Some Black Friday nostalgia.

As we enter the holiday season, let's think back a year.

Later today, I’m going to grade 40 papers about the life and impact of Curt Flood — a man who more than 50 years ago dramatically changed sports (and more) forever — that I had my students write.

In the meantime, I’m going to revisit a four-week period, just over a year ago, that dramatically changed sports (and more) forever for me. And I suspect for many of you.

Something real quick, though, before we get to some bad-ass nostalgia.

Dutifully engaging in the Black Friday vibe, I gratefully offer you the opportunity to subscribe to this newsletter for the next year (or next month, if you prefer), or to gift a subscription to a friend, a family member, a co-worker, a client or customer — you can even postdate the gift to arrive on Christmas or Chanukah or any date you choose! — or to buy your peeps (or yourself) some “Zero Things” merch to commemorate the Rangers’ 2023 World Series run.

Or to buy the book that I put together writing about that 2023 season (with one of its three forewords penned by Chris Young) — a book that starts with the October 2022 hiring of Bruce Bochy, takes you through a shockingly ahead-of-schedule season, including a harrowingly ominous late summer, and ends with 85 pages (85!) of raw, emotional vibes and coverage of every one of the team’s 17 playoff games.

Here’s what the book cover looks like:

And some of the merch you can tap into:

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For subscribers, later today I’m going to open things up in the Chat for you to submit your trade ideas — I’ll tackle a handful of them in a story before the Winter Meetings open here in Dallas in a week and a half.

But for now, because it’s the season of giving, I’m going to share some excerpts from every playoff entry in the above-mentioned book. I got rabbit-holed into reading through those entries this morning, and thought I’d let you do the same if you don’t already have the 2023 book.

Hope you enjoy some of this over (perhaps several cups of) coffee.

Here we go.

After Wild Card Series, Game 1 — 12 Things:

1. The Rangers and Rays have played 11 post-season games—well, 10 in the playoffs (2010, 2011, this week), plus one Game 163 play-in game (2013). The road team is 10-1 in those games—and 6-0 in St. Petersburg.

That’s the historical context. As for now, we’re talking about a Rangers team that went from 94 losses to 90 wins in one year. That has overcome a slew of major injuries, including those that have made Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Jon Gray postseason spectators. That would have been the two-seed with a bye this week and home field next week, getting its pitching in order and its players rested in the meantime, had they converted only one of those 33 blown saves.

Instead, the Rangers faltered in the season’s final weekend, needing merely two positive outcomes between their final four games and Houston’s final three, and getting only one. They hit .219 against Tampa Bay this year, including .200 at the Trop. On paper, the Rays have the stronger rotation, the deeper and more reliable bullpen, and the prognosticators’ votes.

But they don’t yet have a win. That distinction belongs to the resilient Rangers. As does the opportunity to end this series today.

Sure did miss playoff baseball.

After Wild Card Series, Game 2 — 11 Things:

9. As for the decision to let Leclerc close the series out, even though the lead was six runs and he’d thrown 18 pitches the day before, my attempt at reading Bruce Bochy’s mind leads me to wonder if the manager knows there could come a time or two when Leclerc is needed on back-to-back days in really tight spots this month. Wednesday provided a relatively low-stress opportunity to build some confidence in Leclerc: that he can do it in spite of rocky results this year on no days’ rest. It took 24 pitches, and it wasn’t the cleanest inning, but Leclerc finished with a flourish, punching out both Manuel Margot and Curtis Mead to bring on the team’s second celebration in five days.

After League Division Series, Game 1 — 10 Things:

3. I guess I could see Bochy moving Carter again, after just one day in the five-hole, but it just doesn’t seem like a Bochy thing to do. Still, it was (another) heck of a day for the 21-year-old on Saturday, moved from his familiar ninth spot in the order all the way up to fifth.

Though Carter is still measurably less productive against lefties, Bochy left him in to face both Danny Coulombe (fifth inning) and DL Hall (seventh). I’m not sure we’ll see Carter rested against a left-handed starter at this point, not that Texas will see one this series anyhow.

You just can’t sit the guy down. Yesterday: a five-pitch walk (getting one borderline call from Lance Barrett, a notorious pitchers’ umpire), a smoked double (101.5 mph to right field), another walk (with two more borderline calls going his way), and a groundout to first that he made dangerously close.

The double was my favorite, and not just because it opened the game’s scoring (or gave him an MLB-tying four extra-base hits as a rookie in his first three playoff games, a record he and Jung now share with two others). The gameplan against Carter, whose minor-league reputation of possibly being too passive at the plate has been accentuated by a steady log of deep counts in the majors, has to be getting ahead in the count while he is tracking pitches.

And then Carter goes out and ambushes a Bradish first-pitch, get-me-over slider, seconds after Garcia had pulled up to second with his own double.

Good grief, I loved that Carter double.

Two pitches later, he properly froze—and almost stumbled—as he let Heim’s rope go by into left center field, but he still motored around third so effortlessly that there was no thought of a throw to the plate. (A major-league record there, too: he’s the first player to fill his line in the box score with an extra-base hit, a walk, and a run in each of his first three career playoff games.)

Evan Carter is great at baseball.

