The Texas Rangers will be facing the Arizona Diamondbacks tonight, in a kind of World Series rematch, if a World Series rematch is exciting with the Diamondbacks in a wild-card spot and the Rangers with only a vanishingly small chance of making the playoffs. The Rangers are getting Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer back from the injured list this week, and Kumar Rocker will be promoted from the minors against the Mariners on Thursday, but that contingent of formerly Mets-affiliated pitchers are entering the fray too late. By "vanishingly small," I mean a record below .500 and a 0.8 percent chance, per Fangraphs—all but over, even with the current state of the AL West. That's worse than the Mariners.
While it's tough to repeat in baseball, a hefty payroll usually means that you want more than one World Series run out of it. But even with the World Series appearances, neither the Rangers nor the Diamondbacks were the sort of team that you would look at and predict a dynasty. Unlike, say, your Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Atlanta Braves, the Rangers entered the 2023 postseason as a 90-win wild-card team. The Diamondbacks had 84.
UCLs permitting, the returns of deGrom and Scherzer and debut of Rocker will be something to get excited about to close out the year, and helpful in the lead-in to the next. But their late-season contribution won't restore what made the 2023 team so successful. Scherzer was a trade-deadline acquisition who pitched eight regular-season games and two postseason games while struggling with injury; deGrom pitched in six games before he needed Tommy John surgery. Rocker was still in High-A, after spending a year in independent ball due to the Mets' concern about his elbow health.
When the Rangers made the playoffs, it was off the backs of Marcus Semien and Corey Seager having the best performances of their careers at the same time. They placed second and third in the AL MVP race that year, behind Shohei Ohtani. Even factoring in some concerns about aging curves, Semien and Seager are hardly schlubs now; they both made the All-Star game this year. But they're suffering now from the same principle behind the appearance of sophomore slumps: It's hard to pull off the sort of performance that puts you in conversation for best in the league for two years in a row. The sorts of players who are able to do that are on the caliber of, well, Shohei Ohtani. There aren't too many of those lying around for the picking, especially because depending on how you count, the Dodgers have at least two of them.
Thanks to the expanded playoffs, more average teams can participate in the postseason, and thanks to the general randomness underwriting small-sample-size baseball, an 84- or 90-win team that squeaks through actually has a shot at the World Series. As the critic Anton Ego famously said in Ratatouille, "Not everyone can [win a World Series], but a [World Series winner] can come from anywhere." It's not that radical to say that building a deep team of the Astros-Dodgers-Braves sort is much tougher than building a team that can win one World Series. Coaches love to say after losses that the team needs to find a way to be more consistent, but they may as well say that the team needs to miraculously find a way to get good. This is especially true in a game like baseball, which enjoys the law of large numbers.
The Rangers were successful last year, and now they're victims of their own success within a new postseason landscape. Conventional wisdom would make this season a failure, but with three wild-card spots, conventional wisdom no longer really holds. In this environment, it's hard to muster up the energy for some total-rebuild thought experiment. Superglue together the pitching rotation's UCLs and invent some odd-year bullshit, and the Rangers are still decently set up for next season.
Anyway, unless the rings-oriented realm of American sports undergoes a drastic values shift, the Rangers have already done enough. Which is a sigh of relief for team ownership, at least: Even if they never return to the postseason, they'll always have a ring to justify the expenditure. After all, the Rangers have won as many World Series in the past decade as the Dodgers, and that's nothing to turn up your nose at.
