ARLINGTON — Yes, Rangers manager Skip Schumaker conceded this past weekend that he does scoreboard watch this time of year.
“What’s going on in the division?” Schumaker said in an explanation of what he now checks for nightly, “and in the Wild Card?”
Those may be loaded questions.
“Obviously,” he continued immediately afterward, “you focus on yourself.”
That may be the safest bet.
The Rangers are within distance of a postseason berth through two different avenues with fewer than three weeks left in the regular season, thanks in large part to a strange race in which nobody seems prepared to bury anyone else. They trail the first-place Houston Astros by two games (though, for tiebreaker purposes, it’s technically three games) in the AL West standings. They trail the Cleveland Guardians by two games (and hold the tiebreaker over them) in the AL Wild Card standings.
They are in a reasonable-sized hole, but to dig themselves out of it, and to best historical precedents, they may need to play unreasonably well.
On the topic of historical precedents: The 2005 San Diego Padres are the only team in the Wild Card era (since 1995) who’ve had a 71-73 record or worse through 144 games and still qualified for the postseason. The difference is that those Padres held a five-game lead in an especially weak NL West at that juncture and were able to effectively tread water through the finish line before they reached the playoffs with an 82-80 record.
The Rangers do not have that exact luxury because of their deficit, though on this most-recent homestand, they did benefit from the fact that their direct competition for the division title and the final at-large berth squandered opportunities. They started their homestand two games behind the Astros in the AL West race and two games behind the Guardians in the AL Wild Card race, but because each team went 4-3 last week, nobody gained or lost any ground.
In fact, since Aug. 7, the Rangers have only lost a half-game on the Astros despite their 14-15 record since.
“I don’t really know how to look at it,” first baseman Jake Burger said. “It’s a super bizarre race. I think, at the end of the day, we can just focus on what we have in here. Obviously winning the Athletics series at the start, obviously splitting two games with the best team in the AL, I think if you circled these four games, they’re pivotal. You at least want to get out of it with a split. I feel like we could’ve swept this series, but you’ve still got to take the positives.”
They’ll now need more than moral victories and splits to erase the deficit. The Astros are projected to finish the season with an 82-80 record, per FanGraphs, and the Guardians are projected to finish with an 83-79 record. The Rangers — who are projected to finish with an 80-82 record — would need to win games at a rate that they rarely have this season to clear either of those thresholds.
If the Rangers were able to finish with an 83-79 record, it could theoretically be enough to clear the Astros and the Guardians, though it would also require them to win 12 of their last 18 games. They’ve only done that in an 18-game span twice this season — most recently June 25-July 18 — and they’d need to do it against at least four teams who’re currently in postseason contention.
“We know what our record is and we know we’ve got to win quite a bit,” right-handed pitcher Jacob deGrom said. “We’ve got to play really good baseball to get in.”