After League Division Series, Game 2 — 9 Things:

1. After winning the pennant in 2010 and 2011, then playing a 163rd game in both 2012 and 2013, the Rangers bounced back from a disastrous 2014 to win the West in 2015 and travel to Toronto for the ALDS. New manager Jeff Banister’s group won Game 1 and Game 2 across the border and returned home needing just one win in three tries to advance to the ALCS.

You know the rest.

This series isn’t over.

My favorite MLB memories are headlined by the times I’ve been fortunate enough to be in the ballpark for road playoff wins. The October chill and the moments of (eerie) silence, pierced only by the yells coming out of the visitors’ dugout and the chorus of boos in the crowd when the Rangers just prove to be too much. These last two days have been just about perfect.

But this is no time to get ahead of ourselves. We have to stay focused. Keep an eye on the prize. Avoid looking too far ahead. Be faithful to routine. So I’m headed to Miss Shirley’s one more time on my way to the airport. You don’t mess with a streak.

After League Division Series, Game 3 — 8 Things:

5. I feel like I’ve buried the lede, but that’s only because Game 3 had multiple ledes.

Seager getting the Rangers on the board and getting the crowd going was huge, but the at-bat of the game was an F-7 in the books.

Unless you keep a detailed book.

Texas sent six hitters to the plate in the first inning, leaving Nathaniel Lowe to lead off the second. In his final 60 plate appearances of the regular season, Lowe hit .094 and struck out 18 times. In the Rays series and the first two games of the Orioles series, he was 3 for 18 (.167) with seven strikeouts.

In his first trip on Tuesday night, he fell to .158 for the playoffs. And it may have been the most important at-bat of the night.

Lowe watched the first two fastballs from Orioles starter Dean Kremer, who needed 22 pitches to get through the first inning, and both found the zone. Then it was on. Kremer threw everything at Lowe. Four-seamers up, four-seamers down, cutters in. Lowe fouled off a pair of them and watched three others elude the zone. After that: seven straight foul balls before he lofted the 15th pitch of the at-bat fair, caught in left field for an out.

I’m not kidding about this: the crowd, by the last few pitches of the at-bat and even as Lowe returned to the dugout after the flyout, was virtually as loud as it had been on the Seager homer an inning earlier. Since MLB began tracking pitch counts in 1988, only a Johnny Damon at-bat in 2004 (16 pitches) and an Austin Meadows at-bat in 2021 (17 pitches) lasted longer in a playoff game.

Lowe forced Kremer to throw more pitches in that at-bat than Eovaldi had thrown in the first (11) or second (9) inning.

And it set the stage for the inning that changed the game irreversibly. Josh Jung lined a single to left on the first pitch after Lowe’s marathon. After Taveras popped out, Marcus Semien drilled a double to left center. Then came the intentional walk of Seager, Garver’s two-run double down the third-base line, and Adolis Garcia’s demonstrative, three-run blast.

Lowe set it all up.

And then, four innings later, Lowe destroyed a Kyle Gibson fastball on the inner half, a pitch whose outcome was as certain as the Seager home run. As much as I loved Garver’s mic drop on his grand slam in Game 2 and every Garcia bat flip, Lowe’s reaction to his shot, maybe 50 feet into the 437 it would travel, was the best home run reaction of the year. For all Lowe has gone through this year, at the plate and more importantly off the field, where his mother is battling brain cancer, he deserved that moment.

Even if his flyout to left was more important.

And I miss my dad.

After League Championship Series, Game 1 — 7 Things:

1. First, this is one of the biggest moments of the Rangers’ season, and not of the catastrophic variety as it was originally feared to be:

That’s Garcia, walking off the field with trainer Matt Lucero on September 6, after injuring his knee trying to rob Michael Brantley of a second-inning home run in a game the Astros would win, 12-3.

Three things of note about that game:

It completed the Astros’ sweep of the Rangers in Arlington, a series in which they outscored Texas, 39-10.

It was the last game between the Rangers and Astros until Sunday night.

It was the last day that Evan Carter was a minor leaguer and the reason he was about not to be.

It’s no fun to imagine where the Rangers would be right now if Garcia hadn’t gotten hurt. It’s entirely possible that Carter would still be awaiting his major-league debut.

Carter made a tremendous play in left field in the first inning, gliding toward the foul line to rob Bregman of extra bases. Unless Travis Jankowski were starting, I’m not sure another Texas left fielder would have made that play.

Carter turned on an inside Verlander fastball in the second inning, shooting it 103 mph under Abreu’s glove and turning it into a hustle double. Nobody else on the Rangers even thinks about second base on that play. It set up the game’s first run, as he got a great read on Heim’s one-out flare single to center and scored without a throw.

After the Taveras home run doubled the lead, Carter made a very good play on an Altuve liner to left to start the bottom of the fifth, setting up a key shutdown inning for Montgomery that he needed only 11 pitches to complete.

And then.

The eighth.

Altuve worked a walk off of Josh Sborz on a brutally missed call on a 3-and-1 pitch by plate umpire Stu Scheurwater. On came Chapman, in whose head the second baseman and Minute Maid Park most likely reside. Chapman threw a fastball a foot low to the patient Bregman, then clipped the zone with a slider on the outer edge. Bregman successfully (but narrowly) checked his next swing on a shoulder-high fastball, and not one of you felt good about Bregman sitting 2-1 with a man on in a two-run game.

