With Athletics series done, Rangers need to turn two ugly trends around to make playoffs

ARLINGTON — With a chance Wednesday to sweep the Athletics right back to wherever it is they call home these days, the Texas Rangers began the afternoon with a homer from Ezequiel Duran. Began the second inning with one from Justin Foscue. 

Best you don’t ask about the rest of the afternoon.  

The A’s homered five times. Jonah Heim, who got a tribute video for his time in Texas, hit one of them. Even smiled. The Rangers did nothing the rest of the day and took a 9-2 shellacking. It clinched the season series for the A’s. Good thing the Rangers won’t have to worry about any tiebreakers there. 

You get the picture. It was an ugly game. The good news: Ugly as it was, it doesn’t really matter.  Even now. The Rangers won the series. That’s what they have to do. And that’s how they have to look at the final 22 games. Or, rather, the final seven series. Win each series. Nothing else matters. Win each series and they’ll end up with at least 84 wins. In this year’s AL, heck, that might even get you a first-round bye.  

“It would have been nice to sweep; there's no doubt,” Rangers manager Skip Schumaker said afterward because, like, what else could he say? “Winning each series is the goal, always has been the goal. We’ve got a tough series ahead of us. So, it was really important to start this homestand by winning the series.” 

All of this is true. It also highlights the Rangers’ real challenge going forward. Believing they can win series after series for the next three weeks requires some suspension of disbelief in the first place, considering the Rangers haven’t won more than four series in a row this year.  

And the deeper you dig, the harder it is to believe. Done with the A’s, the Rangers now host Tampa Bay, which has the best record in the AL, for four games. The Rays, who beat the Rangers twice in three games in July in Florida, play very much like Milwaukee, which just won two of three along the shores of Lake Michigan last week. The Brewers nearly ran the Rangers straight out of Wisconsin with their small-ball execution. Tampa Bay does it all just as well. 

After that, the home-field edge evaporates, with the final 18 games split evenly between Globe Life Field and elsewhere. And if there are two things this team has not done well at all this year, it’s beat winning teams and win road games. 

The Rangers are 26-35 (.426) against teams at .500 or better. They are 30-41 (.431) on the road. Both winning percentages rank in the bottom half of the league. This has all taken a decided turn for the worse since July 1, which was the last time the Rangers won either a road series or one against a team at .500 or better. Both came when they took two of three from Cleveland, which currently holds the AL’s third wild card spot. 

Since then, the record splits have been abysmal: 5-13 against winning teams, 6-17 on the road. It’s been both baffling and astonishing. 

Now, to be fair, to make these expanded playoffs, you don’t necessarily have to be very good at either, but you can’t stink at both. And that’s where the Rangers are at the moment.  

“Trust me, I'm very aware of where we're at with it, and that's why I’m frustrated,” Schumaker said. “The whole goal, since I was a player, was to be really good at home and at least .500 on the road and we have just failed at doing that. But we’ve still got games on the road and need to figure it out. It’s part of our jobs as managers and coaches. We’ve gone over this, and it keeps all of us up at night.”  

Well, the cure for sleeplessness doesn’t have to involve trazodone. The first 140 games are done and the Rangers haven’t found answers in them anyway. All that matters is the next 22 games. Or, better yet: the next seven series.  

“Yeah, the numbers suck,” Jake Burger said. “But it's a clean slate as far as we're concerned right now. Moving forward, we’ve got 22 games. It’s a sprint now. A playoff mentality. There are no throwaway games, but you aren’t thinking about the playoffs in the middle of June. So, I think that’s what we’ve got to have is a playoff mentality. If we win each series, we’re in a pretty good spot.”  

Just like the playoffs. 

But also, just like the playoffs, to win series, you’ve got to beat good teams. And you’ve got to win on the road.  

Now is the Rangers’ last chance to prove they can do that. 

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This article originally published at With Athletics series done, Rangers need to turn two ugly trends around to make playoffs.