The Texas Rangers are finally World Series champions
PHOENIX — History can’t matter to the players who fill out a lineup or line the steps in a dugout. How are the events that happened before their births supposed to affect whether athletes trained to live in the present take a pitch or swing at it, whether they hang a curveball or snap it off, whether they win or lose?
But tell the fans who filled the stands behind the Texas Rangers’ dugout — the visiting dugout — Wednesday evening at Chase Field that their own history, their own backstory, was irrelevant to how they felt in the moment. On the field before them, dancing and embracing in newly minted World Series champion hats and T-shirts, were heroes whose place is now secure on the stretch of Interstate 30 that runs between Dallas and Fort Worth, and all the Texas towns to the north and south.
“I just know that the wait is over,” said Chris Young, the Dallas kid who once rooted for his hometown team, later pitched for the Rangers and now serves as their executive vice president and general manager. “Our history has changed, and I just am so happy for so many people that have waited a long time for this.”
The distance between the Rangers’ first game representing the Lone Star State and Wednesday night’s tenser-than-it-sounds 5-0 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 5 of the World Series spanned 51 years. In the time since the Washington Senators relocated to a patch of prairie known as Arlington, Tex., 23 franchises had won World Series. It was never the Rangers’ time.
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Two years ago, Texas lost 102 games. Before this season, the Rangers’ most recent winning record came in 2016. So it was reasonable to ask: Would it ever be the Rangers’ time?
And then they spent $325 million on the services of Corey Seager for 10 years. And then they spent $175 million for seven years of his double play partner, second baseman Marcus Semien.
Dollars ultimately attract players to teams. But could a franchise’s history — and what it lacked — be not a hurdle but a help?
“It was definitely a drawing point for me,” Seager said Wednesday. “I won in L.A. [with the Dodgers in 2020]. They hadn’t won in 30 years, and I saw what it did to a fan base. When I found out they had never won here, that was something that intrigued me, to be able to start at the bottom and try and build something and compete. And to be able to do it, it’s really satisfying.
“But it was a lot of trust. A lot of trust from them to me and me to them.”
This would be a good time, then, to point out that the Rangers’ mere existence was built on a lack of trust and examine exactly from where they came. Look in the Rangers’ record book, and it shows that the player with the third-most home runs in franchise history is Frank Howard, the towering outfielder-first baseman who died this week at 87 — but played only 95 games in a Texas uniform.
Howard’s place in the club’s record book is based on the fact that the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers after the 1971 season, and the Senators became the Rangers because of one Bob Short. Or, in D.C. parlance, Bob “%$#@&!” Short.
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Short, a Democratic operative who had previously purchased the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers and moved them to Los Angeles, bought the expansion Senators in late 1968. Shortly thereafter, he made the following pronouncement:
“I refuse to sign any papers that would prevent me from moving the club out of Washington. I [said] that I wasn’t buying the team to move it. But, legally, I wanted the right to move it if it ever became necessary.”
So there were the Rangers, born out of some combination of shadiness and greed. Bowie Kuhn, a native Washingtonian, became MLB commissioner in early 1969. He was suspicious of Short’s motivations from the start. The mayor of Arlington, Kuhn believed, held sway over Short.
“He was hearing siren songs beautifully sung,” Kuhn once said.
So Washington was bereft, sent on a journey of 33 summers without baseball. (Yet let it be noted the nation’s capital still won a World Series before Texas did. Thank you, 2019 Nationals.)
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The Rangers’ first two teams in Arlington were managed by Ted Williams, a Hall of Fame hitter, and Whitey Herzog, a Hall of Fame manager. They lost 100 and 105 games, respectively. It took a full quarter-century to appear in the postseason. When they finally got there in 1996, they were dispatched in four games of the division series by the New York Yankees. They didn’t win another playoff game until 2010.
That year, they reached the franchise’s first World Series — and lost in five games to the San Francisco Giants and their hardened, wizened manager, Bruce Bochy. The following year, they won the American League pennant again. In the ninth inning of Game 6 of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, they held a two-run lead. Rangers closer Neftalí Feliz put two men on base but got two strikes on Cardinals third baseman David Freese. They were one strike away.
Freese tripled to tie the game.
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In the 10th, Josh Hamilton mashed a two-run homer, putting the Rangers up by a pair again. The Cardinals scratched for a run in the bottom of the inning, but with two outs and runners at the corners, reliever Scott Feldman had Cardinals first baseman Lance Berkman in a 2-2 count. They were one strike away.
Berkman singled to tie the game.
Freese homered in the 11th to win it.
The Rangers lost Game 7.
Texas had returned to playoffs twice before this year and never made it out of the division series. For Seager, for Semien, for right-hander Nathan Eovaldi — who somehow steered around five walks to provide six scoreless innings in Game 5 — that doesn’t matter much. The current group does.
“I was like, ‘That’s my goal,’ ” said Eovaldi, who signed for two years and $34 million last offseason. “Coming over here to win a World Series.”
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To the … Rangers? With half a century of baseball and not much to show for it?
“I just know that I don’t believe in curses,” Young said. “I mean, you get the right group of people together, anything is possible.”
Young didn’t get the top baseball operations job with the Rangers until August 2022, when Texas ownership fired longtime exec Jon Daniels, who had hired Young. Once in charge, Young’s top priority: pursue a retired, 67-year-old, three-time World Series champ as his manager — Bruce Bochy.
“He made it happen,” Young said. “This doesn’t happen without Bruce.”
But the message from the Rangers afterward: This doesn’t happen without any of them.
“They did everything they said they were going to do,” Bochy said.
Which got them to 90 wins and clawing for a spot in the postseason. Which got them past Tampa Bay in the first round, past 101-win Baltimore in the division series, past Houston and its championship pedigree in the American League Championship Series and to the ninth inning Wednesday night — when an Arizona error and Semien’s two-run homer gave those Texas fans room to relax.
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Excuse them if they didn’t. There’s that matter of “one strike away” a dozen years earlier. With two outs, when reliever Josh Sborz got to 1-2 on Arizona’s best hitter, second baseman Ketel Marte, here they were again.
Sborz went with a fastball, and when it hit the mitt of catcher Jonah Heim, Sborz — of McLean High and the University of Virginia — hopped in anticipation. Strike three? No. It was down and in. Reload.
Sborz came back with a curveball. It locked Marte up. He couldn’t swing. Strike three.
Sborz spiked his glove. Heim sprinted to embrace him. In the bedlam, Heim lost the baseball — the World Series-clinching baseball. He had to squirt loose to secure it.
Everything — legacies included — is secure now.
“All these moments,” Eovaldi said, “it’s hard to imagine the season is over.”
All these moments. It’s hard to imagine the wait is over. There may not be a current Ranger who knows the name Bob Short, who realizes Ted Williams managed the first team, who has a full understanding of the path it took to get here. No matter. The Texas Rangers — these Texas Rangers — are finally World Series champions. There may be more titles in the future. History would tell us there’s nothing like the first.
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