Chapman then threw a slider that caught the zone but too much of it, and Bregman crushed it. High and deep. The look on Chapman’s face as he whipped around to track the ball’s flight was probably only slightly less distressed than the one on yours. Was the game seconds from being tied? Or would the high fence keep the ball in play and leave Bregman at third as the tying run with no outs and Alvarez up?

Neither.

Carter—playing in Minute Maid Park for the first time in his life—dashed around the jut-out in the fence and into the armpit of the track, and somehow caught the ball leaping straight up.

By that time, Altuve did what a good baserunner should in that situation, hovering at second base so he’d have time to get back to first if the ball was caught but be able to score if the ball eluded Carter’s glove.

Altuve stepped on second base, which is not problematic in and of itself. But then he took a half-step off the bag toward third with his left foot just as the ball was being caught and thrown to Seager, the cutoff man stationed in short center. Altuve lifted his right foot, pulling it to the shortstop side of the bag as he turned his body back toward first base for the rapid retreat. That was also not an issue, until Altuve began his sprint to first base without retouching second base.

Semien saw it; so did Jung. As Semien took the casual throw from Seager just to get the ball back into the infield, he stepped on the bag and looked to second base umpire Doug Eddings for the signal that the Rangers had completed a double play. Eddings called Altuve safe—and admitted to Semien that he was watching Carter and not Altuve—so the Rangers challenged the call.

The challenge was successful. What seemed in flight like a tie game out of Chapman’s hand and off Bregman’s bat was instead a two-out play that cleared the bases in a 2-0 game. Four pitches later, Alvarez dinked a 2-1 slider to Lowe that quietly ended what was inches from being a very loud and game-changing inning. I’m sure Astros closer Ryan Pressly was starting to stretch.

After the game, Carter credited Jankowski and ex-Astro Robbie Grossman for helping prepare him for the idiosyncrasies of the left-field fence. Surely Carter won’t sit against the lefty Valdez today, even though Grossman hits lefties well and has defensive experience in that park. Right?

I wouldn’t DH Grossman in place of Garver, either, but the Rangers just freakin’ won Game 1 in Houston, and I trust whatever Bruce Bochy thinks is the right thing to do at DH and three-hole today.

But … man. What if Bregman hit that ball 10 feet to the left? Or five feet farther?

Or if neither happened and Altuve properly retraced his steps and didn’t get doubled off?

Or if Adolis Garcia hadn’t banged up his knee on September 6?

After League Championship Series, Game 2 — 6 Things:

1. The Rangers are now 7-0 in the postseason and have trailed for one single inning: the first inning of Game 2 in the ALDS, when the Orioles scored twice and Texas promptly responded with a five-spot in the second.

The Rangers will look to win an eighth straight on Wednesday at home, giving the start to Scherzer, who will have last pitched 36 days ago. They are better at home; the Astros are better on the road. The Astros are also in a corner, and that’s not going to be like Tampa Bay or Baltimore facing elimination.

Texas is now guaranteed at least three more games at Globe Life Field: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday if the Astros win at least once—or Wednesday and Thursday and then one week from Friday against the Phillies or Diamondbacks if Texas completes the sweep.

The Rangers surely would prefer not to return to Houston in 2023; if they do, it will mean the series is 3-2 in someone’s favor with only elimination games left in hostile territory. They’ve put themselves in a very good position to avoid that, as good a position as they could possibly ask for.

We started with a magic number of 13, and we’re already down to 6—and shockingly, that number has ticked down every time the Rangers have played.

See you at the Ballpark.

After League Championship Series, Game 3 — 6 Things:

6. Nobody expected the Rangers to sweep this series. And that’s not the goal, anyhow.

Yes, taking Games 1 and 2 in Houston was historically significant. Teams winning the first two games of a best-of-seven postseason series have gone on to win that series 84 percent of the time (75 of 89). And since the league has gone to the 2-3-2 format, the 29 teams who have won the first two games on the road took the series 26 times (the three exceptions were all in the World Series). That’s a 90 percent success rate.

But these are the insanely streaky Rangers, who have bucked all sorts of statistical probabilities throughout 2023. And these are the defending-champion Astros, who have been better all year on the road than at home and have now won seven of their eight 2023 games at Globe Life Field, outscoring Texas 71-37 along the way.

The Rangers have proven over and over in this incredibly extraordinary roller coaster of a baseball season that anything is impossibly possible. For better and worse.

In the first playoff series the Rangers ever won, a best-of-five that went the distance against the Rays in the 2010 ALDS, the road team won all five games. In the 2019 World Series, the Astros fell to the Nationals in the first-ever best-of-seven series of any kind in which the road team won every game.

That history may have been kinder to Texas than Houston. Let’s hope the Rangers won’t need to test that path again over the next five days.

So we roll out a Magic Number today that, for the first time this month, hasn’t ticked down. With the two-game edge the Rangers built in Houston, they still hold onto a home-field advantage even with last night’s loss. But it sets up a massive Game 4 tonight, when the Rangers will send Andrew Heaney (and presumably Dane Dunning behind him) against José Urquidy in a matchup that both teams are hoping to get through before they can put their No. 1 starter back on the mound Friday afternoon.

After League Championship Series, Game 4 — 6 Things:

6. A best-of-three.

That’s what the ALCS is down to, and we can look at it one of two ways. On one hand, it’s the latest demonstration of the extreme, unrelenting, mind-boggling, sometimes excruciating ups and downs and swerves the 2023 Rangers have dog-sledded us through. On the other hand, not even the most upbeat fan or optimistic exec could have imagined sitting two wins from a World Series berth this year, with all the ground the organization had to make up from the last handful of years. This type of turnaround was not supposed to happen in one year.

