26 weeks and 3 days

Trying to make a watched pot come to a boil - the 2023 Texas Rangers quest

The baseball season is insanely long. Just ridiculous, really.

I was once asked how any sport could have reasonably decided on the incredibly non-symmetrical 162-game season.

My only response (of which I have no real proof but simply an educated guess that I have talked myself into believing) was basically in the north there was a gap between winters that allowed you to have outdoor sports from the end of March or early April, and you’d better wrap it up in October before the snow returns.

Obviously, the birthplace of the sport was rather north and the birthdate of the sport predates other major sports. So baseball had the entirety of the year to themselves and were likely trying to amuse themselves with some activities that were not all based on farming or other farming-type occupations. Get done with the plow and then we can go have a catch and an ale and call it a day when the sun goes down.

Not sure if this is a very good historical record, but that is my best explanation on why we need 162 games (or 154 before it) to determine who gets to play in the playoffs that start after everyone is exhausted.

The season is so long and every game represents a small percentage of the final outcome in baseball that you often refer to the old cliche "a watched pot never boils” — time passes slowly when one is waiting for something to happen and that is the only thing one is thinking about.

You and your blood pressure cannot survive a pennant race if you take every ebb and flow as the end of the world. Every inch matters, but it is best to remain calm and not to jump out of a window at the first sign of trouble.

So, it is not lost on me that it was only a week ago that everyone felt great about where the Rangers sat in the standings. Thanks to my friends at baseballreference.com here are the standings from the morning of August 16, 2023:

(That also happened to be the date this column was penned.)

I think it is worth noting that when you look at the the standings, the fourth column, win percentage, and the eighth column, pythagorean theorem win percentage (a measure of your expected win percentage based on your run differential), is almost identical for every team in the division, while the Rangers who were underperforming their expected wins. This, is of course, is crazy because they were still 72-48 and were flying high, 24 games over .500. According to the Rangers run differential, they should have been at 78-42 or so. Houston was exactly where it is supposed to be. Seattle was slightly under their earnings (66-53 was about right), but the Angels and A’s were spot-on the number.

One week ago, everything was on schedule. The trains were running smoothly. The anxiety levels were measured and calm. Nobody was losing their minds.

And here we are today.

It happens fast. But, also, it happens slow. This is how baseball works.

When you have played 120 games, you realize that you are 75% through your schedule and in many ways you can see the finish line. You also have 42 games to play and six-and-one-half weeks to go. The path is treacherous, especially if your entire roster is primarily comprised of players who have not played much competitive baseball, while the opponents are October veterans.

The Rangers have spent the last week losing games with poor offense. They, as you can see, have had an outrageously good offense all year – which requires consistency on its own right – but now cannot generate runs. There is a contagion that seems to affect everyone not named Corey Seager, who quite understandably, is the hitter on this roster with far and away the finest post-season resume of them all. In fact, Seager had gone to the post-season nearly every season of his Los Angeles Dodgers career, so a week in August is nothing to be too concerned about. Marcus Semien also has some playoff bonafides, albeit much less.

Everyone else who holds a bat around here? Nothing much at all.

I am not trying to tell you that we have to know our ways around October to be able to handle Milwaukee at home or the Arizona Diamondbacks. But there is now a looming sense of dread that seems to be spreading. The guy in front of you is in a slump and the guy behind you is in a slump. Maybe you are trying too hard or holding too tight. Maybe you are questioning how everyone had a career year at the same time or maybe it’s just baseball and arbitrary sample sizes make us all a bit dense.

Either way, this is why so many sports people believe momentum is real. Can it be proven?

No.

Momentum is always misapplied in sports broadcasts. But ask any team that had a big lead, sees it slipping away, and collectively all forget how to perform at anything approaching their “normal” outputs and there it is. That collective, sinking feeling that we are doomed is chasing you down like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is catching up too fast and we are all going to die soon.

By the way, Uncle Mo also works in the other direction. We don’t talk about how great it is when Leody Taveras and Zeke Duran and Jonah Heim and Josh Jung are all feeding off eachother and before long, you have an entire lineup of Seagers. How many weeks was that the case this year?

The collective feeds the individual. It happens in every sport. It happens at every level. You feel great because you are up three holes with five to play. Oh dear, in the water. Out of bounds, oh no. Now, you can’t even halve a hole to save your life. You’ve choked.

But, how is it stopped?

Nobody knows. We think steady hands on the helm and calm performers are the way. They need everyone on board to figure out how to back on track. Having Bruce Bochy and his staff using their incredibly panic-free demeanors is a nice start, but the players are the only ones between the lines that can change anything.

To make matters more full of despair, this roster is locked in. Once they passed the trade deadline, there was nothing else that anyone could do. The guys in that uniform and in that clubhouse have to figure this out on their own. And soon.

The tennis great Billie Jean King has a phrase that fans of that sport know like the back of their hand. It is repeated frequently and attributed to her constantly. I have only followed the sport closely here for about five majors in a row – six, if we include next week’s US Open – and I have heard it many times. It is this, “Pressure is a privilege.”

That phrase means a lot of things to a lot of people, but author Douglas Conant explained it like this:

Pressure gives us the opportunity to experience the joys and pitfalls of life more fully and to savor them more completely. Life is short. We can’t let opportunities to test ourselves pass us by. Pressure is the privilege to try ever-harder, to win (and lose) bigger, and to experience the full range of feelings that life has to offer us for the brief time we’re here. We ought to grab onto it.

I think about this with the Rangers right now. They are feeling the pressure and the doubt and they might be uncomfortable right now. They are inexperienced and probably a year ahead of schedule. The young core is used to being irrelevant, only Jose Leclerc played any role at all with the 2016 Rangers.

But, they have earned the right to feel pressure. They have earned the right to be doubted. They have earned 126 games of first-place baseball.

They now will either win big and return to the playoffs, proving the future is very bright. Or they will lose big and offer one of the biggest collapses this city has witnessed by missing the postseason completely.

Heading into Minnesota for a long weekend and then New York, it is anybody’s guess how this final six weeks will go. They either embrace the situation and respond or wilt in the summer heat – despite playing indoors – and the pressure busts the pipes.

What an opportunity. They have played a huge portion of the season – nearly 21 weeks! But, that doesn’t quite get it done around here.

They have earned the right to feel the pressure and now they definitely feel it. The question then becomes, “how do they deal with it now?”

I plan on watching that pot come to boil with most of my attention. They have earned that, too.