Image credit: Jerome Miron-USA Today Sports
This article was originally published on August 17, 2023.
Ttranslated by Fernando Battaglini
“The fact that we cannot organize the universe as a single ordered sequence of time does not mean that nothing changes. It means that the changes are not organized in a single ordered succession” — Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, p. 109
The Texas Rangers are 71-48. His collective 108 DRC+ is third-best in the league, behind only the 117 of the Braves’ aliens and the 111 of the Dodgers’ Goliaths. 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 fair to bill them that way, have 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 questions about whether they could stay healthy before the start of the season and have worn them down more than answered them, ultimately posting a DRA- that makes them a bottom-10 unit and required multiple trades at the league’s trade deadline.
More important than any individual performance or team standings, however, is that the team leads the American League West in August. They have played winning baseball every month this season except July, when they barely missed the mark at 12-13. Even though injuries have piled up, and the aging machine that is the Astros has slowly warmed up, they remain in the driver’s seat for a postseason berth that would give them home field advantage in a stadium where they racked up wins. throughout the year and they are 21 games over .500.
However, they weren’t supposed to. Or “supposed” to be. We’d all be better off applying quotes to that word more often than we do, which is never, given the heavy lifting we allow it to take on. Supposition cannot be subtracted from assuming. Texas spending in recent winters was endearing in that it challenged the conventional path toward the claim that sports teams have expended tons and tons of energy, rather than dollars, to convince us that’s the way must do. Windows are supposed to be built slowly, opened briefly, and then allowed to close as if winning could only be seasonal. The Rangers more or less said to hell with it and took out the entire wall, ready to catch a breeze, whether it came or not. No one was calling their actions responsible.
That’s why there’s nothing lined up about the Texas Rangers in 2023. They’re working on the margins of probability, something more about what we’re inclined to assume, the same way an older person might be inclined to loiter in a park or a child might lean to wander through the shops in a shopping center. We like to think of probabilities in terms of numbers rather than prospects. We talk about the likelihood of something happening based on the rate at which it has happened in the past, or the rate at which a team has won and how we can regress their performance and project it forward, or how often the team has been called. same sandwich and has been satisfying and the likelihood that it will do more good than harm during a bad day at work.
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“But memory, causes and effects, flow, the determination of the past and the indeterminacy of the future are nothing more than names 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 is truly extreme, it doesn’t even register as possible. The closest we can get is when a team appears to be out of play near the end of the season, its postseason hopes all but dashed. Or when they’ve made the playoffs but are down in a series, and hope is restored in the face of long odds. But even those are just analogues, attempts to express something about a thing rather than something explicit about the thing itself. It’s the difference between “acting nice” and “being kind,” a façade you absorb because you’ve passively come to know the way we’ve constructed our language to be almost enough.
No other team has improved its winning percentage more since last year than the Rangers. Almost every other exciting team in the league started to be exciting last year. Their 177-point increase from .420 to .597 at the time of this writing is only coming close to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds, another team that has provided a surprising amount of fun this year, also give us more reason to doubt their ability to keep doing this and get 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 remaining strong 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 of the season where we can’t ignore how reality doesn’t matter.
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 games he’s been in are already stacked up as wins. Adolis Garcia’s ability to spit on pitches outside the zone may not hold up, 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 fact that his bullpen is so left-handed with Will Smith and Aroldis Chapman is strange and, in the grand scheme of likely things, leaves them more vulnerable. But one of those players limits walks and the other strikes out batters and both do better than most pitchers, leaving them a problematic tandem late in the game.
The most unlikely thing about Rangers right now is a months-old preconception that hasn’t been fulfilled, the way you worry about jumping into the pool until you do it and realize the problem was with yourself and not with Water. They could lose every remaining game this season and still finish better than last year. They would have to play disastrous baseball to miss the postseason
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“The place of a thing is what surrounds that thing.” —The Order of Time, pbranch. 69
The Texas Rangers are 71-48. An improbability the size of Texas has led us to positive disbelief. Only doubt could keep us from thinking they would continue to be a good ball team, because the willingness to protect yourself only requires a lack of commitment. It is a winning club because it has put winning players everywhere, outside of the expectations of when it should. What a novel concept.
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2023-12-29 14:19:52
#TexasSized #Improbability
