CLEVELAND — If only the Rangers’ future was as clear as Sunday afternoon.
It was a dazzling early autumn day, with a pleasant breeze blowing in off Lake Erie, the kind of day that made you smell playoff baseball in the air. Or maybe that was simply the aroma of rancid champagne still emanating through Progressive Field after the Guardians clinched a most unlikely playoff berth the night before.
The Rangers? You could say Sunday brought to a fitting close the most perplexing, frustrating, brain-bending under-achieving season in recent history, if not ever. Cleveland’s Brayan Rocchio hit a three-run homer off the right field foul pole to cap a four-run 10th inning rally in a 9-8 Guardians win. It was the second straight walkoff win for Cleveland. And set off another champagne jam. On Saturday, they had only clinched a playoff berth; on Sunday they clinched the AL Central. Meanwhile, the Rangers finished at 81-81. Even when the season was over, it was impossible to determine if this team was winners or losers. The kids have a word for it: “Mid.”
Along the way, the Rangers brought out all the old standards from this maddening season. They lost leads of 2-0, 5-2 and 8-5, the last coming on Rowdy Tellez’s homer in the 10th. They twice had runners make outs on the bases, a day after having a runner thrown out at home. They failed to get a run home from third base with less than two outs.
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“This was a gut punch,” Bruce Bochy said after the game.
What’s one more after all he’s already been through.
Now come the questions. Boy, there’s a lot of them. Meaty ones, too.
Sure, the Bochy issue looms over the organization. Bochy apparently wants to continue to manage. But whether he wants to continue to manage this group or whether Chris Young feels this team needs more, um, let’s go with “proactive guidance” is to be determined.
At least that will likely be determined within the next week. Young and Bochy will meet. They’ll discuss visions. They’ll come to some kind of mutual agreement. And either the Rangers will proceed with a Hall of Fame manager or one who has already pocketed a Manager of the Year award in a two-year career Skip Schumaker. As predicaments go, this is not the worst.
On the other hand, another question that lingers is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, to quote that old baseball mastermind Winston Churchill.
That question: Have the Half-A-Billion Boys run their course?
Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, the two big free agent splurges at the outset of the Rangers’ remake, have been together for four years. Together, they’ve produced one playoff berth. It was one heck of a playoff berth that ended with a parade and confetti. But that playoff berth is looking more and more like, pardon the language, a fluke.
If anything, the Rangers seem to have grown farther apart since the World Series than together. It almost feels like a reflection of how Seager and Semien prepare for games. They are constantly in different places, each working obsessively on their own pregame routines. This offense often functioned like it didn’t see or meet one another until game time; team-centric at-bats, approaches and rallies were in short supply all year.
So, it’s at least worth asking: Has this been a success?
“They came here and accomplished a goal that the Texas Rangers had never achieved: Winning a World Series,” Young said. “You can’t even quantify what that means to our fan base and our organization. But, I can speak for myself that my goal in this job is not to just win one; it’s to get back to the playoffs or have a chance for the playoffs year after year. We have not accomplished that since 2023, so for me, We haven’t done what we need to do, and we’ve got to look for ways to improve that. Accountability falls on everybody. We, collectively, myself included.”
He said more, though. And there may have been more meaning behind his words.
“When Corey is on the field, we win,” Young said. “Marcus has had a down year. There’s no other way to put it. He did not live up to his expectations, to our expectations, and we are going to need better from him moving forward in order to win. And so there’s accountability. We all have accountability.”
Translation: The Rangers need to figure out ways to get Seager on the field more often, which is kind of self-explanatory, but the Semien comments seemed more pointed.
Look, Seager has missed almost the equivalent of a full season over the last four years with injuries. Obviously, some of that can’t be helped, but it also means optimizing his playing time when healthy. He’s the franchise cornerstone. Those guys don’t take healthy days off.
On Semien, the hard truth is he’s a player who appears in decline. And historically, decline comes very fast after age 35 for second basemen. Ask Bret Boone. Ask Ian Kinsler. It’s easy since both are currently employed by the Rangers. And both are acutely aware of how the age impacted their careers.
Over the last two years, Semien’s .686 OPS ranks 110th of 118 players with at least 1,000 plate appearances. Adolis García, at .675, ranks lower, but García’s contract expires after this year, and for months, it’s been understood he’s not coming back. Semien has three more years left at $25 million per year.
Semien only seemed to create more issues about himself than answers earlier in the week when asked about the end to his season.
“I’m not the one making the decisions on who’s in this clubhouse,” he added. “I definitely know the kind of team I want to play on. That’s guys who are hungry and want to go for a championship every single year. There were just some things that didn’t work out for us as an offense, and it kind of slowed us down. That ended up being the hardest part of this season.”
The answer left some in the organization — and outside of it — confused about the context. Is there an issue in the clubhouse? That certainly seemed to be what Kevin Pillar suggested after he was released, though he later back-tracked. Are the current Rangers not hungry enough? Of the things that didn’t work out on offense, well, Semien has to be at or near the top of the list.
Those are all questions the Rangers need answered, too, as the offseason begins. And the one thing they didn’t need heading into a long October was more questions.
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