Negative 11 things.
-11
Eleven things.
In a few hours, Bob Sturm and Dan McDowell will roll Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails with “Hurt,” because a local sports season has ended. I need to hear it. It will make me feel worse for a couple minutes, and then better.
But in the meantime, I’m going to recycle my own Sturm bit, a 2008 thing he wrote at the end of a Dallas Cowboys season that ended well short of expectations. It applied a year ago, after Toronto had eliminated Texas in what was a very different kind of kick in the junk from this year’s. It applies now — and in a way you hope it happens far more often than the years that breed indifference — and I include it again.
As I was leaving a frigid Texas Stadium after the game, I was walking right behind a Dad and his boy. The boy must have been 7 or 8 years old and was crying about the result. Some people might roll their eyes, but I knew how the boy felt. When you are young, and you love a sports team, you believe the games and the seasons will all have the happy endings of the Disney movies that you watch. Guess what, son, if you are going to pledge allegiance to a team as it appears you have with the Dallas Cowboys, I want to welcome you to the fellowship of the die-hards. Understand, that once you do, you are not allowed out of this commitment, and you should also understand that most seasons are going to end in tears. A favorite team is the only thing a male human feels the same about when he is 5 and when he is 45 and when he is 75. You will change your mind on everything else. Girls, money, hobbies. But, you will always still feel the adrenaline rush of a win, and the gutting sadness of a horrible loss. I didn’t say anything to the boy, as his Dad was handling it (and he might not have welcomed my advice) but I felt for him. Welcome to sports, young man. Someday, you may live to see a championship or five, but most years will end with your guts spilling onto the floor.
I needed to share that. It made me feel worse, and then it made me feel better.
“They were one play better than us today.”
So said Jonathan Lucroy, for whom “us” became the Texas Rangers 10 weeks ago.
Fair observation, perhaps, but Toronto was far better than Texas in the series, by just about every imaginable measure. And that’s sports. Really, that’s baseball. It’s less predictable than football or basketball, because there’s no such thing as a quarterback rotation and you don’t change your backcourt based on the opposition. More often than not in those sports, the teams that win the most in the regular season should continue to do that in the post-season.
In baseball, it’s more about earning the opportunity to play in the post-season — at which time you roll the win-loss odometers back to 0-0.
Yes, in one sense the Blue Jays were one play better than the Rangers on Sunday night, but in the series sweep Toronto — which scored the fewest runs in baseball in September — hit .266/.344/.550 (.915 OPS), while Texas hit .204/.255/.320 (.575 OPS).
The Blue Jays, as a whole, were Nelson Cruz.
The Rangers were Cliff Pennington.
The three starting pitchers Texas sent to the mound gave up an opponents’ slash line of .333/.396/.854, permitting 16 runs (13.94 ERA) on 16 hits and four walks in 10.1 innings.
Toronto played better defense, too.
The team that led baseball in turning double plays in 2016, and that booked an insane number of one-run victories, lost by one run when it failed to execute what, for this club, appeared to be a fairly routine double play chance.
And for the second straight post-season, the Rangers’ elimination will be remembered, at least in part, for plays their reliable defenders usually make, but didn’t.
This was not the 1998 Rangers who lost three straight to the Yankees, or the 1999 edition that did the same, two clubs that gave us the feeling that maybe they didn’t even really belong in the post-season fraternity. This, instead, was a very good team that got outplayed in three games by a very good team, once very narrowly, and as a result the Rangers flew home a day earlier than planned, and will pack their things up a couple series early.
Toronto may have been one play better on Sunday, but they were many plays better in the series.
Great starting pitching is the surest way to make a lengthy post-season run, and the converse bears itself out, too. Texas wouldn’t have drawn this series up any differently coming out of spring training — a legitimate chance to start Cole Hamels twice, Yu Darvish twice, and Colby Lewis once in a best-of-five with home field — and it lined up perfectly.
The Rangers’ 1996 playoff team had Ken Hill and Roger Pavlik fronting the rotation.
In 1998 they had Rick Helling and Aaron Sele.
