The Rangers came up one win short of the division title, and in a year when the AL West was so flat that an 81-81 team took it, that one win stung all the more.
Texas finished 80-82, one game behind the Houston Astros, who clinched the division on the final day when the Rangers lost and Houston won. The margin was razor-thin, but the payoff was harsh: Houston’s postseason lasted only one round, as the Astros were swept by the Chicago White Sox in the AL wild card series.
For Texas, though, the bigger story was how a season with playoff hopes never quite found its footing. The Rangers kept getting chances to seize control of the race and couldn’t convert. Injuries piled up around key players, the team never found a real winning run, and the end result landed below both expectations and, by Chris Young’s account, even the club’s own internal forecast.
At his end-of-season press conference, the Rangers’ president of baseball operations said the team had seen itself as a playoff-level group entering the year, though only if a few things broke right.
“Going into the season, we have internal projections for win totals based on our roster construction, which we compared to outside projections,” he said. “Coming into this year, we felt like we were between an 82-to-85 win team, somewhere right in there - and that was if things kind of go our way.”
That makes the finish even more frustrating: the Rangers needed 82 wins to take the division, and the low end of their own projection would have been enough. But the injuries and uneven play kept them from even reaching that mark.
“The painful part of that is that even in spite of that, we had a chance to be a playoff-caliber team if we had even just a good last week of the season,” Young said. And we didn’t execute that.”
Young said that reality made it hard to process the season the day after it ended, because he believed it would continue a little longer. Instead, Texas ended up just outside the bracket, a result that fit an unfortunate trend: this was the ninth time in 10 seasons the Rangers finished .500 or worse, with their 2023 World Series run standing as the lone exception.
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