If someone told an avid baseball fan that the Texas Rangers, despite their losses of Nathan Eovaldi, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, would be playing like the grittiest and hottest team in baseball deep into September, most people would be surprised.
These Rangers have won 12 of their last 16 games, including a six game win streak against the Angels, Athletics and Diamondbacks as August winded to a close.
After a dominant 5-0 win over the MLB-best Milwaukee Brewers, led by Michael Helman’s five RBIs, the Rangers now sit just a game and a half out of the final wild card spot, and just 3.5 games out of first place in the AL West.
The Rangers have been beating strong opponents as well as easy opponents. They swept the Guardians at home from August 22-24, took two of three against the Astros over the weekend, and have a chance to take the series against Milwaukee tonight with phenom Jack Leiter on the mound.
The league is impressed, surprised, and wowed. That includes Rangers infielder Josh Smith, who surprised even the hosts of the Foul Territory with his admission that the Rangers are even surprising themselves.
Even Josh Smith would’ve been skeptical if someone told him two weeks ago the Rangers would be where they are now.
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“If you had told me two weeks ago that we’d be a game out…I’d {tell you} you’re kinda overthinking it there,” Smith said in an appearance on the podcast.
“We’ve just gotten hot at the right time, we’re playing with so many guys down, Seager, Semien, {Eovaldi}, and we’re playing with nothing to lose,” he added. “We’re in a wild-card race, but we also feel we’re in the division race, too. We don’t have a ton of time but we’ve put ourselves in a pretty good spot.”
The admission acknowledges a well-discussed fact: the American League West has been up for grabs for quite some time, but no team has seemed to want to win it enough. The Astros, with their .542 winning percentage, would not be in first place in any other division, with the next-weakest division by win percentage being the NL West, led by the Dodgers (.556 win%).
Despite their putting all their chips in the table to build around Cal Raleigh, the Mariners have not gotten out of their own way, either. They’ve only won four of their last 10, and are only a game and a half above Texas for second place and the final wild-card.
Those circumstances have made it possible for the Rangers, with a couple weeks’ worth of quality ball and a record just five games above .500 to make some noise in this division.
Baseball is a game of tenacity, but it’s also a game of hunger. Who can get hungry at the right time, and who can put all the pieces together at the right time. Right now, it looks to be these Rangers, electrified by the losses of key pieces and steadied by the veteran leadership of Bruce Bochy. It might be wise to stay out of their way.
