NEW YORK – For the first five months of the year, with nothing to back him up but faith, Chris Young insisted – tried to convince himself – the Rangers’ best baseball was in front of them.
Well, it’s here.
And it’s spectacular.
The Rangers ran their winning streak to six Saturday with a come-from-behind 3-2 win over the staggering New York Mets, scoring all their runs in the eighth and ninth innings and getting so many different contributions you would have sworn they had a whole Broadway cast in the clubhouse.
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Just to keep things straight, this win streak is entirely different than the six-game streak from two weeks ago. Yeah, they’ve had two separate six-game winning streaks since starters started dropping to injuries en masse. They’ve won 16 of their last 20 games. This was the fourth time they won a game they had trailed after seven innings since Aug. 4. In the four months previous, they had three such wins.
“It’s September and we’re playing important games and we’re doing a good job of coming from behind, playing good baseball,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “They are just playing with a lot of confidence and having fun out there. They are loose and that’s the way you want them to be. That’s when you play your best baseball.”
When the afternoon was done, the Rangers were 1 ½ games back of both the AL West lead and final wild card spot, but Houston and Seattle were both playing late. They are now, however, only two games back of the second wild card spot, too, with 13 games to play thanks to Boston’s second consecutive loss at New York. Of significance: The Rangers hold the head-to-head tiebreaker with Boston should the Red Sox keep dropping. Boston’s last 13 games are ranked as the sixth toughest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon. The Rangers’ is now ranked only 18th.
Where to even start with this one?
Maybe this is as good a place as any: With an old-timers game. The Mets’ “Alumni Classic” on Saturday afternoon canceled on-field batting practice for the Rangers. They used the time to get a minor league pitcher to throw to Adolis García, who is trying to return from a strained quadriceps. But the exercise had to take place under the stadium in a narrow batting cage, which is not usual or preferred for these types of things. When Tellez heard, he asked if he could jump in, too. He’d had only four at-bats, all pinch hit appearances, in the past 10 days. And, going back to the last day of August, he was in a 1-for-16 skid.
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“I want to contribute,” said Tellez, who has been relegated to pinch hitting by the return of Jake Burger at first base. “We’re playing some really good ball and I want to contribute and be as close to ready as I can all the time. You need to see pitches, especially when you are not in the game.”
All of which came in handy when the Rangers asked him to pinch hit for Dylan Moore in the eighth inning, trailing 2-1 with two outs and runners on first and second. His mission: Get a hit off Edwin Diaz, against whom Tellez had been 0 for 4 with three strikeouts.”
If the swings were designed to help, it was to allow Tellez to not be slow to react.
“I wanted to be in a position where if I saw something well, I wanted to be able to pull the trigger and not be indecisive,” he said. “I wasn’t selling out, but I wanted to be able to take a chance on a pitch with some confidence. He’s got a really good fastball and a really good slider. You can’t prepare for both, but you can sit on a location and that’s what I did.”
He got a slider that was just drifting to the inner half of the plate against the left-handed hitter and lined it sharply to right field to score Wyatt Langford, who’d given the rally legs with a double into the left field corner. It came right after Josh Smith reached on a catcher’s interference call to start the inning and right before Joc Pederson lifted a fly ball to center to drive home the first run.
It hardly comprised the list of the contributors. In the bottom of the eighth, yet another Ranger suffered an injury, with Chris Martin feeling more numbness in his fingers with a runner on third, two outs and a 3-1 count on Jeff McNeil. Phil Maton, who finished off Friday’s win, entered, finished off a walk of McNeil, then coldly struck out Cedric Mullins on a series of curve balls.
In the ninth, the Rangers manufacture a run on a leadoff single by – who else? – Cody Freeman, a sac bunt and a two-out single by Langford off a tiring Diaz. Then Shawn Armstrong bailed out Maton in the bottom of the ninth to seal the win.
“I think we all feel it right now,” Armstrong said. “We’re all hungry. I watch every pitch, every action and I think you can see it. Whatever it is – going first to third or tagging up or making a play on defense – there’s a lot of energy right now. We can kind of sense the common values and effort amongst us all right now. It’s a lot of fun to watch.”
Good baseball almost always is.
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