The Winning Is the Point
In the midst of baseball's Great Revolution, the Texas Rangers opted for an old school strategy: they tried
The Texas Rangers are World Series champions. This is not a sentence I nor most other baseball fans expected to be saying, even as recently as two weeks ago. But things can change very quickly in this game.
For all the mathematical and spiritual inevitabilities baked into baseball, the only true certainty in America's pastime is that no one really, truly knows what they're doing. The spreadsheets, the biometrics, the decades in the dugout, the nine figure salaries all obscure the fact that this is still very much guesswork. The New York Yankees, the most storied franchise in the sport's history and one of the few clubs spending actual money on and off the field, are in the midst of their third worst World Series drought since they won their first title 100 years ago. The Los Angeles Dodgers, a top to bottom behemoth that has wreaked havoc on their division for the past decade, were just dumped out in the first round by a division foe for the second year in a row. This year's two best teams, the Braves and Orioles, were similarly embarrassed, neither even forcing a game five in their opening series. You can build a Death Star, but you cannot account for every last detail.
There is, of course, all the hemming and hawing over the ever expanding playoff format, which has ballooned from two to four to eight to ten to, now, twelve. Objectively, this is an insane trajectory if you wish to determine the best team in baseball each year, but that has not been the point since arguably the 90s and inarguably since 2012. MLB's point, just about as plainly stated as can be, is to turn the playoffs into a casino. The Texas Rangers figured if you're gonna be at the casino, you might as well be a high roller.
It is often assumed that however the latest championship team is constructed is the right way to do it and other teams should model themselves in their image. This talking point became particularly salient after the Kansas City Royals bullpen'd their way to a title, a genuinely revolutionary change in strategy that has had profound effects on the way playoff baseball is played. The Cubs and Astros titles in '16 and '17 proved that the full scale rebuild process can work and has ushered in the most cynical era in baseball history. Teams have now granted themselves full license to suck absolute shit for years on end because they can point to those teams and say "hey, why not us?" People tried to point to the 2019 Nationals as proof that actually you only need two and a half good pitchers to win a World Series. This has not proven to be the case.
Now, with the Braves, Astros, and Rangers winning the past three titles, a new pattern has emerged. Simply losing 100 games annually for half a decade isn't going to cut it. When those prospects earned through high draft picks and auctioned off big leaguers at the deadline start to debut, you need to put your foot on the gas and start spending like a madman in free agency. Competitive windows are not inevitable: your batch of prospects can pan out pretty well but you still need to have a deep 25 man roster if you want to make noise in the postseason.
Texas went and flung the window wide open, dropping half a billion dollars on their middle infield and then another quarter billion to fill out the rotation, headlined by the best pitcher anyone has ever seen. That last addition, Jacob deGrom, hardly added much of anything this year in what has become his hallmark: untouchable for a handful of starts until his body explodes. The human form simply is not ready to harness the talents that man possesses.
Bereft of a bonafide ace, Texas went out and plundered the Mets rotation again, acquiring Max Scherzer at the trade deadline. This, too, was more bellyflop than splash as he also missed time to injury and when he rejoined the team in the playoffs he promptly imploded, twice, in the ALCS, nearly costing them the series.
But the lesson is not to avoid big name starters—although there probably is a conversation to be had there. The simple truth is that the more good baseball players you add to a team the better your team will be unless you are the San Diego Padres. Nobody is complaining about the mountain of cash paid out to Corey Seager nor the relative pennies tossed Nathan Eovaldi's way. These are the moves you make to put yourself in a position to win. Without them, the Rangers never would've gone on the schizophrenic sun run in which they waltzed and sometimes wobbled through the playoffs.
Going 10-0 on the road is not repeatable no matter who and how much you spend on, but the Orioles certainly wish they had ponied up the payroll to employ some actual starting pitchers. Well, the owner and GM probably don't and that's the whole problem. You can Moneyball your way to a 100 win regular season; it's been done plenty. But what those teams don't do is win in the playoffs. Because no matter how many times the maximum efficiency perverts cry "randomness!" at the admittedly high variance playoff format, the only way to reduce that variance is by consolidating your talent at the top end with stars and filling out the rest of the roster with pre-arb prospects and overlooked veterans—Moneyball but you actually spend the money. "Sustainability" is the refrain these days, but you aren't gonna clean up at the casino checking and folding. Sooner or later, you have to go all in.