ARLINGTON — In the offseason, well before the possibility of a division winner with a .500 record seemed like a feasible outcome, the two most significant additions of the Texas Rangers‘ transformative winter stated their intentions. 

Ten months after Nimmo’s remarks, and eight months after Gore’s, the two reached the regular season’s final sprint still with a legitimate chance to meet the standards they agreed to uphold. 

The trades could pay dividends if the rest of September resembles the month’s first game. 

Nimmo (who drove in more than half of the team’s runs) and Gore (who fell two outs shy of a quality start) anchored a 8-5 win vs. the Athletics at Globe Life Field Tuesday night that inched the Rangers closer to a postseason position with less than one month to play. Their third consecutive win — and sixth-straight home series victory — pulled them to within one game of a .500 record and within one game of the first-place Houston Astros in the American League West.

“We’re in a position right now that the postseason is a very realistic thing for us,” Nimmo said. “So we just need to play like that and play like we belong.” 

Nimmo finished 4 for 5 with 5 RBI, recorded a hit in his first four at-bats and was impervious to the hodge podge bullpen game that the Athletics offered. He doubled off of left-handed pitcher Brady Basso to score a run for a 1-0 lead, singled off of right-handed pitcher Scott Blewett in the third to score a run for a 2-0 lead, singled off of right-handed pitcher Luis Medina in the fifth to score two runs for a 4-0 lead and singled off of left-handed pitcher Jose Suarez in the sixth to score a run for an 8-1 lead.

“I think these type of games are the toughest,” Nimmo, who’s slashed .444/.467/.667 in his last seven games, said. “It’s like spring training. You’re going to face a new guy every single time. But, if one of them isn’t on, you can find a crack in the dam and you can get it to break. It’s very difficult against major league pitching nowadays, so I was just really proud of the guys and the at-bats they put together today.”

Gore — whose previous start against the Chicago White Sox at Rate Field disrupted what had been his best individual month this season — pitched 5 ⅓ innings of one-run ball before the bullpen narrowly avoided a collapse. He stranded at least one runner in scoring position in the second, third and fourth innings before a perfect fifth. Rangers manager Skip Schumaker estimated that Gore could’ve gone “six or seven innings” before his pitch count caught up to him 

“We’ve had some really good production from the guys of late,” Schumaker said. “We’re going to need it in the next 20-plus games.”

Nimmo and Gore, no doubt, signed up for that challenge. 

“This is the opportunity we have,” Gore said. “Everything that’s happened before now is over with. We can’t change it, good or bad. We won a big game today and we’re gonna celebrate it here for a little bit and we need to take advantage of the opportunity to sweep tomorrow. Every day means so much for the rest of the year, and [if we] kind of take it a day by day and compete our tails off every day, then I think we’ll all be happy at the end.”