I just reread what I wrote above, and it looks like something I might have said if the curtain had closed on the Rangers once and for all. It obviously hasn’t. The only predictable aspect of this team’s fortunes this year has been its capacity to go on improbable win streaks and unthinkable losing skids. Winning Games 1 and 2 in Houston gave the Rangers the chance to overcome the debacle of the last two nights.

Game 5 this afternoon will be Houston’s final visit to Globe Life Field until April 5. No matter what. Good luck predicting what happens.

Best of three.

After League Championship Series, Game 5 — 6 Things:

6. Was there intent? Nobody will ever give a definitive answer on whether Bryan Abreu’s first-pitch, 98.9 mph four-seamer up and very in, was meant to axe Adolis Garcia or if it just “got away.” Nothing I will say will change your opinion, nor should it. I don’t know the answer.

I’ve asked close to 10 people in the game, off the record. People who identify with hitters, people who identify with pitchers, people who identify with both. Only two were insistent that, given the score and game situation, there’s no way catcher Martin Maldonado ordered the pitch or that Abreu hammered Garcia intentionally. One was a Diamondbacks advanced scout sitting near me at the game who suggested, in no uncertain terms, that I don’t understand baseball if I thought for a second that there was intent. Another was a baseball person who inferred from a couple key reactions from the Astros that it was not premeditated. A third couldn’t say whether it was merely a “hard and in” plan to make Garcia less comfortable at the plate, or more.

The other six or seven, all closer to the game than I ever have been, varied between “hell yes, intentional” and leaning toward intent.

For me, Maldonado’s setup for the pitch, tilts the evidence. Plus, his track record. Benefit of the doubt would be difficult to factor in.

Given the game situation and series status, a calculated drilling would have been a horrible baseball decision for Houston. That informs Dusty Baker’s public position, too, that it was an accident pitch. But the game isn’t played on paper, and sometimes emotions bleed in. Abreu faced 150 right-handed hitters this year before Garcia stepped up in the eighth. He hit exactly one of them: former teammate Aledmys Diaz back in May.

After the game, one unidentified Rangers player told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, on the condition of anonymity: “One of the best relievers in baseball just suddenly lost command? Maldonado’s smart. They got exactly what they wanted, Adolis riled up. Crazy coincidence, isn’t it?”
Maybe it was.

But not only does the video suggest Maldonado was setting up away—he acknowledged, according to Rosenthal, that the pitch was supposed to be away, counter to what Abreu and Baker said after the game. “(Maldonado’s) differing account will offer further fuel for conspiracy theorists,” Rosenthal wrote.

Odor-Conger. Banister-Hinch. Yu-Marwin.

Hurricane Harvey. Cole Hamels’ no-trade clause.

Crane-Cuban vs. Ryan-Greenberg. Nolan’s Cooperstown cap.

Garcia-Maldonado and Framber Valdez-Marcus Semien.

There’s a lot of history of bad feelings.

(Heroes of the moment last night, by the way: Rangers first base coach Corey Ragsdale and Astros monster Yordan Alvarez, each of whom found Garcia at different times and, fortunately, with the same objective to deescalate.)

It’s not known whether Garcia was physically impacted by the shot to the ribs. If his heat-of-the-moment actions that broke the dam in both dugouts and bullpens lead to discipline, precedent suggests it won’t be imposed until next season.

But no matter how much or little his reaction was justified, there is no getting around Garcia’s actions affecting the end of the game. The delay that started with the fracas at the plate and resulted in a lengthy umpire-driven delay, which the typically mild-mannered Bruce Bochy called “a bunch of crap” after the game. It also begat an as-long-as-you-want warmup by Houston reliever Ryan Pressly once Abreu was ejected, icing Jose Leclerc for nearly 25 minutes between his last eighth-inning pitch and his first in the ninth.

Pitchers—starters and relievers alike—are creatures of routine. While it’s far less common to see a closer to pitch more than one inning than it was 20 years ago, it’s not unheard of; Pressly got six outs in Game 5 himself. But to do it with so much time between the last pitch of the eighth and the first one of the ninth is extremely rare. When a closer finishes an inning and 25 minutes elapse until it’s his turn again, it usually means his offense put up a stack of runs in that time and his services, for that day, are no longer needed.

Far from the case last night.

After League Championship Series, Game 6 — 5 Things:

1. This will also get lost in the mix because Texas won by seven runs while Garcia provided the cinematic moment, but what Leclerc provided in the eighth inning was one of the great relief performances in Rangers history.

Sborz was sent back out in the eighth after needing only three pitches to finish the seventh. This, it appeared, would not be a night on which Bochy would tempt fate with Aroldis Chapman. But Sborz walked Bregman to start the inning, simply unforgivable with a two-run lead and Alvarez on deck. He did come up big by punching out Alvarez on two curves and a fastball up and away, but Jose Abreu then singled to left—the first hit Sborz has allowed in seven innings this postseason—to bring up Tucker as the go-ahead run.

