ARLINGTON – Believe it or not, Bruce Bochy has survived more difficult summers than this one. Like his tour of the Maryland Industrial League, where they chased their dreams by night after working a full shift in construction. Bochy’s day job consisted of driving spikes through railroad ties used in landscape design. He learned to swing his hammer true. One false whack, and it was heck on your shins.
Just the same, he wouldn’t take anything for that summer.
“I still talk to the guys who were my roommates,” he said.
Get this: He still loves this summer.
Rangers
“I get to do what I love to do,” he said before the Rangers swept Cleveland with a 5-0 win Sunday at Globe Life Field, moving them ahead of the Guardians into fifth place in the wild card standings, 4 and 1/2 games back of third-place Seattle.
“If I ever lost that, no question what I would want to do. Do I like losing? No. Do I quit trying?
“No.”
Considering he also calls this season “probably the most challenging” of a 28-year career, you could see how his feelings might be tested. Especially at 70, with four World Series titles meaning there’s nothing left to prove. If the Rangers fail to live up to the expectations he had going into this season — which appears likely, though, as this weekend proved, this team is nothing if not a tease — he could walk away knowing the final act wouldn’t rate much more than a mention in the national recounting of a Hall of Famer’s farewell.
If you were wondering about Bochy’s frame of mind these days — and he’s getting plenty of calls — you should know this:
“I’m a competitive SOB,” he said.
“That’s what drives me.”
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Maybe you remember that Chris Young got Bochy up from his couch in Nashville when the Rangers’ general manager was looking for someone to turn around a franchise lost in the bulrushes since it was left here a half-century earlier. Bochy had been out of the game for three years after 13 seasons in San Francisco and a dozen before that in San Diego. He didn’t miss any one thing in particular. It was everything.
He’d miss it if he got out now.
“I do this because I love it,” he said. “I come to the park every day trying to figure out how to win. For me, it’s the challenge of getting it right. You don’t always get it right, but you keep trying.
“I want to win and I want to win another championship.”
He figured this team had all the earmarks going in. He thought the same of his ’98 Padres team, which lost to the Yankees in the World Series, and he had the same premonition about the Rangers two years ago. There wasn’t any science to it. He could just tell.
If not exactly like the world championship team, he expected this club to hit. That it hasn’t is one of the reasons he calls this his most challenging season. The other reasons? Injuries like the one that just claimed Marcus Semien, maybe for the season. Also because the pitching has been so good. No one who’s spent more than five minutes around this franchise could have expected a rotation like this one.
“If we just have one of our normal years,” he said of his offense, “we’re winning the division.
“It didn’t happen.”
Of course, nobody knows better than Bochy that that’s just baseball. Trust a track record at your own peril. The baseball gods love nothing better than a shot at heavy odds.
Watching the Rangers’ Jekyll-and-Hyde act this season would be enough to scare the bravest of souls. Exactly who are they? The team that took 10 of 13 going into the deadline, persuading their president and owner to push their chips in? The team that subsequently flopped to 5-14 over the next three weeks?
Or the one that just swept the Guardians, outscoring them 19-3 in the process and leaving just enough room for hope to sneak in?
Bochy knows a little about both ends of the spectrum. He’s managed good teams and bad ones, which is why it’s possible he could go into the Hall of Fame as just the third manager with a losing record, after Bucky Harris and Connie Mack. Winning so much makes you a champion; losing so much, a realist. Bochy’s no Pollyanna. He didn’t get back in the game because he hoped the Rangers would win. He could see a parade coming from spring training. He can see one now, if only with a telescope.
Unlike a certain columnist who recently pronounced this season the end of an era, Bochy thinks the window remains open.
“It’s gonna win another championship,” he said of the Rangers.
You think?
“I believe.”
Once this roller-coaster of a season is over, we’ll see if the owner does, too. Will Ray Davis pay for another shot at a title? Or will he roll back the payroll? Would the president still feel the same about the manager if they miss the playoffs again? Would the manager, who says health isn’t an issue, still want to work at 71 if he didn’t think he had the goods to win it all? All still to be determined.
For now, it’s good enough to know that, if the Rangers haven’t beaten the rest of the West, they haven’t beaten the joy out of their manager, either. He still loves what he does, and not just because he no longer has to pull a day shift, too.
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