Best of BP: A Texas-Sized Improbability

Image credit: © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

This article was originally published on August 15, 2023.

“The fact that we cannot arrange the universe like a single orderly sequence of time does not mean that nothing changes. It means that changes are not arranged in a single orderly succession” ⁠— Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, p. 109

The Texas Rangers are 7⁠1-48. Their collective 108 DRC+ is third-best in the league, behind only Atlanta’s otherworldly 117 and the Dodgers’ Goliath-like 111. Corey Seager has been one of the most valuable hitters in the game despite only playing 75 games. The rest of the supporting cast, if it’s even fair to bill them that way, have more than held their own. Even losing significant pieces like Jonah Heim and Josh Jung hasn’t caused them to crater, with their primary replacements, Mitch Garver and Ezequiel Durán, each currently maintaining an OPS above .800. All of this has helped float a pitching staff that had injury questions coming into the season and has worn them more than answered them, ultimately registering a DRA- that makes them a bottom-10 unit while requiring multiple trades at the deadline.

More important than any individual performance or team rank, however, is that the team leads the AL West in August. They have played winning baseball in every month this season except July, in which they barely missed the mark by going 12-13. Even as injuries have piled up, and the aging machine that is the Astros has slowly warmed, they remain in the driver’s seat for a postseason berth that would give them home field advantage in a building where they have piled up wins all year long and are 21 games over .500.

They weren’t really supposed to, though. Or “supposed” to. We might all be better off if we applied quotes to that word more often than we do, which is never, given the heavy lifting we allow it to take on. Supposing can’t be removed from assuming. Texas’ spending in recent winters was endearing in the sense that it bucked the conventional path to contention that sports teams have spent tons and tons of energy, rather than dollars, convincing us is the way it has to be done. Windows are supposed to be built slowly, opened briefly, and then allowed to close as if winning can be only seasonal. They more or less said screw it and took out the whole wall, ready to welcome a breeze whether it came or not. No one was calling their actions responsible. 

This is why there is nothing orderly about the Texas Rangers in 2023. They’re working in the margins of probability, something else we lean into supposing about, much the same way an older person might lean into moseying in a park or a child might lean into meandering into shops on a boardwalk. We like to think of probabilities in terms of numbers instead of prospects. We talk about the chance of something happening by the rate at which it’s happened in the past, or the rate at which a team has won and how we might regress their performance and project it moving forward, or how often that same sandwich order has been satisfying and the likelihood it will do more good than bad during a crappy day at work. 

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“But memory, causes and effects, flow, the determined nature of the past and the indeterminacy of the future are nothing but names that we give to the consequences of a statistical fact: the improbability of a past state of the universe.” ⁠— The Order of Time, p. 169

The Texas Rangers are 71-48. Another thing about the improbability of an event is that, when it’s really extreme, it doesn’t even register as possible. The closest we might get is when a team appears to be out of it near the end of the season, their hopes for the postseason all but dashed. Or when they’ve made the playoffs but are down in a series, and hope is rallied in the face of long-shot odds. But even those are still only analogs, attempts to express something about a thing rather than anything explicitly about the thing itself. It’s the difference between “act kindly” and “be kind,” a façade you grok because you’ve passively come to know the way we’ve built our language to be almost enough. 

No other team has improved their winning percentage more since last year than the Rangers have. Almost all of the league’s other exciting teams started being exciting last year. Their 177-point increase from .420 to .597 as of writing is approached only by the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds, another team that has provided a shocking amount of fun this year, also provide us more reasons to doubt their ability to keep doing this and getting away with it. They have a ton of rookies and worse pitching than the Rangers, and they didn’t even go out and acquire the strong remaining vapors of an ace at the trade deadline like Texas did with Max Scherzer. We can almost taste the shortcomings. We’re also getting dangerously close to a part in the season where we can’t ignore how reality doesn’t care. 

No, Dane Dunning probably isn’t going to be a tour de force the rest of the way with his 90 mph sinker, but a bunch of the games in which he has been are already banked as wins. Maybe Adolis García’s ability to spit on pitches out of the zone doesn’t stick, but it has been a catalyst that has propelled him to being the team’s most valuable player by WARP to this point. Yes, the backend of their bullpen being so left-handed with Will Smith and Aroldis Chapman is odd and does, in the grand scheme of things that are probable, leave them more vulnerable. But one of those guys limits free passes and the other strikes out batters and they both do it better than most pitchers, leaving them as a troublesome endgame tandem. 

The most improbable thing about the Rangers at this point is a months-long preconception that has not played out, the way you’re worried about jumping in the pool until you do it and realize that the problem was with yourself and not the water. They could lose every game remaining this season and still finish better than last year. They would have to play disastrous baseball to miss the playoffs. 

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“The place of a thing is what surrounds that thing.” ⁠— The Order of Time, p. 69

The Texas Rangers are 71-48. A Texas-sized improbability has led us to positive disbelief. Only doubt could keep us from thinking they’d continue to be a good ball team, because a willingness to hedge only requires a lack of engagement. They are a winning club because they have put winning players all around, outside the expectations of when they should. What a novel concept.