On came Leclerc—not Chapman and not another lefty like Will Smith or Andrew Heaney. (Even Martin Perez might have made sense with a ground ball a priority.) Leclerc looked shaky, issuing a walk on five pitches, none of which challenged the .143-hitting Tucker. The bases were loaded. The lead felt like it was about to disappear.

Leclerc righted himself, though, getting Dubon to line softly to Seager on an 0-2 pitch. Dusty Baker then summoned Pena back to the dugout and sent Jon Singleton, the Joey Gallo-like homer/walk weapon, to the plate.

Ball one.

Strike one called on the outer half, and then a cutter in that Singleton fouled off. Leclerc was a strike away from wiggling out of the potentially decisive mess.

Then he narrowly missed low. And then missed badly with an outside slider that never got close to coaxing a swing. Leclerc had thrown six strikes and seven balls. One more of those and the lead would be cut to 4-3. Worse, a strike that got too much plate could squander the lead altogether.

Leclerc pumped 97 right down the middle, surely not where he wanted to be, but Singleton could only foul it off.

Then 98 at the top of the zone. Singleton spoiled that one as well.

Then the Rangers closer unleashed a beautifully executed pitch, a 92-mph cutter at the same eye level as the heater right before it. Singleton didn’t recognize the pulled string, swinging through the pitch and sending the game to what would be the storybook ninth.

And among the great things about that ninth was that Garcia’s heroics meant Leclerc wouldn’t have to come back out for a second frame after a lengthy amount of time in the dugout—perhaps his undoing two nights before—and should be fresher for Game 7. Heaney retired the side on four pitches.

That there is a Game 7 is the latest amazing turn of events in this extraordinary Rangers season. This team never quits. On the 13th anniversary of Texas eliminating the Yankees in one Game 6 to earn its first World Series berth, the club routed the Astros in another Game 6 to give itself a chance at a third.

The Rangers’ first true must-win of the 2023 season came in their 173rd game. The second of those is set for their 174th, tonight with Max Scherzer back on the mound and most likely every other Rangers hurler available to pitch.

We are nine innings away from a chance at “4 Things.” Still hard to wrap my head around.

After League Championship Series, Game 7 — 4 Things:

4. The game ended two hours and two minutes ago as I sit down to begin writing this, and for the first time since we started this postseason run with “12 Things,” I have no idea where to start. Most of these entries have presented a common challenge: how to narrow all the things I want to talk about into a dozen categories, or eight, or five. But this time, I’m having the opposite problem. I really don’t know what to say.

The last time I felt that way after a playoff game, it was for a very different reason. It was following Game 6 in St. Louis in 2011. My “1 Thing” column ran all of 32 words. I was gutted.

I was gutted last Friday, too.

I was at Game 5, along with our two kids. I’ve been to more than 1,000 games of some sort in my life. That one was a top-fiver for me. It was top five when Adolis Garcia turned the lead around in the sixth inning with a missile off Justin Verlander, a moment nobody reading this will ever forget; it was top five when Bryan Abreu drilled Garcia in the eighth and emptied the benches; it was top five when Jose Altuve took Jose Leclerc deep in the ninth.

Gutted.

I went to see some old high school friends late that night, which helped me wash off the devastation. As some of them asked me what I thought would happen as the series headed back to Houston, I dodged the question and thought about Game 7 in St. Louis in 2011. And how little I actually remember about that game. Even when they scored twice in the top of the first, I felt like the Rangers were down by eight runs. I had nothing left. It felt like the team was right there with me, and St. Louis 6, Texas 2 couldn’t end fast enough.

I suppose I was conditioned after Friday’s soul-crushing defeat for the season to end the next time the Rangers took the field, to circle the drain surely but slowly.

But it happened exactly unlike that on Sunday.

And again on Monday.

I have a complicated relationship with sports. I’ve only shared it with a couple of people. Maybe one day I will share it with a professional, and then maybe with you. I don’t know.

I have friends who are Astros fans, most but not all of whom truly cared about the team before 2015. I hate their team, but don’t begrudge their loyalty; I respect it. The Astros are great at baseball. They’re also great for baseball, a supervillain with a storyline. They are exceptionally easy to hate because they’ve played dynasty baseball for seven years, but it’s not the only reason why. This isn’t David Freese hate.

The memory of Game 6 against the Cardinals—and the lack of memory of Game 7—primed me to expect an anticlimactic end to the 2023 season once Game 5 ended with a gut punch and sent the Rangers and Astros back to Houston. The way I feel about the Astros only deepened the dread.

But it did not for the Rangers themselves.

Good grief, not for the Rangers themselves.

After World Series, Game 1 — 3 Things:

1. Seager’s heroics rocked Globe Life Field into a pandemonium that, half a day later, still rings in my ears. (Good thing it was as loud as it was; I shouted things probably unsuitable for that kid I’d handed the ball to eight innings earlier to hear, if any of us could hear anything besides a massive roar.)

But, amazingly, the bedlam would get a reprise.

Right after Seager’s blast, Carter struck out, and, on an 0-2 pitch, Sewald came inside on Garcia and drilled him on the left hand. There were no theatrics; only the bated breath of 42,000-plus, exhaling when his slow walk with trainer ended at first base rather than peeling off into the home dugout.

His stolen base seconds later was predictable but probably not very smart. Arizona made the obvious move; if Garcia were to score, the game would be over, so putting Garver on intentionally had zero downside. And plenty of upside: it brought the very light-hitting Hedges up. Bochy could have hit for him—he had Robbie Grossman on the bench, for instance—but that would have meant Garver sliding to catcher and the pitcher moving into the Grossman spot for however long the game lasted.

