ARLINGTON -- You just need to win series. Stack series and the rest will work itself out.
But for the Rangers, just winning the series doesn’t seem to be enough at this point. Texas is in a precarious position entering this final week of the regular season with a razor-thin margin for error in order to reach the postseason.
The Rangers won the first two games against the Blue Jays this weekend, but a sweep would have done wonders for the standings.
Texas fell, 7-2, to Toronto in Sunday afternoon’s finale at Globe Life Field, as the Rangers could not complete the sweep, despite having ace Jacob deGrom on the mound against a Blue Jays bullpen game.
“Yeah, I mean, you want to win every game,” manager Skip Schumaker said. “I don't look at it as a sweep or not sweep. I look at it as trying to win every single game. Did we prepare? Did we play the game the right way? And I think we did all of that.
“We didn't make a bunch of errors or anything. We had guys on base, didn't really hit good with runners in scoring position today. That's going to happen. Hopefully, we can start another winning streak, and it starts with game one on Tuesday.”
Despite the loss, the Rangers (78-78) maintained their one-game lead over the Astros (77-79) atop the American League West entering Monday’s off-day.
The Rangers are undefeated in their last nine home series (8-0-1), good for the longest such streak in the Globe Life Field era (since 2020), but they still have not completed a sweep since taking all four games in Toronto from June 25-28. Their last sweep at home was against the Royals from May 29-31.
“You just keep trying to win series. That's about all you can do,” designated hitter Corey Seager said. “That was a good series. You can't dwell on today. Obviously, you'd like to win it, but overall, this homestand's been really good. We’re playing good baseball right now.”
The Rangers entered Sunday just 21-55 when their opponent scores first. That troubling trend continued, when deGrom issued a leadoff walk to Brett Bateman to open the game. Bateman went first to third on a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. single and then scored on a sacrifice fly for a 1-0 Toronto lead.
Twice deGrom issued a leadoff walk to Bateman. Twice, Bateman came around to score. While Toronto scored more than enough runs throughout the rest of the game to win, the two runs early loomed large for a team that has often struggled to play from behind.
deGrom owns an 8.40 ERA and .949 opponents’ OPS in the first inning this year.
“I didn't have a real good feel for anything today,” deGrom said. “Maybe the changeup or curveball, but I wasn't really able to locate the fastball and didn't throw the slider well off of it. I didn't make pitches when I needed to. That was frustrating. I was kind of all over the place.”
The Blue Jays scored four in the seventh inning when the Rangers sent a trio of relievers to the mound: Tyler Alexander, Chase Silseth and Adam Macko.
Texas’ pitching staff has been decimated by injuries and abbreviated starts this homestand, leaving the bullpen to cover far more innings that it should be prepared to. But for the most part, they’ve risen to the occasion. Rangers relievers entered Sunday with a 1.84 ERA over the first five games of the homestand, covering 29 1/3 total innings in that stretch. The group was holding opponents to a .163 average with a .468 OPS.
It finally caught up on Sunday.
“You saw some balls find some holes today,” Schumaker said. “Really in my estimation, [Charles] McAdoo put a good swing on a split [from Silseth], but he had him in the right count and just couldn't put him away. I thought they pitched good. Balls just found some holes.”
The Rangers and Astros have a mutual off-day on Monday, the final idle day of the regular season for both clubs. Texas has a one-game lead in the division, but Houston owns the tiebreaker, should it come to that.
So how do the Rangers keep it from even getting to that point?
“We know we gotta win,” deGrom said. “We gotta win as many games as we can. It’s be nice to win all of them. It would have been nice to win today, but I didn't do a great job of helping us in that situation. We have to go play good baseball in these last six games and see what we can do.”