Two years ago, they lost 102 games.
In spring training last March, they were 50-1 long shots to be playing baseball at Halloween.
After only six starts and 30 innings of the regular season, they lost pitching ace Jacob deGrom to a season-ending arm injury.
This season down the stretch they had an eight-game losing streak amid dropping 16 of 20.
On Labor Day they began a nightmare three consecutive home losses to the Houston Astros by a combined 39-10.
They lost three of their final four games, coughing up an American League West Division they had led most of the year on the final Sunday of their six-month, 162-game schedule.
In the postseason they’ve lost all but one home game at Globe Life Field, including three more demoralizing defeats to the Astros in the American League Championship Series.
In Game 5 of the ALCS they blew a late lead and suffered a kick-to-the-crotch 5-4 loss on nemesis Jose Altuve’s dramatic ninth-inning homer to be pushed to within one loss of elimination.
Add it all up and — somehow, some way — all that losing has earned the Rangers home-field advantage in the World Series for the first time in franchise history. The team that hasn’t won diddly squat in the last 11 years is suddenly the favorite to win the title, starting with Friday’s Game 1 against the Arizona Diamondbacks in Arlington.
Said Fox TV analyst John Smoltz after the Rangers walloped the Astros, 11-4, to win Game 7 of the ALCS Monday night at Houston’s Minute Maid Park, “Honestly, this is hard to explain.”
Just wait. It gets weirder.
The first time the Rangers made the World Series, in 2010, they lost the clinching game at the old Ballpark in Arlington to a San Francisco Giants team managed by Bruce Bochy. Guess who came out of Hall-of-Fame retirement to lead this Rangers squad? Sure enough.
"Nothing about this Texas Rangers’ season makes sense."
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“This is unbelievable,” Bochy said. “This team has been down so many times. But we just keep getting back up.”
A year later in 2011, the Rangers got back to the World Series and in an infamous Game 6 in St. Louis were within one strike of the championship twice before choking away the title.
What followed was an epic drought. Not a single playoff game victory, much less a series. Before this year's remarkable run they hadn’t made the postseason since 2016, and in that span had sad-sack seasons trailing the Astros in the West by 36 (2018), 35 (2021) and 38 (2022) games.
On the heels of watching his outfit go 60-102, by Thanksgiving 2021 majority owner Ray Davis had seen enough. At the winter meetings the following week, the Rangers shocked the baseball world by spending a half-billion dollars to sign free-agent middle infielders Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. But the investment improved the team by only eight games in 2022, and that’s when the real upheaval commenced.
Manager Chris Woodward was fired. Five days later, general manager Jon Daniels was also canned.
Said Davis at the time, “The bottom line is that we are not good. And we haven’t been good for six years.”
Elevated to GM was Daniels’ sidekick, former Rangers pitcher and Highland Park High School alum Chris Young. His first win was to talk the 68-year-old Bochy out of his rocking chair and into the dugout. And when deGrom’s injury left the Rangers without a No. 1 stud, Young made daring trade-deadline deals that will likely pay dividends into November.
When pitchers and catchers reported to Surprise, Arizona, eight months ago, the Rangers’ top three projected pitchers were deGrom, Martin Perez and Jon Gray. None will likely throw a pitch in the World Series; the staff was carried instead by Nathan Eovaldi and July 30 acquisitions Jordan Montgomery and Max Scherzer.
Montgomery, merely a .500 pitcher with three teams over nine seasons, is 3-0 this postseason including the win in Game 7 over the Astros.
“This is an amazing team,” Montgomery said. “We try not to think too much about stuff and just keep playing good baseball.”
While Seager and Semien have fueled Texas’ powerful offense all season, it is 30-year-old Cuban defector Adolis Garcia, sent to the minors in 2021, who has commanded the post-season spotlight. Seager had eight hits in the seven-game series against Houston, including a first-inning homer that began the Game 7 rout. Semien hasn’t missed a game since arriving in Arlington, and this year led all of baseball with 185 hits and 122 runs scored. The Rangers traded only a handful of cash to the St. Louis Cardinals for Garcia in 2019. By 2021 he was off the spring training roster in favor of pitcher Mike Foltynewicz and was promoted back to the big leagues a month later when first baseman Ronald Guzman was injured.
From afterthought to ALCS MVP. Garcia is the Rangers, evidenced by him striking out four times in a row in Game 6 in Houston, then proceeding to hit a grand slam and two home runs in his next five at-bats in route to setting a record for the most RBI (15) in an ALCS.
Said Seager, “He’s a bad man, isn’t he?”
In the history of the Rangers there are two team moments: Neftali Feliz striking out Alex Rodriguez to clinch their first-ever trip to the World Series in 2010, and Garcia’s two-run single in the 4th inning that pushed the lead to 8-2 and blew a hole in a do-or-die game against the arch-rival Astros.
Said Young as he hoisted the AL trophy, “We’ve had some hard times around here. But they’re over now!”
This is where Creed enters the story. I promised you more weirdness, no?
The post-grunge ’90s band, led by Scott Stapp, had some hit songs, but mostly became the poster boys for guilty-pleasure rock with its simple guitar chords and hollow lyrics. Creed played the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game in 2001, but otherwise found its niche as the band that was cool to loathe.
No one seems to know exactly when or how it started, but somewhere amid the Rangers’ bevy of August losses Creed’s 2000 Top 10 hit “Higher” came on in the clubhouse and players — organically — began sheepishly singing along.
“I don’t really know,” said Seager. “It was just kind of a random thing that everybody started singing to one day.”
The losses turned into wins. The old song became a new inspiration.
“Next thing you know,” said pitcher Andrew Heany, “we’re having fun, playing Creed and winning baseball games.”
