The American League West has turned into a strange, grinding race, and the Texas Rangers are right in the middle of it because nobody in the division has managed to separate.
Houston entered Thursday at 60-58, holding a 1.5-game edge over Texas, which sat at 60-61 after Wednesday’s loss. That gap matters, but only a little, because the Astros spent most of the season below .500 before taking over the division lead two weeks ago.
Even more telling: all five AL West clubs are carrying negative run differentials. Nobody has outscored the competition over the full season.
That kind of muddled race brings back echoes of 1994, when every AL West team finished under .500 before the players’ strike wiped out the rest of the year. This season won’t end that way.
There will be a World Series, and there are no plans for a strike or lockout before the collective bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1.
For Texas, though, the bigger issue is more immediate and more familiar. The Rangers are a game under .500 and need a win Thursday night against the Angels just to get back to even.
Houston is off, so a Texas win would also trim the Astros’ lead to one game. But even that would only reinforce what has become the Rangers’ defining pattern: hovering around .500, never quite breaking through, never quite falling away for good.
The math has become almost absurd. Texas’ communications staff recently included the club’s record since the start of last season in its game notes, and that makes the team’s ongoing tug-of-war with .500 easy to trace.
The Rangers led the division early, but never by more than 1.5 games. After they slipped behind Seattle in late April, they never fell more than three games out.
They dropped below .500 on May 2 in Detroit, then did not get back there until beating Kansas City on the road on June 11. Even then, the hole never got much deeper; their worst point in the division race came while they were five games under after a May 28 loss to Houston, when they stood at 25-31.
Texas fought back into first place on July 9, beating the Angels at home to move a game over .500 at 47-46. That set them up to hold the lead into the All-Star break, and they pushed it as far as two games shortly after.
Then came a six-game skid, including a sweep by Houston in Houston, that dropped the Rangers to 55-58 and into second place. A four-game winning streak followed, getting them back to 59-58 and once again parked just above .500.
That’s the story of Texas’ season: close enough to matter, never clean enough to feel secure. The Rangers are still alive in the division because the division itself has been so ordinary.
In a stronger year, they’d probably be fighting just to stay in the wild-card picture. Instead, the AL West has left the door open.
The question now is whether the Rangers can finally walk through it and leave this cycle of mediocrity behind.
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