million deal after spring training began, which is a little like constructing a Lamborghini with 20-year-old spark plugs in the engine. (In related news, the Rangers are 3 for 16 in save chances since August 13, a development the Morning News’ Evan Grant accurately characterized as “an astounding percentage of failure.”)
So here we are, six months and 152 games after the Rangers began this journey, and none the wiser about what we’re liable to see on a given afternoon.
There is something exhilarating about that, of course. Suspense can be its own virtue, especially on the heels of half a dozen years of being resigned to postseason-less baseball long before the standings calcified. “You’d be thrilled if, back in March, someone told you this team would be playing meaningful baseball in September,” the refrain has gone. It’s one we’ve championed on this website, too.
But suspense loses novelty when it appears only in waves, in the tide of mediocrity washing ashore without warning and sometimes receding just as quickly. It is, at the risk of placing too fine a point on it, not always fun to subject oneself to anything with zero in the way of consistency, let alone something that chews up leisure time in three-hour chunks, too. Patience erodes. Nerves shred. The finality almost becomes inviting. Postseason or not, at least you’ll know.
That will not make the next fortnight any easier to experience. The safest prediction one can make is the Rangers will fascinate and flummox, delight and dispirit, impress and infuriate—because they have done all of those things all season long, and why should it be any different now, when the stakes are highest and the pitching staff at its most threadbare?
That those highs exist, however undependable, is a badge of progress. But it’s also an ineffable one, and that alone would bring little comfort to a fanbase—and, let’s be honest, an owner—who expect more for all those outlaid dollars, especially when this team spent so many months this year doing just that.
But there’s still time. There are still those 10 days. Now it’s on the Rangers to use them to fashion all of this into something more solid.
Author