In 1999: Helling and Sele again.
Cliff Lee and C.J. Wilson headed up the 2010 rotation.
Wilson and Matt Harrison were probably the top starters in a well-rounded Texas rotation in 2011.
In 2012, when the club played in the Wild Card Game, Darvish and Harrison were the top two starters.
In 2013, when Texas played in a Game 163 tiebreaker, Darvish and Derek Holland were one and two.
None of those tandems measure up, objectively, to Hamels and Darvish. You’d take Lee over either of them, but in terms of a one-two punch, this was the one best suited to take the team deep into the tournament.
There are lots of things that can and will be dissected as far as this Rangers season’s autopsy is concerned. But the failure of the starting pitching to execute is the one that was most shocking, and ultimately most damning.
Meanwhile, Toronto’s pitching shut the Rangers down late on Sunday. After Texas chased Aaron Sanchez in the sixth, clawing back from a 5-2 deficit to take a 6-5 lead in the frame, Jays relievers — thought to be a relative weakness — were not only perfect in the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, but didn’t allow a ball out of the infield until the final Rangers plate appearance of the season:
Strikeout, 5-3, 1-3.
F-5, strikeout, F-5.
F-2, 4-3, F-5.
Strikeout, strikeout, F-8.
“We didn’t hit,” Adrian Beltre said after the game, taking personal responsibility for his part in that. “Can’t win when you don’t score.”
“They got hot,” Lucroy said.
“We were cold.”
Was it that simple, that fundamental a breakdown? Am I dumping 2,000 words too many this morning? (No need to answer that.)
The only prize you get for winning the most regular season games is a marginally cleaner opportunity to advance in what follows. That’s worth something, without question.
But if you’re not clicking, that margin more than disappears.
Rougned Odor had a huge hit in the game, but his fourth-inning home run was just his second hit of the series, and then he was at the center, defensively, of the play that will unfairly define this post-season, especially unfortunate given the reality that he’d become the face of this rivalry for Texas in May.
He’s a tremendous talent who’s getting better and whose edge will help define this team’s identity for years — and he’s still just 22 years old.
But a year after Tony Beasley had a long and very productive talk with Elvis Andrus about embracing the challenge to use his final game in Toronto as motivation, I wonder if Beasley spent the better part of last night’s flight back to Texas sitting alongside Odor.
Hope so.
The Lucroy passed ball.
Still hard for me to digest.
Love that guy.
Hey, while we’re running down a list of things to blame for the Rangers’ early exit, on top of shaky starting pitching and a team slump at the plate and surprisingly wonky defense, you won’t mind, I assume, if I go ahead and say, hey, thanks a lot, Buck Showalter.
Dang it.
Man, the bullpen was nails the whole series. Only one reliever permitted any earned runs — Jake Diekman, whose appearance Sunday night was really the one personnel decision I didn’t understand, after his lengthy sputter to end the season and as ineffective as he was in garbage time in Game One — and the rest (Alex Claudio, Tony Barnette, Matt Bush, Keone Kela, Jeremy Jeffress, and Sam Dyson) threw 16.1 scoreless frames, scattering eight hits and six walks while fanning 10.
Kela, after throwing the lead-surrendering pitch in the sixth that Lucroy didn’t handle, was as good as he’d been all year in the seventh, punching Josh Donaldson out swinging and then getting Edwin Encarnacion to fly out to right and Jose Bautista to pop out to first.
Getting Kela back in 2015 form in 2017 would be huge. He flashed it last night.
Bush was brought in on a minor league deal 10 months ago that didn’t even include an invite to big league camp in the spring. He finishes the year as the Rangers’ most dominating pitcher.
Three times in his professional career had Bush faced nine hitters in one appearance: in a Class AA game on May 10, 2011, in another AA contest on August 9, 2011, and in a July 25 outing this season against Oakland. He’d never faced more than nine.
He faced 10 Blue Jays last night, over 2.2 innings — after never having pitched more than 2.0 innings in any game at any pro level.
