One foundation-shifting moment in the Texas Rangers’ march toward the World Series happened on the morning of March 13, on the back fields behind Surprise Stadium. After better-safe-than-sorry injury delays, the two biggest offseason additions to the ballclub — starters Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi — were making their spring debuts for the Rangers, on two different fields, in two different minor-league games.
In the clubhouse before the debuts, the excitement was downright palpable.
“It’s really fun,” first baseman Nathaniel Lowe told The Sporting News that morning. “We’re addressing organizational needs all over the place, on both sides of the ball.”
Did they ever.
Lowe was downright giddy — and he wasn’t alone in that emotion — for another, slightly more important seismic moment in the Rangers’ season. That one, of course, happened on Monday night, when the revamped Rangers finished off their improbable ALCS title, with an emphatic 11-4 win in Houston against their AL West rivals.
Lowe himself provided the exclamation point, a two-run homer in the sixth inning that gave Texas a 10-2 lead, pushing the advantage from sorta-comfortable-but-not-really to just-avoid-a-complete-meltdown. Facing a lineup like Houston’s, with an unstoppable machine in Yordan Alvarez and veteran top-of-the-order hitters with a knack for the big moments, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, an eight-run lead feels a lot better than a six-run advantage.
Thinking back to that spring day, deGrom isn’t part of this current team, at least not on the active roster. He’s been on the IL for months now, shut down after Tommy John surgery. But he’s still a big reason the Rangers even made the postseason. Remember how they finished a scant two games ahead of the Mariners for a wild-card spot?
The would-be-ace, deGrom, started six games for Texas this year, and the Rangers went 6-0 in those games.
Yep.
Nathan Eovaldi comes through for Rangers
Eovaldi was pretty much everything the Rangers could have hoped for this season, earning his first All-Star nod and finishing with a 3.63 ERA in 25 starts. He spent some time on the IL in August and struggled after his return, but that whole way down the stretch he was working his way back to peak form.
It might not have looked like that in his final regular-season start — he was torched by the Mariners — but he’s been vintage Eovaldi in the postseason. Remember how the Red Sox don’t win the 2018 World Series without the right-hander’s epic performance in the 18-inning Game 3 marathon? Well, the 2023 Rangers don’t reach the World Series without Eovaldi who has a 2.42 ERA in his four October starts this year, with his club winning all four.
MORE: Full MLB postseason bracket, schedule
Building off their good-vibes-only spring training — credit new manager Bruce Bochy for making sure all the pieces fit — the Rangers came out of the gate rolling. “To be honest, I’m pleased with the camp. I think we’ve played some really good ball,” Bochy said that morning. “You may say, ‘Well, you’re losing a lot of games,’ but you look at how crisp we’re playing and how the guys are doing who will be with us, I think they’re playing great. They’re playing great defense, swinging the bats well and the pitching has been good in the early going.”
The Rangers were 17-11 by the end of April and 35-20 by the end of May. The most important three wins of that stretch, though, just might have been the first three.
Texas opened its season at home vs. Philadelphia, and the Rangers swept the Phillies at Globe Life Field. DeGrom and Eovaldi started the first two games and weren’t great, but the offense — yeah, that same offense that smoked the Astros during pretty much every ALCS game in Houston — showed what it was capable of doing, as they outscored the Phillies 29-11.
Why was that important? The Rangers and Phillies both finished the regular season with 90 wins, meaning the first home-field tiebreaker is head-to-head record. Should the Phillies beat the Diamondbacks in Game 7 on Tuesday, Texas has that one over the Phillies (and over the 84-win Arizona club, too). And even though home-field wasn’t too important in the ALCS — the road team won every game — the Rangers would still rather play Game 1 at home.
Because that list Lowe mentioned this spring wasn’t just about adding players like deGrom and Eovaldi, and elite batsmen Corey Seager and Marcus Semien the previous offseason.
No, the biggest Organizational Need is the same as it has always been: winning the franchise’s first World Series. Game 1 is Friday at Globe Life.
