ARLINGTON — The company line around these parts is that every Texas Rangers game matters between now and the conclusion of the regular season.
It’s hardly untrue and it’s a product of the make-or-break position that they are in with a shade more than one month left to play before the postseason starts with or without them.
But, still, an exception to the rule isn’t necessarily unwarranted.
Especially when business — for the first time in some time — was handled as needed.
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“I think now that we can look on it retrospectively,” right-handed pitcher Merill Kelly said Sunday afternoon, “it’s a big deal.”
The Rangers won 5-0 vs. the Cleveland Guardians Sunday at Globe Life Field to complete a sweep of the team that was directly in front of them in the American League Wild Card standings. Keyword: was. The Rangers, now .500 again with a 66-66 record, leapfrogged the Guardians and are now behind only two teams for a playoff berth.
Related:Rangers complete pitching-powered sweep of Guardians with Merrill Kelly’s best start yet
Consider the whiplash to understand the significance. The Rangers concluded a seven-game road trip against the first-place Toronto Blue Jays and in-contention Kansas City Royals Thursday with two wins, five new injuries and the look of a team whose opportunity to contend for the postseason had closed.
They were, after Thursday’s loss to the Royals, three games under .500 and five-and-a-half games out of the Wild Card and tasked with a challenge that they’d often stumbled over this season.
The Rangers, who were 25-42 this season vs. teams with a .500 or better record before Friday’s game, had an opportunity to control the destiny directly in front of them as it pertained to the standings. They failed to do so earlier this month when they lost a series to the Seattle Mariners. They whiffed again this most recent road trip when they dropped three of four against the Royals. A series loss vs. the Guardians, who were two-and-a-half games up on the Rangers Friday morning, would have represented a significant blow to the theoretical postseason chase.
Texas, an enigmatic bunch whose patterns have been largely difficult to predict or understand this season, bucked the trend and swept them.
Go figure.
“It’s baseball,” center fielder Wyatt Langford said. “It’s a weird game. You can feel like you’re at the very bottom one day and the next day it feels like you’re on top of the world. So we’re just going to try and ride that feeling for as long we can.”
They might’ve learned from the mistakes that they made against the Mariners and Royals. A trio of Texas starters — right-handers Nathan Eovaldi, Jack Leiter and Merrill Kelly — allowed one run in their 21 innings. The offense scored 19 runs and won two games via shutout and one, on Friday, courtesy of a walk-off hit from designated hitter Joc Pederson.
They received contributions from a number of role players, including first baseman Rowdy Tellez (two home runs in the series), infielder Cody Freeman (go-ahead home run Sunday) and infielder Ezequiel Duran (three hits, three runs driven in and one scored) while a third of the every-day Texas lineup lingers on the injured list.
“It’s super important,” Langford said. “Being able to sweep those guys who, they were ahead of us, I don’t know, are they below us now?”
Yeah, by a half-game, to be exact.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s awesome,” he continued, “but obviously we still have some work to do.”
The work includes the one-and-a-half game lead that the Royals hold over the Rangers for the first spot out and the four-and-a-half game lead that the Mariners hold for the last spot in. The Rangers do not play either team again this season and still have six games left to play against the first-place Houston Astros, three against the first-place Milwaukee Brewers and three against the playoff-positioned New York Mets.
The Rangers have just a 11.1% chance to qualify for the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, and the Cleveland sweep only improved those odds by slightly less than 4%.
They’ll need to handle their business and then some to beat those numbers.
Sunday’s sweep-clinching win was a start.
“It definitely gave us more life,” Pederson said Sunday after his fourth home run of the season vs. lefthander Erik Sabrowski padded the lead in the seventh inning. “We were messing around [and said] we want 20 in a row. This is just the beginning and we’ve got to build on that. There’s still hope, we’re playing with fire and energy, that’s all you can ask for.”
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