Hedges swung through three straight sweepers, stranding Garcia and Garver.

Both teams went scoreless in the 10th and Leclerc pitched a second clean frame in the 11th.

Carter, left in to face lefty Kyle Nelson to start the bottom of the 11th, lobbed a lazy flyout to right. It brought Garcia up, and reliever Miguel Castro in. He’d face Garcia once last year and once this year, getting him out both times, once on strikes.

A Castro slider sailed to the screen and Garcia spit on a second straight pitch, a changeup low and away. He then swung through another change before successfully taking yet another one. The count was 3-1, and Castro hadn’t thrown Garcia a fastball. Yet.

The 6-foot-7 righty fired a 97-mph two-seamer down in the zone.

(Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

I get sort of carried away, you might have noticed, with the adjustments Garcia has made lately, and I asked Bochy a question after the game that I would have asked him if it were just the two of us sitting down for a beer, or breakfast at Miss Shirley’s.

Given Garcia’s flair for the big moment and his emotional game, how big is it for him to stay within himself, let a pitch like that get deep, and take it the opposite way?

“He’s done such a great job with that,” Bochy replied. “We saw [it] in the last series, we saw [it] toward the end of the season. He’s doing such a great job controlling his emotions, so to speak, where he’s not overswinging and he’s staying under control. That’s fun to watch when he does that.”

Garcia hammered the low fastball the other way, powering it to right field on a gorgeous 25-degree launch angle and depositing it not only into the seats but also into Rangers postseason lore, and his own. It was his fifth consecutive game with a homer.

He now has 22 RBI in this postseason, an all-time MLB record that breaks the mark set by the Cardinals’ David Freese in, uh, 2011. On an 11th-inning walkoff home run in a World Series game featuring the Rangers.

Garcia, a former Cardinal himself …

… knocked Freese out of the record books with his own 11th-inning walkoff job. On the 12-year anniversary of Freese’s, obviously at a horrifically low moment for this franchise.

I don’t know if Garcia deleting Freese is another omen. But I do know that it’s going to take some doing to make me question the power of the omen at this point.

After World Series, Game 2 — 3 Things:

1. Kelly was Jordan Montgomery on a night when Montgomery wasn’t. The big lefty’s velocity and spin rates were noticeably down, not only on his fastball but on his “death ball” curve as well. Though he was able to squirm out of consistent traffic for much of his night, Montgomery, on regular rest after coming out of the bullpen in Game 7 in Houston (but perhaps thrown off his routine by making only the third relief appearance of his career), failed to register a strikeout in his six-plus innings. Not just that: he didn’t earn a swing-and-miss until the fifth inning, when first-base umpire David Rackley ruled that Geraldo Perdomo failed to check his swing on Montgomery’s 51st pitch of the night.

The Diamondbacks didn’t crush Montgomery. Their offensive onslaught was dotted with infield singles, stolen bases, and sacrifice bunts, an M.O. they kept going once they got into the Texas bullpen and blew the lid off of the game. Aside from Gabriel Moreno’s solo home run in the fourth inning, every run Arizona drove in—both off of Montgomery and off Texas’ relievers—scored on a single.

And seven of their nine runs came with two outs. Montgomery and the bullpen had no putaway pitch to go to in Game 2, and to Arizona’s credit, the Diamondbacks lineup executed all night without doing so explosively. Sort of like their starting pitcher. A team with a run differential of -8 in the regular season jumped on the Rangers for an eight-run win, a demonstrative response to the heartbreak loss it had suffered the night before.

So, here we are. A best-of-five. The Rangers, not by choice, have seized what for them has been a road-field advantage, and they will need it to give Montgomery another chance to pitch. Or they can avoid that in the best way possible, by extending their unblemished postseason record away from Arlington until Arizona is out of chances to win a second game, and the Rangers, finally, are World Series champions.

But given the game plan that the Diamondbacks have designed to limit Texas offense, and that Gallen and Kelly have executed well, it feels like the Rangers will need to come back home if they are going to win this thing.

Scoring first in Game 3 on Monday would be a good start.

After World Series, Game 3 — 2 Things:

1. It was 279 b.c. when King Pyrrhus of Epirus marched his troops to Asculum to take on the Romans, seeking a road win. And he got it, although he lost 3,500 soldiers in the process, including most of his key leaders. Legend has it that Pyrrhus said in the aftermath of the victory: “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

I’m hopeful that we’re not talking about Pyrrhic victories again in this series.

Whether Scherzer can come back for a potential Game 7 on Saturday—a game that, under present circumstances, the Rangers hope isn’t needed—is not known. Whatever brought the trainer out of the dugout to visit with Josh Sborz in the seventh at least seems to be a non-story, as Sborz threw everything he had at Thomas—98 mph fastballs, curves, a slider—before getting him to swing through a down-and-in curve to end a threat.

But 10 pitches later, Garcia doubled over after lifting a fly to center to end the Texas eighth, with an obvious oblique injury. Travis Jankowski replaced him in the field. Whether he is needed to replace Garcia in Game 4 and possibly beyond would make the Game 3 victory a far more Pyrrhic one than Scherzer’s status. Gray could, at least in theory, step into Scherzer’s role as he did on Monday night;. Butthere is no way to replace Garcia’s presence at the plate, or his defense, for that matter.

