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The Rangers Have Hit .500 Twenty Times This Season. Somehow They’re Still in It.
Records current as of Aug. 26, 2026
Texas is 66-67, half a game behind Houston in the American League West, with about thirty games left.
That record would be irrelevant in most divisions. In this one it’s a pennant race — and ESPN’s model puts the Rangers’ playoff chances at roughly a coin flip.
The AL West is the weakest division in baseball
Earlier this week only four American League teams had winning records. Houston and Texas were tied atop the West at 65-66, with Cleveland matching them — meaning that if the playoffs had started, two teams with losing records would have made the postseason.
That’s happened before, but barely: three losing teams have reached the playoffs in history, two of them in the expanded 2020 field and one in the split 1981 season. Neither really counts.
To measure how little movement is required here: Seattle lost games in August by scores of 22-0, 19-2, 11-0 and 8-0, and finished the month in the same position it started — three games out of first.
The tiebreaker problem
Houston won the season series 9-4, which means the Astros hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Rangers cannot win the division by matching Houston’s record. They have to finish ahead outright.
That turns a half-game gap into something larger in practice. It also means the two clubs are finished playing each other — Texas has no remaining chance to settle it on the field.
Houston’s remaining schedule includes a difficult mid-September trip to Philadelphia and Tampa Bay, then closes with four road games against the Athletics. That’s the opening, if there is one.
Corey Seager has to hit
The single clearest reason Texas is here rather than three games up.
Seager has batted .198 with a .304 on-base percentage and .388 slugging — 12 home runs and 35 RBI through 64 games. That’s far below the standard he set across his first four seasons in Texas.
The encouraging read is that the power hasn’t vanished; he still drives the ball when he squares it up. He’s just made less consistent hard contact all year. A month of the real Seager changes the middle of this lineup entirely.
The deGrom question
Jacob deGrom carries the widest range of outcomes on the roster.
Before his most recent scare he was 8-8 with a 3.95 ERA across 120⅔ innings, striking out 147 while walking only 31 — numbers that say he still misses bats and controls the zone. Then he left a start after two innings with right triceps fatigue and underwent an MRI.
Whatever healthy innings remain from him are the difference between a rotation that can win a short series and one that can’t. Nathan Eovaldi is the other anchor. MacKenzie Gore needs to be more consistent, and Jack Leiter has shown signs of turning a corner.
The players nobody expected to matter
Two names lead the team in wins above replacement, and neither was on anyone’s preseason list.
Ezequiel Duran has started games at seven different positions and leads Texas in position-player WAR. Jacob Latz — a 1.68 ERA with 26 saves — leads the pitchers.
The Rangers are also 22-13 in one-run games, which is how a team with a negative run differential (roughly 500 scored against 546 allowed) stays in a race it probably shouldn’t be in.
The road is where it slipped away
Texas is 33-27 at home and 29-37 away, and one road trip explains a lot of the season.
Seven games against the Angels and Athletics — the two worst teams in the American League, back to back, with a homestand waiting afterward. It was the clearest opportunity of the year to build a lead.
The Rangers went 2-5 and came home having lost ground instead of gaining it.
What has to happen
- Win outright. The tiebreaker is gone and there are no more head-to-head games.
- Seager, for thirty games. Nothing else in the lineup moves the needle as much.
- Whatever deGrom has left. The MRI result reshapes the rotation either way.
- Keep winning close games. The one-run record is not sustainable and it is also the reason they’re here.
Twenty times at .500 is the most in baseball this season, and it’s a fair description of the last eighteen months in Arlington. But a bad division is still a division, and thirty games is enough time to stop being mediocre.
DFW Sports Wire covers Rangers news, schedules and game coverage all season. See the Rangers schedule for first pitch times and broadcast info, or the AL West standings for the current race.