Lifting a World Series trophy requires a certain critical mass, an alchemy that is difficult to recreate no matter how much of Adolis Garcia’s muscle or Bruce Bochy’s experience you have to throw at the task. After achieving that cathartic moment of triumph, after maxing out your exertion at the peak of the sport, the thought of doing it again becomes a sort of paradox. You know you are capable of it, and you know exactly how much had to go right to make your ascent to the summit possible.
The very verbiage of “defending” a title feels like a relic. No team has successfully done so since the New York Yankees won three in a row starting in 1998. Those Yankees are the only repeat champs since the advent of the wild card, and they did it with one wild card spot per league. Now, there are three agents of chaos to weather. The teams that gaze up at the newly raised pennant in early April have less and less sway over the decisive rush of October.
These Rangers returned from the celebratory winter as a relatively cohesive bunch, with anchors Corey Seager and Marcus Semien still signed for the better part of a decade. They hoped for improved pitcher health and dreamed of Wyatt Langford joining Evan Carter in a mutually beneficial Rookie of the Year race. Instead, they have spent the spring and early summer swallowing a bitter dose of reality.
Last year’s club achieved its glory thanks in large part to a frenzied, star-studded trade deadline that imported five players across four deals, headlined by playoff rotation stalwart Jordan Montgomery. This year, they reached the deadline three games below .500 but making up ground in a stagnant AL West race. Even after two more post-deadline losses, they are only 4.5 games out.
In a season when few teams are out of contention and prices for impact talent proved mostly prohibitive, Chris Young and Texas’ front office wrestled with a question many a defending champ has faced: are they willing to bet on themselves to muster championship oomph all over again in a matter of months? Or should they hedge and acknowledge that the timeline might be more future-facing?
Stocked with hitters under control ’til kingdom come and pitchers who might as well be wearing ticking clocks around their necks, Texas had little incentive to risk its core. With the AL West race devolving into a marathon of mediocrity, the Rangers briefly flirted with reclaiming their Opening Day postseason odds, per FanGraphs.
Still, Young held the wheel steady, defying any temptation he might have felt to either push more chips in on 2024 or join the Tampa Bay Rays in an opportunistic but crushing sell-off. The Rangers added lefty reliever Andrew Chafin and backup catcher Carson Kelly to plug roster holes ahead of the stretch run, while flipping depth starter Michael Lorenzen to Kansas City. In broader parlance, they stood pat. They took the oft-spoken, not-always-acted-upon position that this team can do it again.
The 2024 Rangers were the fifth of the 13 defending champions in the expanded wild-card era (the wilder card era?) to pull into the All-Star break under .500. That relatively recent history can provide points of comparison for their choice, and some hints at what might have been behind Door No. 2 and Door No. 3 as the club seeks the path that leads both forward and back.
Here’s how a few of their notable predecessors approached the same choice:
2020 Nationals
First-half record: 12-19*
*This was COVID-shortened season
Coming off their rollicking 2019 title, the Nationals had to make a number of key decisions before they played another game. Anthony Rendon walked, heading to the Angels in free agency. Stephen Strasburg re-signed. Scherzer and Trea Turner’s free agencies lingered on the horizon.
Washington stood pat in a middling 2020, only to initiate a teardown the following year as things soured on a roster best described as “aging dudes and Juan Soto.” Soto was later shipped to San Diego for a package that included All-Star shortstop C.J. Abrams and mega prospect James Wood. The rebuild was underway.
2017 Cubs
First-half record: 43-45
The Rangers didn’t come into 2024 with the dynasty expectations of Theo Epstein’s curse-breaking Cubs, but Chicago’s title defense has one parallel: a core of hitters in place that makes it feel wasteful not to challenge in any season. So once the Cubs surged from under .500 to the top of the division between the break and the deadline, Epstein pounced by dealing away a raft of prospects—including Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease, Jeimer Candelario, and Isaac Paredes—for starter Jose Quintana and reliever Justin Wilson. The Cubs’ problems, however, were a bit of an inverse from the 2024 Rangers. The young hitters were performing; the aging pitchers were not.
This particular Cubs team went on to win the division, making it to the NLCS before bowing out. Still, if the Cubs could do it over, it seems unlikely they would make those moves again considering future reinforcements might have helped sustain success like tank-to-title contemporaries Houston and Atlanta. Case in point: mired in last place in the NL Central, the current team made a surprising deadline deal to bring Paredes back.
2014 Red Sox
First-half record: 43-52
Following a World Series win that felt like even more of a miracle than usual—Stephen Drew, Daniel Nava, and Felix Doubront were prominently involved—things went south quickly. The cobbled-together veteran group was disbanded in short order. Jon Lester and Jonny Gomes went to Oakland at the deadline, while Jake Peavy joined the Giants for another title run.
GM Ben Cherington tried to reboot with expensive signings that didn’t work, and he was dismissed midway through the 2015 season. He was replaced by Dave Dombrowski, who would achieve an accelerated version of Cherington’s rise and fall in Boston with the 2018 title and a 2019 firing.
2013 Giants
First-half record: 43-51
The second of Bochy’s three championship teams in San Francisco changed little to nothing in their odd year off. They stood about as pat as it’s possible to stand.
“We pretty much know who’s available and what it’s going to take,” GM Brian Sabean said as the trade deadline approached. “At this point, it’s not in the best interests of our organization to move forward with anything from the outside.”
With Buster Posey still at the peak of his powers and Madison Bumgarner rising to the fore of the storied pitching staff, the Giants simply bided their time until the following year. We know what happened then.
Maybe it’s fitting that Bochy is a common thread of patience between those Giants and these Rangers. It’s far from guaranteed that veterans such as Semien and Garcia will hit the highs of 2023 again. The peril in predicting the trajectories of young players like Langford and Carter and Josh Jung would make Pete Delkus blush. Nearly the only certainty is that age is coming to diminish even the steeliest performers—Scherzer and Nathan Eovaldi, et al.
But there’s also that World Series memory that no one can or should shake. It’s still close enough for Seager’s triumphant scream to reverberate in the atoms of the rafters of Globe Life Field. It’s still vivid enough to call muscle memory.
Can they repeat that most arduous of feats right away? History says probably not. But isn’t it tempting to keep trying?
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