The winner of Game 3 in a World Series that featured a split in Games 1 and 2 has gone on to win 66.1 percent of the time. But I’m not sure how many of those lost the LCS MVP in the process, let alone a possible Game 7 starting pitcher.

Like Pyrrhus’s army 2,302 years ago, the Rangers have proven to be road warriors of the highest order. They’ve kicked off the final road trip of the year the same way they did the last three. Whether they’ve been decimated in the process is not yet known. The brand of resilience that has stamped this team all year may be put to a final test.

After World Series, Game 4 — 1 Thing:

1. What a response.

The dark cloud that hung over the Rangers all morning and afternoon never lifted. Though they won Game 3 in Arizona to go up two games to one in the best-of-seven series, it came at a price: an hour before Game 4, the team announced it was removing Adolis Garcia (oblique strain) and Max Scherzer (back spasms) from the World Series roster, given the unlikelihood that they’d be able to recover in time from the injuries they suffered in Game 3 to help in the balance of the series. The former had been one of the two most feared hitters on the Rangers this postseason, if not in the entire league. The latter would have ideally lined up to start a potential Game 7.

Bruce Bochy would say after Game 4 that he didn’t have to say anything to his team when the decision was made to shut down Garcia and Scherzer. “They’re professionals,” Bochy said. But during a pregame meeting, Garcia spoke to the group, with several players remarking how emotional and courageous a moment that was.

They came out in Game 4 not feeling sorry for themselves, but on the attack. A five-spot in the second inning and another one in the third—all 10 runs scoring with two outs—paved the way for an 11-7 win that was only that close because the very back of the bullpen was called on after seven innings.

It has entered cliché territory to call the Rangers a resilient group, but Tuesday’s win epitomized the label. Garcia is lost; his replacement in the lineup, Travis Jankowski, playing in the first World Series of his nine-year career, picks up two hits, drives in two runs, and scores twice in his first start since September 6. Scherzer’s injury had forced the bullpen to throw six innings in the first of three straight at Chase Field; Andrew Heaney, in the first World Series of his 10-year career, allows a single run in five innings, the most he has thrown since late August.

Josh Jung, reinserted in the No. 5 spot in the lineup that was mostly his before an early-August thumb fracture, singles twice and doubles, scoring two runs—including the first one of the game on a spectacular read of a two-out, two-strike wild pitch in the top of the second that squirted away from catcher Gabriel Moreno. (Jumping on the scoreboard first mattered: the two teams came into the game a combined 16-0 this postseason when scoring first.)

The most impactful reemergence, however, belonged to Marcus Semien, who dressed up for Halloween as Marcus Semien. Nobody in baseball came to bat more in the regular season than the 33-year-old ironman, whose 753 plate appearances stretched to 825 through Game 3. Perhaps wear and tear explains the gruesome, playoff-long slump he was mired in: until two nights ago, he was hitting .190 and was 2 for 16 with runners in scoring position in these playoffs.

But on Monday, Semien drove in the first run of the game with a third-inning, two-out single. Whether that got him going or whether the loss of Garcia was all he needed to dig deeper doesn’t matter. What does is that he regained his early-season-MVP-candidate form in Game 4.

Despite a penchant for swinging early in the count and, lately, hitting balls in the air without authority, he started the game with an eight-pitch at-bat that ended with a 104 mph groundout to shortstop.

He came up again in the following inning. Down in the count, 1-2, and with two outs, he hooked a triple into the left-field corner on a slider down and away, extending the lead to 3-0.

In the third, again with two outs, he drove a 96 mph fastball up and away—the pitch that has tormented him for weeks—over the fence in left to turn 7-0 into 10-0. Semien’s resurgence was a statement development, especially in light of Garcia’s absence.

The Rangers had recorded consecutive five-run innings, a first in the 119-year history of the World Series. Not only had Semien batted three times by that point, the Diamondbacks had yet to send their No. 8 and 9 hitters to the plate.

…

When Seager came up to bat in the third inning, the score was already 10-0.

10-0 is also the Rangers’ record this postseason when scoring first.

10-0 is also the Rangers’ record this postseason on the road.

10-0 is also, if you remove the hyphen, the percentage of uncertainty of how I feel right now about the Rangers and about baseball and about what emotions will pummel me if the Rangers win one more game in this series, not to mention the depths of emotion that will shut me down if they don’t.

It’s never easy. Even for this team, on the brink of history. The Rangers have lost eight All-Star players to extended injury layoffs this year, with Garcia and Scherzer now going down a second time. They took an 11-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning on Tuesday and somehow still needed Jose Leclerc to get loose and throw 10 pitches under stress, a night after throwing 16 and a night before he could be needed to close out a potential championship-clinching lead. He hasn’t been asked to pitch on three straight days all year.

I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to write “0 Things.” I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to write “0 Things.” And if that time comes, I have no idea what form it will take. It’s not something I’m willing to think about until I have to step in the box.

I’m able to build in one off-day for my SMU sports law class each semester. I’d like to think the reason I, when putting together this fall’s syllabus back in July, decided to give my students October 31 off was because I thought the Rangers might be playing in a World Series Game 4. In truth, it was probably just a thought that the students might dig having Halloween off.

