Thursday afternoon, the Texas Rangers absorbed a lopsided loss at the hands of the Oakland Athletics. There's nothing that should ever be made of one individual loss -- even the best teams in history lose. Even the Harlem Globetrotters have lost. If you have two enemies, and you arm one of them with a gun, and you arm the other one with a bucket, after enough trials eventually the guy with the bucket will emerge victorious. You might have to go through a lot of guys to get there.
The Rangers, And Overreacting To Overreactions
The Texas Rangers got off to a blistering start, and at that point they looked like World Series favorites. They’ve slumped since, and now people are jumping off the bandwagon. They’re still awesome, you guys.
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But while Thursday's was one individual loss, it was a troubling loss, as the Rangers managed one run on four hits, and Yu Darvish treated the strike zone like protected airspace. And there's the matter of context. It was the Rangers' third loss in a four-game series in Oakland, and in those losses they scored a total of two runs. The A's entered the series in a tie for last place, nine games behind the Rangers.
There are more question marks around the Rangers now than there used to be earlier. And in order to discuss that, we must first discuss how the Rangers were doing earlier. In a word, “awesome.” In two words, “awesome possum,” where the possum adds an element of playfulness. You could’ve imagined a team getting off to a better start than the Rangers did, but it wouldn’t have been realistic. Realistically, the Rangers began about as well as they possibly could have.
On Wednesday, April 25, the Rangers beat the Yankees to move to 15-4. They already had five more wins than any other team in their division, and their run differential was +55. To put that another way, the average score of a Rangers game through that point was 5.6 - 2.7. The Rangers were more than doubling their opponents.
And oh, did people get behind them. It made sense that people were ready to support the Rangers, given that they're back-to-back American League champions. But from an early point, comparisons to the 1998 New York Yankees abounded. Here's one example, from Tom Verducci:
With Hamilton at the peak of his game, the Rangers, too, have the look of a team that may be historic. Texas is destroying American League competition. This could be the best team since the 1998 Yankees. It has no weakness.
Several echoed the idea that the Rangers were a perfect or near-perfect team. They were talked up in many corners as obvious World Series favorites, as though they had grown only hungrier since coming so close last October. There were the Rangers, and then there was the rest of the American League, peons, obsequious providers of the Rangers’ every wish.
Since Thursday, April 26, the Rangers have stumbled. They've gone 18-21, and most recently they've lost seven of their last nine, getting outscored by an astonishing 35 runs. You want to blame it all on that 21-8 loss to the Mariners, but of course you cannot. The Rangers have fallen off, and they've allowed the Angels to climb into the race. The Angels have been hot on their own, but they wouldn't be as close as they are now had the Rangers been playing better baseball.
And now people are backing off of their earlier statements. Some people wonder what’s going on; some people have taken it to the next level, and are worried. Rangers fans are worried because fans live and die by the day-to-day business, and lately the Rangers’ day-to-day business has been less than encouraging. Something must be the matter because the Rangers don’t look like themselves.
It's absolutely true that the Rangers haven't looked like themselves of late. Here's something else that's absolutely true: the Rangers have the best run differential in baseball, at +64. The next-best belongs to the Dodgers, at +41. The Rangers entered play on Thursday with a team 112 OPS+ and a team 119 ERA+, the former being baseball's second-best, and the latter being baseball's second-best.
It’s so almost impossibly difficult to keep one’s eye trained on the big picture. With the Rangers, though, it’s the big picture that matters. You could try to split their season into two fractions, or you could recognize that, after 58 games, they’ve probably been baseball’s best team, record be damned. Just as the Rangers had to come down from their early highs, they Rangers have to come up from their recent lows, and the best idea of where they belong is provided by their overall season performance. It’s been outstanding.
Of course the Rangers have more questions than it might have seemed like when they were playing near-perfect baseball. When you’re winning every day, nothing is wrong, but teams don’t keep winning every day, and as losses mount, issues emerge. There’s not a team in baseball that doesn’t have things it’d like to change about itself, just as it is with people. Even the most beautiful people in the world!
I keep bringing myself back to the same over-simplified but nevertheless instructive concept. In 2011, the Rangers won 96 games and advanced to the World Series. They had the numbers to back up their record. The big change between 2011 and 2012 was replacing C.J. Wilson with Yu Darvish. There are other things, but that's the big one.
Maybe Darvish isn't quite as good as Wilson was, but maybe he will be. Maybe some players will regress, but then the bullpen's a lot better now. Alexi Ogando is out of the rotation and Neftali Feliz is hurt, but the Rangers just signed Roy Oswalt, who's never finished with an ERA+ below 100 in his life. The Rangers were incredible a year ago, inches from being crowned world champions, and they did nothing to make themselves substantially worse.
So while the Rangers are slumping, I can’t imagine that this is a time to worry. Not only do we have the overall 2012 numbers to tell us that the Rangers are very good, we kind of have the overall 2011 numbers to tell us the same thing. That sounds like cheating and it’s hardly something that would hold up in a scientific journal, but how the Rangers did last season doesn’t say nothing about this season.
People can’t help but get caught up in the everyday storylines. And that’s fine, because it wouldn’t be fun to sit back and only think about the bigger picture, all but ignoring each day’s events. The games are the soul of the sport. For a few weeks, the Rangers have played an unusual number of unpleasant games, and recent performance does matter a little more than earlier performance.
What says the most about the Rangers’ ability, though, is the Rangers’ performance, and not the Rangers’ performance before or after a certain date. The Rangers’ performance has probably been better than anyone’s. If you were a big believer in the Rangers before the season, they’ve done nothing that should’ve changed your mind. And if you weren’t a big believer in the Rangers before the season, you were wrong.
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