KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Somehow in the context of this season, this makes sense. The Rangers have spent all year losing games they should have won, it figures that at some point they win one they should have lost.
How else is there to explain Wednesday’s 6-3 win over Kansas City?
They were without their manager. Interim skipper Luis “Pipe” Ureta was left to manage a road game against a left-handed starter, two areas in which the Rangers have been exceptionally bad. They were without a starting pitcher.
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They got a leadoff homer and still trailed three batters into the bottom of the inning. They ran themselves out of three different innings. And, yet, somehow, the team that was supposed to slug its way around the American League built a game-breaking, two-out, ninth-inning rally off a walk, a bouncer batted around the infield like a foosball and maybe the softest infield single of the year.
It all allowed for cleanup hitter Kyle Higashioka to clear the bases when he smoked a double from exhausted reliever Sam Long. If you stopped at “cleanup hitter Kyle Higashioka,” there’s a good reason. It was only the second time in his career he started in the No. 4 spot. The other was the meaningless last game of a lost 2023 New York Yankees season when just rounding up enough players was hard enough.
Oh, and then the bullpen finished off six shutout innings with Hoby Milner somehow retiring the top of the Kansas City lineup in order.
“I think it was a big team effort,” said Ureta, now 3-0 as an interim manager after winning both his games with Miami at the end of last season. “The bullpen did an amazing job in a game that we needed to win.”
In the worst way. Thanks to an acrid August, the Rangers playoff chances on Wednesday morning had dropped to a season low 7.9%, according to Fangraphs. It was down from 51.7% as recently as July 27. Their stock, so to speak, had lost nearly 86% of its value in three weeks marred by more offensive malfunctions and a beleaguered bullpen.
It looked for much of the night, like they were going to drop even further. Though Wyatt Langford led off the game with a homer, spot starter Caleb Boushley allowed a pair of singles in the bottom of the first and then a three-run homer to Vinny Pasquantino on the way to a 38-pitch inning that meant the Rangers were going to ask even more of their bullpen than intended.
While just-recalled Jake Latz was spectacular for 3 ⅓ innings, the offense clawed its way back into the game despite running into outs in bulk. Ezequiel Duran was caught stealing to end the sixth and picked off to end the eighth.
The biggest mistake, though, was Langford just running past third on Marcus Semien’s single, a batter after Corey Seager tied the game. Langford was caught in a rundown. While his speed has created some runs for the Rangers, his aggressiveness has lately been costly. Including caught stealings, it was his 15th out on the bases this year.
“I didn’t see or hear a stop sign,” said Langford, though replays showed third base coach Tony Beasley clearly pointing at the base. “I didn’t know Bobby Witt had fielded [Semien’s ball] and I was running like it was in the outfield. When I looked back at it, it was too late. It’s baseball. It was an aggressive mistake trying to score with two outs. It’s not the right thing to do, but I didn’t know what was going on.”
If anything played in the Rangers’ favor late, it was the structure of the Royals lineup, allowing Ureta to use death-to-righties Shawn Armstrong for the seventh and most of the eighth before going to Milner with a deep pocket of lefties coming up in the ninth.
All it took to get to Higashioka’s heroics was Langford reaching for the fifth consecutive time with a two-out walk, Pasquantino and Long both kicking Seager’s grounder and Semien’s slow dribbler, which left the bat at 38.9 mph.
“In those situations, where it’s like make-or-break, win-or-lose, I just kind of try to think about not doing too much,” said Higashioka. “You are already going to have extra adrenaline going. So, in those moments, I tell myself to swing at 70 or 80 percent and know I’ll still uncork a full swing.”
And to uncork one of the most unlikely wins of the season.
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