But maybe there were external forces at work—maybe Dad reaching out, three months after he died, suggesting to me that I’d best not be in a classroom on Tuesday the 31st of October.

I can’t believe I had reason to be where I was Tuesday night. And that I might experience something in the next few days—and as soon as tonight—that, as I hand this off to my editor, I have no idea how I’ll handle. No idea how I will respond. Because none of us do, not to this, after our lifetimes of waiting.

Let’s find out.

After World Series, Game 5 — Zero Things:

Here we go: Zero things.

Zero things to break down or project.

Zero things to game-plan.

Zero things to bemoan or lionize or nitpick.

Zero things to imagine.

Because it happened. The Texas Rangers are World Series champions.

…

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. So are scars. The Rangers, whose 52 seasons include 48 that I’ve cared deeply about, have hit me in all the feels. They’ve broken my heart, and done so at a level it’s hard to imagine hurting more. They’ve also given me so much joy, but for the first 51 of those seasons, never the ultimate version.

Not until Game 5 of the 2023 World Series: Texas 5, Arizona 0.

Late in the Rangers’ 11-7 win in Game 4, I caught myself hoping Jonah Heim’s home run down the right field line might get him going. That’s the instinct of a fan whose team has never stood at the center of the diamond with the other 29 having been eliminated. Has this hitter figured things out? Has that pitcher settled into a groove? Which prospect is getting hot at the right time? What is the team going to do about that player’s club option?

But you know what? There’s no reason to think like that anymore. Zero. That was the ingrained mentality of a Rangers fan—will some development get him, or them, going as things move forward?

Time for an adjustment to that mindset. They’ve crossed the finish line. Scaled the mountain. Aced the test. Pushed the boulder all the way up the hill.

Landed the final strike.

…

Two outs later, with Heim still standing on third, Marcus Semien stepped to the plate. Semien had busted through an extended slump with a huge Game 4 (a triple, a home run, and five RBI), so I half-joked to a buddy that maybe the Diamondbacks should walk him and Seager intentionally in the 3-0 game and take their chances with Carter. On the second pitch he saw, Semien deposited a fastball up and away into the seats in left-center.

It was at that moment that my eyes started welling up.

Sports.

It no longer mattered that the Rangers lost Jacob deGrom after six starts, and Adolis Garcia and Max Scherzer during the World Series. Or that they didn’t add enough winning bullpen pieces before the season, or in July, and blew more saves than they recorded. Or that they lost 94 games a year ago. Or that they lost 16 of 20 late this season and plummeted not only out of the division lead but also out of one of the six playoff spots.

It no longer mattered that they’d been stymied by Zac Gallen for the first six innings of the game and then couldn’t get a runner in from third with no outs in the seventh and with one out in the eighth and with no outs in the ninth.

It no longer mattered that Chapman once again couldn’t finish his inning or that Sborz hadn’t thrown 2 1/3 innings since he was a Double-A starter in 2017.

…

None of it mattered. Sborz punched out four of the eight batters he faced, including Geraldo Perdomo to start the ninth and Ketel Marte to end it. He spiked his glove, and his teammates all rushed him at the mound.

And I stood completely still.

I was also completely still 13 years earlier to the day, watching Bruce Bochy win his first World Series at the expense of the Rangers in the 2010 World Series. That time, there were no tears.

Bochy’s teams have now won 17 of the last 20 games in which they had the chance to close out a playoff series. His latest team went 11-0 on the road, the first to ever do that in a postseason. It also went 11-0 when scoring first. It also has never lost a World Series in which I caught a foul ball in the first inning of Game 1.

It’s been a very emotional year for me. I lost my dad. Our kids have moved on from the house and are charting their own paths. World events have been heartbreaking.

Over the years, I’d gotten much better at avoiding getting too high or too low. Sports setbacks in particular stopped hitting me quite as hard. Maybe it was a matter of maturing out of needless mood swings. Maybe it was just experience, and no longer overreacting to things I’d been through before.

But this was new. As the visitors’ dugout emptied in a sprint and the bullpen did the same, my heartbeat slowed. I cried. In that amazing, overwhelming, unfamiliar moment, I had no clue how I was supposed to feel.

Zero.

…

As for 2023, I am sort of frozen—to be fair, now it’s 4 a.m. here, 6 a.m. back home in Texas—in a surreal state of euphoria. I’m not sure if it’s enough emotion, or too much. I guess that will work itself out. I have zero experience watching the final baseball game of a Texas Rangers season and not wishing the year had gone differently.

I’ve been waiting for this peculiar, powerful, ineffable feeling my entire life. For the last eight hours, I haven’t wanted to put any expectations on what shape or depth that feeling might take. I’m not going to force the action. No song lyrics to wrap around the moment, no historical reference points, no attempt at description or category.

I don’t want to put this feeling—this acceptance that the Texas Rangers have, in fact, won a World Series championship—in any sort of neatly identifiable box. You’ll just have to understand that I have zero intentions of doing that, and that this is, at long last, a game that I happily plan to let come to me.

Hope some of that stirred up for you what it did for me. There’s a whole lot more of those postseason write-ups in the book.

Let me know if you have any questions about the book or the merch.

As we’ve cleared Thanksgiving, the process of building the next one of these World Series contenders is about to ramp up significantly. I’ll hit you up shortly in the chat to start tossing around some trade ideas.

Let’s have a great holiday season.