It should have been 3.0 innings.
Russell Martin was the first batter he faced and the last one as well. The first time they faced off, in the eighth inning, Bush struck Martin out looking. The second time, he got the ground ball he needed to escape the tenth and, most likely, turn the ball over to Martin Perez until Texas managed to get a lead for Sam Dyson to preserve.
But no such luck.
Bush threw fewer than half as many pitches (42) as Sanchez (92) but got the same number of swinging strikes (nine each). His stuff was electric, and though he was pushed to a workload level he’d never reached as a pro, nobody could have second-guessed the decision.
He fanned the first four Jays he faced, sitting 98-99 and locating his breaking ball as well. In the tenth, he struck Bautista out for the second time in the series (Bush drilled Bautista in May, of course, in his second big league appearance) before coaxing the grounder to Andrus off Martin’s bat.
What should have been Andrus to Odor to Mitch Moreland — the three men, incidentally, who had homered and homered and doubled, in that order, to produce the final five of the club’s six runs — and back to the dugout, for Carlos Beltran, Beltre, and Odor to get another shot (would Roberto Osuna have gone a third frame?), and maybe Lucroy, if the Rangers managed to put at least one runner on, instead involved a low feed, and a wide throw, and a short throw, and Lucroy was instead the fourth fielder involved in the play, never getting the chance to be the fourth hitter in the next half-frame.
Bush deserved better. Maybe, in a sense, we all did. But Bush definitely did.
He was incredible, and he’s under Rangers control for six years.
Maybe next year the Rangers win a lot fewer of those one-run games.
But maybe they win a lot more by four, or six.
A few minutes ago I deleted 16 entries on my work calendar. A couple said “ALDS?” Seven said “ALCS?” Seven more said “WS?”
It sucked to delete those.
The last thing I wrote a year ago when Toronto sent Texas home was this:
I’m close to physically ill, still. I can’t imagine how much it hurts for the players and the coaches and the trainers and the front office and the scouts and everyone else who kills it all year to get to a moment like yesterday’s, because it has to be 100 times more painful than it is for me, and mine’s as agonizing as I can imagine on a sports level.
But I’m at peace.
I’m a believer in writing while it’s raw, and for me that’s usually the play.
But occasionally it’s not, like now.
In spite of the title, this isn’t really a negative entry.
Actually, it’s not at all. Losses suck. Especially final ones. But 2015 was awesome. Awesome.
I’m really proud that the Texas Rangers are my team. That Jon Daniels is in charge of one facet, and Jeff Banister another. That they battle the way they do, that they overcome the way they do, that they embrace being underestimated. If your thought right now is that 2015 was a failure, well, I suppose every baseball season is a failure for 29 teams, by the strictest definition. But that’s a terrible way to look at this, I think.
I’m really proud that the Texas Rangers are my team.
I’m not sure how much more baseball I’ll have the stomach to watch the rest of the month. The games will be easy to stay away from, at least for a while, not to mention the highlight packages, which I’ve immediately got zero use for.
I’ve got a book to put together — and I’m fired up to let you know that Rangers third base coach Tony Beasley and MLB Network Radio/TBS Pre-Game Show host Casey Stern have agreed to write the two forewords — and I’m busy enough with family and with work to keep from getting myself mired in the muck of an untimely and unwelcome exit by the baseball team I love.
I’ll get this book done, and that’s going to be a tangible opportunity to celebrate 2016.
Before that, soon, I’ll sit down and write an epitaph for the season. It won’t be tomorrow and won’t be the next day and it may not be this week. It will be soon, though, while this one still hurts.
I’ll talk about a few free agents whose Rangers careers may have just ended, and I’ll toss out a wild trade idea that, in these next few days, I might instead talk myself out of exposing to the light of day.
But I will celebrate 2016, too. It deserves that. It ended too soon, far too soon, and that’s the dependable cruelty of sports — but it didn’t end with 162, like it does for most, and the Texas Rangers’ drive this year to 162+ was one helluva ride.
Just sucks that it ran out of gas when, and how, it did.