ARLINGTON -- A day removed from baseball’s Trade Deadline, the Rangers look relatively the same, for better or for worse.
It was also a day removed from what manager Skip Schumaker called “our worst game of the year,” as well as a day removed from everybody -- the front office, the players, Schumaker himself -- asserting that the players already in that clubhouse could go on a run to get this team to the postseason.
You just have to start with the first one. And they got it, thanks to one man dubbed “The Solution.”
The Rangers finally put an end to their six-game losing streak on Tuesday night, with a 5-4 win over the Giants at Globe Life Field. The Giants fought back to tie the game on two separate occasions, first in the seventh inning and again in the ninth against All-Star closer Jacob Latz before Ezequiel Duran played hero for the final time.
Duran collected four RBIs on three hits, including a bases-loaded double in the eighth and a walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth inning to secure a victory.
“He nicknamed himself ‘The Solution’ for a reason, and he's no joke,” Schumaker said. “He really is [the Solution] at times. He's been that the whole year. He brings the energy he brings daily. It's real. It's not fake. It's not fluff. So again, with all these injuries that we've had, to have him do what he's done has really kept us afloat where we're at right now, and still within striking distance, so to speak. He's a big reason why.”
Duran’s decisive game-winning double left the bat at 95 mph and hung in the air for 4.6 seconds as Giants right fielder Jung Hoo Lee got turned around under it. The ball fell, just as Lee himself stumbled to the ground, and bounced over the right-field wall to score Jake Burger from second base.
What was Duran thinking as he watched the ball fly?
“I don't know. I don't know. I was praying,” he said with a laugh.
When it fell?
“I was happy. I was happy. Pretty happy,” he repeated.
“[Duran] was huge for us,” said Tuesday’s starter MacKenzie Gore after twirling six scoreless innings in the win. “When he came up in the last inning, and it was like, ‘Please do it again.’ It was just a huge win for us. We need to keep doing what he's doing. Getting three or four hits a night is probably not necessarily something you do every day. But he's competed all year. He plays hard. Guys feed off of that. I think if we continue to try to do that as a group, we're going to win games.”
But it was definitely more difficult than it needed to be, especially on a day when Gore collected one of his best starts of the season, and the offense jumped ahead with two runs in the first inning.
It should have been an easy recipe for Rangers success. The success came, but just after a winding road to get there.
And this definitely the kind of win they needed.
“I never like to say ‘must win’ in August, but it felt kind of that way,” Schumaker said.
At Monday’s Trade Deadline, the front office affirmed its commitment to this club and these players. They stumbled in the series opener against the Giants on Deadline day with a fruitless effort that included five errors in the field and extended the losing streak to six games.
Tuesday, despite the back-and-forth of it all, felt like a righting of the ship. It looked more like the resilient team that the front office hoped could make a deep run.
“We play 162 games,” right-hander Cal Quantrill said after the series-opening loss on Monday. “[The Deadline] had nothing to do with our preparation for today. The boys wanted to win. We had good energy. We just had a bad day. That's baseball. That's part of it. It sucks sometimes. The timing can lead to a story that I know you guys might want to write, but the energy was good. We came here to play. We put the road trip in the past. We just didn't have our best day, and that's all right. So we'll be back tomorrow and get on a roll.”
They came back. Hopefully that’s the start of getting on a roll.