The band learned of the Rangers’ phenomenon and tweeted its support of the team. By Game 3 of the AL Division Series, almost 50,000 fans at Globe Life Field — more notably home to faith, family and country-fried music — were belting out “Higher” between innings.
A Long Wait
I became a sportswriter because of the Rangers.In the summer of 1972 in Duncanville, there wasn't much to do for an 8-year-old twerp. It was a time before video games. Way before the internet. No texting. Cable TV had yet to hatch. Same for the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars. The Dallas Cowboys had just won their first Super Bowl, but back then they actually had an offseason where every June hangnail wasn’t top-of-the-blog news.
There were no blogs, either.
Life meandered at a slower, simpler pace. Between The Price is Right in the morning and Leave It To Beaver at night, the neighborhood kids spent our summers, well, bored. The rerouting of Interstate 20 through our town, the opening of a strip shopping center anchored by a Skillern’s drug store and the day our four-person, 1,100-square-foot home advanced from a rotary-dial to push-button phone? All landmark moments that awoke my sleepy childhood into a temporary frenzy.
Thankfully, there was baseball.
Because Dad loved the sport and Mom wanted me out of her hair, I began playing T-ball at age 7 before graduating to baseball at 8. When I smacked that ball into the air — probably all of 10 feet — it was love at first flight. No clock. No urgency. No way I wasn’t hooked on baseball.
I’d been to Turnpike Stadium in Arlington to watch the minor-league Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, but in the spring of ’72 I encountered big-boy baseball. This, on the night of April 21, 1972, was the Texas Rangers. I sat with Dad in right-center field of the newly christened Arlington Stadium and watched in awe as slugger Frank Howard whistled a homer to the green seats in center in the first inning of a 7-6 win over the California Angels.
Life. Changed. Forever.
The next night I tuned my transistor radio to WBAP-AM 820 and drew up a homemade, rudimentary scoresheet. I got my glove, wooden bat and ball, and lay a pillow on the floor for home plate. During Rangers games, I played out Rangers games. As announcers ranging from Dick Risenhoover to Jon Miller called the action, I’d simulate — alone, in my room — the pitching motion of Dick Bosman and the at-bats of inaugural Rangers such as Tom Grieve, Toby Harrah and Elliott Maddux. After each play, I’d scribble the information on my Big Chief tablet.
After almost every game I’d turn my notes into my version of a game story, then breathlessly wait for the next afternoon's Dallas Times Herald so I could compare my tale to that of legendary writer Blackie Sherrod.
The Rangers sucked. They went 54-100 in ’72 under manager Ted Williams (yes, that one), and other than brief pennant races in ’74 and ’77, they were always inferior to the Oakland A’s and Kansas City Royals and Chicago White Sox in the AL West. It didn't matter. I was consumed.
I begged Dad to go to every home game, especially “Farm and Ranch Night,” when players would milk cows on the field between games of a day/night doubleheader. Swear. When he came home from work I was sitting in the driveway with two gloves and a ball, ready to play catch until dark. Every morning I’d ask Mom for a quarter so I could bike to 7-Eleven and buy a pack of baseball cards or one of those plastic Slurpee cups featuring a different player. I had thousands of cards, hundreds of cups and just one dream: to play baseball.
If it was a summer night I was practicing, playing or at the neighborhood field watching my friends play. One of my proudest moments in life was the day I hit a home run and received a free hamburger at Bonanza. And some of my lousiest memories are of sitting in the car at the park, watching it rain.
During the day we played Wiffle ball, or sometimes with a “ball” fashioned out of paper snow-cone cups. If my friends weren't available I’d take my scoresheets in the backyard, construct an imaginary opponent for the Rangers and play a game founded upon me throwing a tennis ball off the walls and roof of our house. My skills didn’t necessarily reflect my passion for the game — I peaked as a sort of utility infielder/Josh Smith at Duncanville High School — but our worn-out grass certainly did.
Most nights before bed I’d pen a baseball story. Hand-written. In high school I often wrote a “Rangers Poem of the Day” and passed it around my class. And out of college, my first apartment was at The Enclave on Randol Mill, so I could be within walking distance of Arlington Stadium.
My relationship with baseball and the Rangers has ebbed and flowed through the years. The Mavericks arrived. The Cowboys won. Marriage. Divorce. Life.
But Monday night the Rangers rekindled my love and rewarded my loyalty. They’re back in the World Series. Just like former lifelong fan John “Zonk” Lanzillo and his drum, season-ticket-holding nuns Frances Evans and Maggie Hessions, forever public address announcer Chuck Morgan, Tom Grieve and iconic radio voice Eric Nadel, I was about moved to tears when Garcia clubbed his second homer of Game 7 to push the lead to an insurmountable 11-3.
In Houston, the Rangers celebrated with Creed and Champagne. Those of us who grew up in Duncanville five decades ago toasted the better-great-than-never success with misty eyes and appropriately tugged heartstrings. Can’t tell you how many texts, calls, e-mails and Facebook messages I've received from old friends choked up by this new team.
The Cowboys have won five Super Bowls. The Mavericks and Stars both raised trophies. The Rangers are seemingly as close as they’ve ever been.
There’s no crying in baseball, unless you've been made to wait 51 years by the Texas Rangers.
My first baseball glove, way back in T-ball, was a hand-me-down from Dad. I dug it out of the closet this week just for grins. Not good as new, but somehow better than ever.
These Rangers are defying logic. They’re 8-0 on the road in the playoffs. Staring at extinction after the gut-wrenching Game 5 loss, they promptly went to Houston and twice pummeled the two-time champs by a combined, 20-6. They are weird. Unpredictably, wonderfully weird.
Said Davis after Game 7, “It’s been a long, long wait. Our fans deserve this.”
Cue Creed.
