The 2024 Texas Rangers never hit their stride, undone by poor health and worse hitting. If you’re the superstitious sort, perhaps it’s the bad end of Bruce Bochy’s every-other-year World Series voodoo, too. Nevertheless, I knew by May that I’d have license to write this piece by the time the calendar hit July.
Sure, there were flashes of hope. It’s easy to forget now, having come out the other side of four and half months of mediocrity, that Texas held the A.L. West lead more than six weeks into the season. But even then, one could spot the fissures expanding beneath the surface. The battered rotation, a gamble from the beginning, never congealed into a solid unit so much as a collection of names floating in and out around Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney. The bullpen was Kirby Yates, David Robertson, and a giant shrug emoji, which, in fairness, was considerably improved over last year’s group. And, of course, there was the offense, which plummeted from the best feature of the sport’s best team to a liability faster than Adolis Garcia can zip a ball from right field to home plate. (Considering Garcia hit .224 this year, there is a follow-up joke to be made about how fast opposing pitchers could get him out, but we’re friends here, and you’ve suffered enough this season.)
The whole season was a drag, give or take a Travis Jankowski game-sealing Web Gem here or a Kumar Rocker debut there. When I’m calling for Weird Al Yankovic to rally the troops, you know things have gone to a dark place.
But the disappointment isn’t that Texas didn’t repeat as champions. History, and Jamey Newberg, told us to expect as much given that no team has gone back to back since the Yankees in 1999 and 2000. No, the letdown comes from the Rangers rarely looking capable of reaching today’s wild card round, let alone return the World Series. The franchise that joined the 2010-2011 Mavericks as the only North Texas pro teams to win championships this millennium now keeps ignominious company with the 2011-2012 Mavs for failing to mount a credible championship defense.
That’s a different type of happiness than the championship season itself—a less fulfilling one, of course, provided the team in question doesn’t repeat like the 1994 Cowboys. But it exists all the same, and you can spot it in the aura when a really good reigning champ swaggers into other team’s buildings, in the visible strain of striving to exceed last year’s standard. You can see it in comparison, too, which is no ordinary thief of joy when it’s in service to mining through the little tweaks from one year to the next: how well this role player assimilates into a winning collective, or how successfully the squad shored up a minor weakness from the year before. You learn plenty about a team in its title run, but one could argue that you know it better when it fights for a second, as it camps out on the summit instead of only arriving there the season prior. It makes the eventual descent far less rocky.
Instead, the Rangers, like the Mavericks, tumbled hard and fast. Austerity was the throughline. Mark Cuban, fearing the ramifications of the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement, let several core pieces walk in the name of preserving cap space. Ray Davis glanced at lost revenues from the team’s doomed partnership with Bally Sports Southwest and didn’t give his front office the scratch to bring back World Series hero Jordan Montgomery or make big-ticket upgrades to the pitching staff. (Yates and Robertson, great as they became, signed one-year deals for a combined $9.5 million, with Robertson carrying a mutual option for a second year at just $7 million.)
Cuban’s call was a miscalculation—no one ever did take the Mavs up on that cap space—but at least there was good intent to be parsed from it. One step back to take two more forward. It was much harder to find any in Arlington, where the Rangers reign as one of the biggest market teams in a sport with no salary cap, when World Series winners traditionally see revenue spike the season after their championship.
Spending could not have saved the lineup from imploding, mind you. And Michael Lorenzen, the low-budget consolation prize for losing Montgomery, drastically outperformed his predecessor before being shipped off to Kansas City at the trade deadline. But in baseball, more than any other major sport, investment comes down to choice. That Davis made two years of positive ones to chase a title only makes the lack of effort to keep it more damning.
And so we are left to reminisce about the 1999-2000 Stars, the last group to take North Texas on a laudable journey as reigning champions before bowing out in the Stanley Cup Final against New Jersey. Perhaps the 2024-25 team will finish the job and bring the Cup back to Dallas for the first time in 26 years. It would be great if they do. In which case, it might be even better to see the 2025-26 team pick up where they leave off.
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