With sincere apologies: I have to talk about the Texas Rangers.
Baseball is a sport that exists, right? I mean it is present for like six months out of a calendar year. Some people still enjoy baseball. Over the last decade it has been left in the absolute fucking dust when compared to the two other major American sports — the NFL and NBA — and the reason for this is offense. It’s a crazy concept to be sure, but sports fans, er, American sports fans, like scoring. They like when the teams they watch score points.
The NFL was able to generate more league-wide scoring simply by cracking down on the way defenders are able to hit (or not hit, more specifically) the quarterback, and tighten up the way opposing cornerbacks are allowed to defend wide receivers. The NBA, meanwhile, was more or less able to create more scoring not by the rules being changed but rather the evolution of the players themselves. Everyone can make threes nowadays; three-pointers are worth more than two-pointers. That is math.
Baseball, as has been typical for them as an entity since the dawn of time, is always slow to react to its own problems. I assume the main reason for this is that it is run by old white people, and so many of the fans they cater to happen to be old white people. Change generally is not something this particular demographic is agreeable to (see: the American political system). So while the NFL lapped the field of being the most popular sport in the United States, and while the NBA grew into more of a global game, like soccer has been, MLB basically sat around and continued calling itself ‘America’s past time’ even though that saying probably hasn’t been true since like 1995.
It sounds and feels sort of ridiculous to say given how much time I spend consuming and writing about the NFL, but baseball was my first love when it came to sports. I was there in the late 1990’s when the Rangers were making the playoffs; I was there when they signed Alex Rodriguez to a once record-setting 10-year, $252 million contract in 2001; I was there in 2004 receiving text messages to my brick Nokia phone from my mom, before phones were capable of going on the Internet, when I was a freshman in high school and the Rangers were in a pennant race; I was there for their World Series runs in 2010 and 2011; I was there for their division titles in the middle 2010’s; I was there for everything.
The early 2010’s were an interesting time, not only because the Texas Rangers happened to be one of the very best teams in baseball for the first time in my life, but because analytics, such as Wins Above Replacement, were exploding. Information poured in, year after year, and while most of the older heads — the whites, as we call them — rejected the new wave of valuing players (they still do, by the way), I was on the front line writing articles and posting on message boards and arguing with strangers on early Twitter about how I Am Right And You Are Wrong.
I was in my early-20’s at the time. I got fired from being the Editor-in-Chief on a FanSided blog because I used too much profanity when I wrote (which is kind of understandable), and after that I wrote for the Rangers on the ESPN Sweetspot Network where, again, I got so fed up with the guy who ran the site that I started posting on an alias account just to shit talk. That one was on me. The point is, I was invested in my favorite baseball team. I was a guy in the online Texas Rangers community.
But baseball took a turn on me in the late 2010’s and it lost me. Basic mathematics — WAR, and valuations of players per dollar spent — got old. I wrote an article in 2014, on here, actually, that ended up on FanGraphs, which I still view as the best baseball website, about how the proliferation of strikeouts is ruining baseball. The harder pitchers throw, the more strikeouts occur, and thus the less action exists within a given game. This trend only continued in the years following and became such a problem for baseball that finally, finally, they tried to do something about it starting in the year of our lord, this year, 2023.
MLB’s way of curtailing this issue was by instituting a pitch clock; it was eliminating the shift; it was forcing relief pitchers to throw to at least three batters at a time (rather than having left-handed and right-handed specialists who would come in to pitch to only one batter before being taken out). I hate to give MLB credit, I really do, because they are dumb, but it actually, surprisingly, made the game more watchable.
I say all of this now as background information, nothing else, because the truth of the matter is the only reason I am writing about baseball right now is because my favorite team, those same Texas Rangers whom I have struggled with and lived with and died with since I was like seven years old are tomorrow night facing off against the Houston Astros in Game One of the American League Championship Series. This is the first time the Rangers have advanced this far since 2011, when I was a young and strapping 21 year-old with I’m sure an entirely different set of life problems I was dealing with.
I don’t have much to say about the series itself. I’m only here, again, for accounting purposes. To remind myself that it is happening, that it happened. The Astros have played in this same exact series in seven consecutive years; they have won two World Series trophies; they, as much as I hate to admit it, are the most accomplished MLB franchise over the last 10 years. They enter the series as the obvious favorite — but nothing crazy, something like -140 (meaning every $140 bet nets $100) — and the Rangers are a small underdog at +120 (meaning every $100 bet nets $120).
The bigger picture is more fun to ponder, and the bigger picture looks something like this: in February my favorite football team — the Kansas City Chiefs, if you have been living under a goddamn rock — defeated the Philadelphia Eagles. They won that game 38-35 in a classic sort of fashion that is kind of amazing to look back on.
There are four teams left in the MLB playoffs, the two aforementioned teams from Texas, along with the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies (who are a -170 favorite, or in other words a bigger favorite against Arizona than Houston is to Texas). That’s kind of a funny foursome, is it not? (To be clear, it’s not. It’s just random that I’m a Kansas City football fan and Rangers baseball fan.)
However, who is to say that the Rangers will not beat the Astros in a seven-game series? Who is to say that the favorite Phillies will not win their series (which they are clearly the favorite in) against the Diamondbacks? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Rangers and Phillies end up playing each other with the World Series on the line in a couple weeks. It’s really not.
If, somehow, the Rangers are able to win it all, and if somehow they are able to win it all against the Phillies, then wouldn’t that just be perfect? I mean, the Chiefs beat the Eagles. The Rangers could totally beat the Phillies. Of all the cities in the country, like, literally all the cities, from Southern California to Montauk goddamn Point, what is it about Philadelphia?
The Rangers are probably going to lose their seven-game series to the Houston Astros, because the Astros are just better, top to bottom. But even if they don’t lose it, even if the Rangers do win, there’s a weighted coin-flip chance that the D-backs upset the Phillies. I may not get my perfect marriage out of this quadratic equation I’m operating with. But what if it works out? What if it works out perfectly? What if it goes perfect-perfect and the Rangers beat the Phillies?
Then my only assumption is that sports really aren’t about what is happening on the field. It’s not about Patrick Mahomes orchestrating a game-winning drive to beat the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. It’s not about the Rangers hitting the ball better and/or pitching better than the Phillies in a theoretical World Series matchup. It won’t be about any of the managers, any of the players, or anything that is happening on the television screens as the action takes place. It won’t be about any of that.
Because this isn’t fucking Los Angeles we’re talking about here. It isn’t San Francisco or New York or Miami or any of these other places. If this actually happens, it can only happen against a team that plays in Philadelphia. That’s the city. That is where the Chiefs made their stand and won a Super Bowl. That is where I want the Texas Rangers to win their first World Series in franchise history. Philadelphia.
If that is indeed what happens, then, like I said, it isn’t about the players or the teams. It’s not about the coaches or the training staffs or the nutritionists who work all year to make sure everyone is doing exactly what it is they should be doing. It’s not about the fans, it’s not about god, it’s not about anything else. It can’t be.
It can only mean one thing: that it’s all about me. Because it’s Philadelphia.
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