78-84 – Rangers end wayward season with sweep of Angels

See ya later, you weirdos

The Texas Rangers scored eight runs while the Anaheim Angels scored zero runs.

Sometimes the Rangers are weird in a fun way. Backing us onto a trap door only for us to land breast-stroking in Scrooge McDuck’s money vault by squeaking into the postseason and then going on an all-time bender of a scorching red hot streak to claim the franchise’s first World Series was as fun as weird can get. But it was still weird as hell. The Rangers are weird.

Sometimes the Rangers are weird in a bad way. The entire rebuild years were dreadful as you’d expect but they were also classic Rangers odd. The real brand of this franchise. The true identity. It’s the kind of stuff that you tell someone by prefacing it with “It sounds like I’m making this up, but…”

I mean, Texas opened their new park and a different team won the first World Series there (same WS MVP, though) because it came in a year that the world ended for a while. That’s weird. The Rangers are weird.

Sometimes the Rangers are just weird for the sake of the befuddlement. The 2024 Texas Rangers somehow ended up here. For that, they end in the nexus between always champions and no longer champions.

It feels like there should be more to say about this season but there really isn’t. It just never clicked this year. Counting on returning injured players while injury prone players got injured again while some other regressed and still more slumped meant the Rangers followed up their championship with all whimper, no bang. Again, weird. The Rangers are weird.

It’s odd. It feels like we’re still living on Nov. 1, 2023. Or at least, that’s how I feel. That an entire season beyond that has now passed doesn’t seem true, despite the fact that this was a long, laborious 162 to follow. But that’s the neat thing, I guess. The Rangers can have 2024s from here on out but that flag will still be flying. It won’t always be a comfort, game to game, but at the end of the day, it’ll still be hanging there.

The Rangers get a full offseason to reset and try to recapture the magic. We get a full offseason to wait and see how they will be weird again next year.

Player of the Game: Dustin Harris collected his first MLB hit, a double that drove in two runs.

He later smacked his first big league home run. Congratulations, Dustin!

Also of note: Nathan Eovaldi, the winning pitcher from the clinching game of the World Series last fall, went seven shutout innings in his final outing of the season in what could very well be his last appearance with the Rangers. Bravo to my latest favorite pitcher from Alvin, TX.

Up Next: Release the 2023 World Series documentary film, dammit!