The most wonderful time of the baseball season is coming to a close, as the rigors of the Postseason have whittled things down to just one team from each league. Just like all of us totally predicted back in March, the Texas Rangers are representing the American League and the Arizona Diamondbacks will be flying the flag for the National League. It’s the first time since 2016 that we’ve had a World Series that didn’t include one of either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Houston Astros, so this year’s matchup has a fresh flavor to it.
This also seems like a good time to look back on how both teams made it to the Fall Classic here in 2023. While the simplest answer to that question is that “They just won games,” we all know that it isn’t that simple. Both teams took incredibly different paths and it’s worth taking a moment to examine the road that the Rangers and Diamondbacks took in order to get four wins away from lifting the Commissioners’ Trophy.
Texas Rangers
The story for the Rangers really begins in 2022, which is when Texas flexed their spending muscles in a big way. Texas spent nearly $600 million ahead of the 2022 campaign with their big signings being Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. Those two players were at the top of the lineup during the when the Rangers clinched the pennant in Game 6 of the ALCS and they’ve certainly lived up to the lofty expectations that came along with the big contracts that they signed. Seager and Semien were the top two regular contributors to the lineup in terms of wRC+ and wOBA and the lineup itself was third-best in all of baseball in terms of team wOBA and fourth-best in terms of team wRC+. This team can mash with anybody and it’s a big reason why they’ve made a deep run in October.
With that being said, it’s still very impressive that the Rangers made it all the way to this point despite missing out on their top signing for this season for all but six starts. Jacob deGrom was intended to be the missing piece that would put the team over the top in their pursuit of returning to the upper echelon of baseball. Instead, deGrom suffered a devastating elbow injury and won’t be available until the middle of the 2024 season at the earliest.
Still, that hasn’t stopped their pitching staff from getting the job done and one of their other big signings from this offseason has been a big reason why. Nathan Eovaldi didn’t have a dominant regular season but he’s been lights out in the Postseason so far. Jordan Montgomery may not have been a splashy offseason signing himself but he has made a huge impact as a trade deadline acquisition and has been showing why the Rangers were right to pick him up at the deadline.
Texas has basically been battling for their Postseason lives for the better part of two whole months, now. After action ended on September 8, FanGraphs gave the Rangers just a 39 percent chance of making the Postseason as they were locked in a three-way battle with the Seattle Mariners and the Houston Astros for the AL West title and/or the Wild Card spot that would surely go to the second place finisher. This eventually culminated with the Rangers ending their season with seven out of their final 10 games coming against the Mariners. Texas swept Seattle in Arlington in the penultimate weekend of the regular season and this ended up being crucial as the Mariners finished 2 games behind both the Rangers and Astros for the playoff spots. The Astros won the tiebreaker for the division but the Rangers got in as a wildcard.
The gauntlet only got more difficult for the Rangers as they were tasked with facing the Tampa Bay Rays on the road in the Wild Card Series. Texas ended up winning that series 2-0 to end Tampa Bay’s season and then they stayed hot and bounced the top-seeded Baltimore Orioles in another sweep in order to meet their Lone Star State rivals in the ALCS. As expected, the two 90-72 teams fought tooth-and-nail deep in the heart of Texas but the Rangers ultimately prevailed and kept the Astros from adding yet another AL Pennant to their collection. Texas fans will remember that this team came within one strike of winning the franchise’s first World Series title back in 2011 and are surely hoping that the agony from 12 years ago will be replaced with ecstasy with a potential World Series victory right here and now.
Arizona Diamondbacks
You’re not supposed to put heavy stock into World Series odds in spring training. After all, the Atlanta Braves were the team that had the best odds of making it to the Fall Classic this season and even still, those odds were at 14 percent. With that being said, there are some teams that went into this season with their odds rated at or just slightly above zero percent and it was understandable to see why the Diamondbacks were one of those teams. They had a respectable season in 2022 but they were also the team that lost 110 games in 2021 and did so completely by accident. There was no tanking going on — they just had a catastrophically bad season.
So that’s why it wasn’t particularly shocking to see this Arizona team being rated as a longshot to simply make the Postseason (at 15 percent odds according to FanGraphs) — much less make it all the way to the World Series. To be completely honest, nothing about this team was really screaming “World Series contender” for much of this season. The Diamondbacks did have a stretch in May and June where they were on top of the NL West but that could’ve been chalked up to the Dodgers starting slow and Arizona simply being one of those teams that got hot for a little bit before falling victim to the rigors of the long MLB regular season.
July and August seemed to be proof that these Diamondbacks weren’t quite ready to be a Postseason contender as they went 8-16 in July and were actually under .500 as late as August 11 with just a 13 percent chance of making the Postseason. Still, Corbin Carroll, Ketel Marte and Merrill Kelly and the rest of the squad just kept on plugging at it and while they were far and away from being contenders in the NL West, they suddenly found themselves in the thick of a very crowded battle royale for the final two Wild Card spots. Arizona had two crucial series against the Chicago Cubs in September and went 6-1 in those games. They ended up needing every single victory as they clinched the final playoff spot in the NL with just one game to spare over the Cubs.
Arizona was rewarded with a trip to Milwaukee to face the heavily-favored Milwaukee Brewers and it ended up being a relatively comfortable two-game sweep on the road for the Snakes. That was fine and all but surely the end of the road would come in Los Angeles when they had to deal with the Postseason-fixture Dodgers. A sweep happened but instead it was the 84-win Diamondbacks dumping the 100-win Dodgers in shocking fashion to make it to the NLCS against the Phillies. With Philadelphia looking to make it two NL pennants in a row, it was once again understandable to believe that the end of the road was near for the Diamondbacks.
It was especially understandable after the first two games of the NLCS where Philadelphia utterly dominated Arizona. It was to the point where Phillies backup catcher Garrett Stubbs already had dreams of a pennant-clinching pool party at Chase Field. That ended up being even more motivation for the Diamondbacks to stave off elimination and keep their improbable run going, as they took Game 3 and 4 in order to make sure that the series went back to Philadelphia. Still, things were dire for Arizona as they were down 3-2 with the final two games coming in the stadium that had been a house of horrors for them to open up the NLCS.
Things changed drastically for the final two games of the NLCS, as the Diamondbacks stayed cool, calm and collected on their way to a 5-1 win to force Game 7 and then kept their composure on their way to completing the shocking upset with a 4-2 win in Game 7. Pitchers like Merrill Kelly, Brandon Pfaadt and Ryan Thompson led the way and helped carry Arizona across the finish line as they were able to keep Philadelphia’s bats quiet for the final two games and ultimately ended up getting the last laugh (and boo) against the Phillies and their crowd. If the Diamondbacks had won two fewer games in the regular season, they wouldn’t have even gotten a shot at any of this. Instead, they barely made it in and now they continue to be proof that all you have to do is get into the tournament and you’ve got a clean slate and a new opportunity to make some noise.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody out there who predicted that we’d be seeing the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks facing each other in the World Series. Even though the Rangers have been building up to this with their spending, it was still tough to imagine them toppling the three powerhouses that they did in order to win the AL pennant. It was even tougher to even fathom seeing the Diamondbacks run through the gauntlet that they did. Still, both of these teams have been battling for their baseball lives for the better part of two months now and have kept that intensity up all the way to the World Series. Nobody expected this matchup but now we’ve got it and now percentages and odds are out of the window. It’s all about taking it to a game-by-game basis and we’ll see who gets to cap their path to the World Series with a ring ceremony next April.
