In New York for kind of a big series

The Texas Rangers are currently in New York where, over the next three days, they will play 20% of their remaining schedule, squaring off against the Metropolitans.

This series is kind of a big deal. They are, really, all kind of a big deal at this point, given the situation the Rangers find themselves in or, more accurately, have put themselves in. An inability to perform at a level better than mediocre for much of the season means that, despite a pretty good second half — they have a .580 winning percentage since the All Star Break, which is a 94 win pace over 162 games — they are still on the outside looking in on as far as the playoff race goes, and in a position where one bad series could cripple their playoff hopes.

As bad as it seems like the team has played this year, they’ve had a losing record in only month — May, when the team went 12-16. Remarkably, they’ve had a negative run differential in only two months in 2025 — March, when they went 3-2 despite being outscored 16-25, and September, where so far they’ve scored 34 runs, allowed 35, and yet gone 6-3.

So the Rangers, who have a winning record but still have been somewhat disappointing this year, will be squaring off against the Mets, who also have a winning record but still have been somewhat disappointing this year. The Rangers, at 77-70, are one game better than the Mets, who are sitting at 76-71.

The Mets, however, have the third Wild Card spot currently, 1.5 games ahead of the Reds and Giants. One would think that that would make the mood of Mets fans a little more upbeat than, say, the mood of Rangers fans. One would be wrong, I think.

For as Rangers fans have been unhappy for much of the season, only to see their spirits lifted with this improbable recent run that has seen the team rally to get back into contention despite having a number of regulars on the injured list, Mets fans have seen their team start off hot, sputter, struggle a bit, and then crater as the summer has progressed.

The Mets were up five games in the National League East at one point! Now, that point was in April, but still, that’s a lot of games to be up. The Mets were in first place in the division as recently as August 2, when they broke a four game losing streak with a 12-6 win at home against the Giants of San Francisco. They followed that up with a seven game losing streak which they broke with a 13-5 win at home against Atlanta, then lose three more in a row after that. That’s a 2-14 stretch, which is going to make any fanbase grumpy.

The Mets then went through a stretch of acceptable play, going 12-7 over a nineteen game stretch, before losing their next six in a row. That current six game losing streak — which includes a four game sweep at the hand of the Phillies, who are now up 11 games on the Mets in the division — is active, and is a losing streak the Rangers are obviously hoping to extend.

So the Rangers are playing a Mets team that can reasonably be described as “not playing well,” what with the six game losing streak and having gone 14-24 since August 1 and having gone from a half game up in the division to 11 back in the space of roughly six weeks, and with Ken Rosenthal using them as the vibes Goofus to the Phillies’ vibes Gallant as recently as five hours ago. That’s a positive thing, I would say, though it isn’t as if we haven’t seen teams going through a tailspin somehow turn things around and immediately starting playing well again. See, e.g., the Texas Rangers, multiple times in the past three seasons.

The pitching probables for this weekend currently show the Mets having Jonah Tong making his third career start today, former Ranger unsigned draft pick Brandon Sproat making his second career start on Saturday, and Nolan McLean making his sixth career start on Sunday. For a team that has, per Cots, a $337 million payroll this year, and whose spending had owners demanding new and ever more frightening levels of punishments for exceeding the competitive balance tax threshold by hitherto uncontemplated degrees, that’s kind of funny.

Of course, we can’t chortle too hard, or too openly, about that, given that we are all convinced that the Rangers struggle against young and/or not good pitchers, and McLean has a 1.42 ERA in his five starts, and Sproat and Tong are consensus top-100 prospects as of this moment. And the Rangers, as we all know, are relying on the likes of Cody Freeman and Alejandro Osuna and Michael Helman and released former 2025 Mariners Rowdy Tellez and Dylan Moore for offensive production, so I think I’ll go see the eye doctor about this beam I’m dealing with rather than drawing attention to the Mets’ mote.

Houston plays Seattle next weekend at home, after the three game series against Texas, which means that they are no doubt saying that they control their destiny, that if they just take care of business at home next week they’ll be on Easy Street, or maybe E-Z Street. They are, to a first approximation, correct in thinking so, though the converse, given that Texas and Seattle don’t play each other again, is that a poor series against one or both teams could find the Astros on the outside looking in.

Texas is two games back of both Houston and Seattle, though Seattle holds the tiebreaker against Texas, so the Rangers are effectively three games back of Seattle. Texas needs to win just one of the three games against Houston to have the tiebreaker against the Astros, so for all intents and purposes we should assume for playoff prognostication purposes that the Rangers have the tiebreaker against the Astros since, if the Rangers don’t win at least one of these three games in Houston, they almost certainly will end up with fewer wins than the Astros, making the tiebreaker issue moot.

Texas also is five games back of Boston in the Wild Card race, and 5.5 games back of New York, with those two teams playing each other this weekend at Fenway. Texas holds the tiebreaker against Boston but not against the Yankees, so I guess you should root for the Yankees to sweep Boston in order to give the Rangers a better chance of squeezing through that slim set of sliding doors if the Astros and M’s both get on a heater the rest of the way.

The Mariners’ three games through Sunday are at home against the Angels, and the Angels being the Angels, I would expect Seattle to win in an especially easy fashion, probably barely having to use their good relievers and having position players pitch the ninth tonight and Sunday because they are up by so many runs. Houston plays three in Atlanta against the surprisingly bad Braves, who got outscored (at home) by the Mariners by a combined 28-4 score last Saturday and Sunday, and who have gone from juggernaut to terrible in a surprisingly short period of time. Atlanta won the World Series in 2021, won 101 and 104 games in 2022 and 2023, and had gone to the playoffs for seven straight seasons before this year’s Hindenburg-esque escapade.

Anyway, let’s have fun with this, y’all.

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