The Texas Rangers scored eight runs while the Cleveland Guardians scored nine runs in ten innings.
Here at the end, I thought I would be angrier at the 2025 Texas Rangers. I thought I would be more dismissive.
I thought I would be more critical. After all they put together a pretty disappointing season. It wasn’t very fun most of the time. The club is perhaps worthy of those feelings.
Mostly though, I just feel at home. This is my own personal feeling. You’re allowed to feel any way you want about the season or the team or the franchise. If you’re angry, feel angry. If you’re dismissive, feel dismissive. If you’re critical, be critical.
Baseball asks a lot of you. It’s a big commitment. They play anywhere from 25-28 games a month for six straight months. Even when they’re good, even when things are going great, you’re still devoting three hours of your life every night for half a year and years are in short supply. There’s a month and a half of spring training that precedes the marathon. If your team is lucky or good or both, they play EVEN MORE BASEBALL. It basically never stops and that makes up most of the charm and all of the curse.
For me, despite the elevated expectations that a championship brings, winning the World Series was never about remaking the Rangers in a new image. Don’t get me wrong, I want them to win. I wanted them to win all year. I wanted them to win today. I wanted to see Jose Corniell finish off a successful debut. I wanted Rowdy Tellez of all people to have hit an eventual game-winning dong in extras.
They’re arguably a better team than the one they lost to today, a Cleveland squad that celebrated a playoff spot yesterday and one that Texas went 4-0 against this year before a couple of admittedly hilarious or depressing walk-off losses depending on your perspective. I get upset when they lose.
Today’s loss felt like a final twist of the knife. A potentially feel good ending that quickly turned sour. Had things gone better, I would love nothing more than for me to be pacing around the house with butterflies anticipating a Wild Card game on Tuesday.
But really, deep down, winning, or the perception that only winning matters, isn’t a large percentage for what I’m in this for and I can thank the Texas Rangers for being what they are for that. The 2025 team is now enshrined as a part of it.
Had the Texas Rangers taken their magical run in 2023 and transformed themselves into something different, a relevant, purely competent, household-name juggernaut of a franchise, it would have been interesting to see, yes. I could have embraced seeing something new, but it wouldn’t have been the Rangers.
Can you imagine a ratings darling Rangers era? How silly.
Yeah, maybe it’s all cope but I like that the Rangers won it all inexplicably. I don’t like that they’ve fallen back into irrelevancy so quickly, but I do like that they haven’t lost their identity. They’re still the Rangers. I watched them win a World Series — and boy am I grateful I can say that! — and they didn’t lose who they are. They’re losers historically. At best they are mediocre, forgotten, an afterthought to even produce a championship film for.
Sometimes that’s frustrating because who doesn’t yearn to see what they love be loved? But it’s wholly Rangers and I wouldn’t have it any other way because to me it isn’t really about the record at the end of a 162 game season, but the moments and memories that make up a season and the Rangers, more often than not, are loaded with the kind of stuff I love, which is the weird granular or even overtly strange shit.
If you’re going to commit to 162 games over a six month span and then do it again six months later, I’d rather be strange than good. Ideally you get both, but the former is far more interesting to me and the Rangers strive on being little weirdos as an ethos. Or at least, I strive on that ethos when it manifests, which is delightfully often. Even if it manifests more often than not with losses.
I suppose if I were to talk about the 2025 Texas Rangers and why they were frustrating, it’s probably because they did not adhere fully to the identity of the team as we expect them even if the results here at the end were near platonic ideal Rangers. Hell, they literally ended the year at .500. You don’t get more Rangers than a coin toss from your most scuffed coin.
The 2025 Texas Rangers were a Mariners ass team. That’s what is annoying about them. They were excellent at pitching and the best defensive team in baseball. They were much, much better than their record showed except that they couldn’t hit worth a damn all year and if you only do the things that prevent runs without actually doing the thing that produces the mechanism that literally wins a game, you don’t win as many games as you maybe should have.
This is Seattle Mariners coded and that makes it hard to stomach. They were unfortunate in all the ways that many summers at Safeco were. Disgusting. *ptooey* Any of the The Ballpark era teams would be rolling in their graves to see Texas averaging just barely over four runs per game.
But it is, nevertheless, strange. The Rangers were an expected 90-win team. This was a playoff team. But they couldn’t hit. The Texas Rangers, a team perhaps most known for a quarter of a century for their jet stream-fueled turbo lineups, took the best pitching in franchise history and won 81 games. God bless this weird fucking franchise. They amuse me to no end and I love them.
Today late-spring emergency signing Patrick Corbin made his team lead-tying 30th start of the year. The Rangers lost after taking a 8-5 lead in extra innings in a season in which they couldn’t score runs. They are 81-81 and they are the Texas Rangers.
Player of the Game: Adolis Garcia got a hit in his final at-bat with Texas. Thanks, El Bombi!
Up Next: See ya next year!
