Rangers Back In World Series, 12 Years After Twice Being 1 Strike From Title

ARLINGTON, Texas — The Texas Rangers have returned to the World Series for the first time since coming within one strike of winning the championship twice in 2011.

“We’ve had some difficult moments recently. “Those days are over,” general manager Chris Young proclaimed shortly after Texas won its third American League pennant.

The wild-card Rangers are the AL champions after a franchise-record six consecutive losing seasons, including 102 losses only two years ago. They are led by three-time World Series winner Bruce Bochy, a half-billion dollar middle infield of Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, slugging AL Championship Series MVP Adolis Garcia, homegrown youngsters Josh Jung and 21-year-old Evan Carter, and an influx of veteran pitchers.

“This team has played with as much heart and determination as any club I’ve had,” said Bochy, the first manager to take three separate clubs to the World Series since LCS play began in 1969. “It’s just amazing how they kept getting up.”

This pennant means more than just this season for Rangers fans. Texas had six All-Stars and dominated the AL West for the majority of the season, but they succumbed to injuries and collapsed late in the campaign, losing the division title to Houston on the final day. Texas bounced back to defeat its Lone Star State rival, defeating the defending champion Astros 11-4 in Game 7 on Monday night.

Rangers Back In World Series, 12 Years After Twice Being 1 Strike From Title

Texas will host the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 1 of the Fall Classic on Friday night, 12 years after Game 6 of the Rangers’ second consecutive World Series with manager Ron Washington. San Francisco defeated them in five games in 2010, their first of three titles in five seasons under Bochy’s management.

The Rangers will not even be the first club to participate in a World Series at Globe Life Field, their retractable-roof stadium, which opens in 2020. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the neutral-site series at the end of that season, which was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Seager as their shortstop.

In 2011, St. Louis went down to its final strike in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 6 before David Freese hit a 1-2 ball over right fielder Nelson Cruz for a tying two-run triple, and he did it again in the 10th with an RBI single. Freese hit a game-ending homer to start the 11th inning, and the Cards won Game 7 the next night.

The Rangers concluded the regular season one game behind Oakland after being swept in three games at Oakland in the final regular-season series 2012. Texas started ace Yu Darvish in the American League’s inaugural one-game wild-card game but fell to visiting Baltimore.

Even though Darvish missed the whole 2015 season due to Tommy John surgery, the Rangers acquired lefty Cole Hamels in a trade deadline transaction and led the division for only 22 days. They won the first two games of the best-of-five AL Division Series in Toronto but lost the fifth by committing three errors in two batters after Hamels pitched into the seventh. The errors allowed Jose Bautista to hit a three-run homer off reliever Sam Dyson.

Rangers Back In World Series, 12 Years After Twice Being 1 Strike From Title

The next season, Toronto swept the AL West champions in the ALDS despite Texas starting Hamels and Darvish in the first two games.

The Rangers’ 2016 division title under then-manager Jeff Bannister, Arizona’s bench coach, is their last. They are one of six major league teams without a World Series trophy. They traded Darvish the next summer, on their way to a 78-84 record that began their losing streak, and traded Hamels midway through 2018.

Following a 102-game losing streak in 2020, the Rangers made the biggest free-agent splash, signing both Seager ($325 million over ten years) and Semien ($175 million over seven years). They didn’t have a winning record with the All-Star middle infielders that first season, but they focused on pitching in another spending spree last winter that included signing two-time Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom ($185 million, five years) and Nathan Eovaldi.

Texas won each of the six games. deGrom began before undergoing season-ending elbow surgery, while Eovaldi is 4-0 in the postseason after an All-Star season in which he was sidelined for seven weeks following the All-Star break due to a right forearm injury. At the trade deadline, the Rangers acquired three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer and left-hander Jordan Montgomery, who is 3-0 in the playoffs after winning the ALCS clinching in relief.

“This is what I wanted,” said Scherzer, who received his contract option for next season as part of his trade from the New York Mets. “I came here to get to the World Series, but I came here to win it.”

SOURCE – (AP)