Getting back.

The back of the rotation (Ross Detwiler, Wandy Rodriguez, Colby Lewis) came up big in Houston.

The back of the roster (Kyle Blanks, Carlos Peguero) did, too.

And now the back of the AL West looks different, as the Rangers have left the Mariners in the cellar, and are percentage points short of Oakland in third, and a game and a half behind the second-place Angels.

It was a strange series, as the Rangers scored big and caught the ball and claimed a win streak, not to mention a sweep. A couple catchers found themselves in unfamiliar situations: Frisco’s Pat Cantwell spent a night bullpen-catching for Texas and Hank Conger played two innings in left field for Houston last night (his first pro appearance anywhere other than catcher in 10 years of minor and major league ball), and while Conger’s run a couple hundred feet southwest of that stupid hill in center field had as much consequence as the lions, tigers, bears, leopards, jackals, bobcats, lynx, kangaroo, and snakes that might have gotten loose last night in Tuttle, Oklahoma (thankfully), Cantwell helped get Keone Kela and Neftali Feliz loose and ready for perfect innings on Monday night to preserve a 1-1 tie and then a 2-1 lead, and that’s pretty cool.

The Rangers head 1100 miles east today for four with the Rays, while 1100 miles west Josh Hamilton will take BP against Matt Harrison, which not long ago would have been as weird a thing to imagine typing as a sentence including Kyle Blanks and Carlos Peguero and Kevin Kouzmanoff, or one including lynx, uncapitalized, or one in which I wonder, in all seriousness, why I haven’t had Colby Lewis higher on my list of favorite Rangers players ever, because that dude is a warrior-beast of the highest order.

By time we get to the Tal’s Hill of the baseball schedule, we could be asking what the returns of Derek Holland and Martin Perez and Mitch Moreland and Ryan Rua and Josh Hamilton and Tanner Scheppers and Kyuji Fujikawa and Nick Tepesch and maybe Matt Harrison will do to the back of the roster and the back of the staff, and there’s nothing bad about that.

By then Houston won’t have the league’s best record and maybe not the division’s (though Carlos Correa will arrive before most of the Rangers listed in the previous sentence), and as for the rest of the West, that’s four teams separated by just two games.

And one of them sitting in the middle is doing it with Wandy Rodriguez and his band of journeymen providing part of the impact.