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THE TEXAS RANGERS: A LEGACY OF FAILURE?
I've decided to do a bit of a retrospective on this Texas Rangers dynasty, seeing as how all I can really remember is playoff failure. Just how bad is it? It turns out it's pretty bad, at least in the playoffs.
As you can see from the attached screenshot, we've only had one bad year -- our first season in Texas. Since then we've been pretty brilliant in the regular season. We've made the playoffs 10 times out of 14 seasons, which is an amazing success.
But we've just won the World Series one time, in 1979. If you're just flipping coins and treat the teams equally, which they kind of are in the 4-team format, we would have been expected to win about 2 or 3 championships so far. As such I'm disappointed with our playoff record.
9 straight division titles and only 1 championship to show for it. What are some real-life parallels and how does this compare? The Atlanta Braves? Washington Capitals? I can't say the Buffalo Bills because sadly they didn't even get one title.
This screenshot reminded me of that brilliant year in 1977 though. A record 121 wins.. and check it.. 1007 runs! That's the most since Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox scored 1027 in 1950. We also allowed only 461 runs in the championship year of 1979 which was cool. I can't find any data on that but it must be close to some sort of record.
Anyway this dynasty has been just the right mix of success and frustration to keep me interested for 14 seasons and counting.
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