Rangers Fade Becoming Historic
The ‘69 Cubs. The ‘78 Red Sox. The ‘64 Phillies. The ‘96 Rangers? Baseball experts and former players on those teams say the Texas Rangers’ collapse-in-progress, if it continues, would stand among the biggest in baseball history.
Scarcely more than a week ago, on Sept. 11, the Rangers’ A.L. West lead over Seattle stood at nine games.
Insurmountable, right?
That’s what pitcher Ferguson Jenkins thought. He pitched for the 1969 Chicago Cubs, who led the New York Mets by 9-1/2 games on Aug. 14. Then the Cubs went 8-17 in September and lost the divisional race to Tom Seaver’s “Miracle Mets” by eight games.
“There’s always one ballclub to go through it,” Jenkins, now the Cubs’ pitching coach, said Friday. “It’s tough.”
The Rangers, hoping for the first playoff berth in franchise history, are on the verge of folding the same way. Entering Friday night’s game against the California Angels, they were 1-8 since Sept. 11, including an improbable four-game sweep in Seattle. Their lead dwindled to two games with nine games left to play.
“That’s right up there with us,” said Billy Williams, right fielder for the ‘69 Cubs. “In fact, this is bigger than ours. They don’t have that much time.”
Jenkins, also a member of the 1964 Philadelphia team that blew a 6-game lead to the Cardinals after Sept. 21, said the collapses have similarities.
“It’s a similar pattern,” the Hall of Fame pitcher, now the Cubs’ pitching coach, said Friday. “The offense tails off and it just steamrolls the pitching. Then comes the defense with errors.”
That’s what appears to have happened to the Rangers. They’re not hitting - a .187 average in the fourgame Seattle series - the pitching has started to struggle, and formerly reliable defensive players are botching routine plays. Fielding errors played critical roles in three of the four Seattle losses.
“This is as much adversity as we’ve faced all year,” said manager Johnny Oates, who has been at a loss to explain the fade.
There’s no official ranking of the biggest chokes in playoff history, but a glance at some historic collapses shows the Rangers would fit right in. In fact, no team has blown a bigger lead at a later date, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame.