Title defense over? Texas Rangers battling history as hopes for World Series repeat wither

BALTIMORE — It is July. Globe Life Field will host the All-Star Game in a little more than two weeks. There will be plenty of photo opps with the Commissioner’s Trophy.

Soak it all in.

It’s probably gonna be the last chance for a while.

The Rangers can work day and night on hitting fastballs, and even showed some improvement at the end of the just-completed road trip. They can try experimental alternative accelerants for the injury returns of Josh Jung and Corey Seager. They can hold daily team pep talks to rally the troops. They can keep believing, as manager Bruce Bochy does, that this will all turn around.

More than a century’s worth of baseball history says otherwise. What history says: The title defense is, for all intents and purposes, over.

The Rangers entered July with a 38-46 record, the third worst for a defending champion in the 120 years since the World Series began. It’s relatively unusual for a sitting champion not to have a winning record again the following season. Before this year, defending champs entered July, trading season, with a losing record only 14 times. None of those teams rebounded to make the playoffs. Only three finished above .500. Boston — the Braves, rather than the Red Sox — had the most wins with 83 in 1915.

The only two worse than the Rangers: Toronto (32-44) in 1994 and Florida (29-53) in 1998. The remainder of the Blue Jays season was canceled by the strike. The Marlins tore their roster down to the studs even before the 1998 season started. In other words, it’s almost impossible to have a trophy in hand and this kind of record the next season without trying to do so.

Winning a title is hard; repeating is almost impossible. The results for the title-defending teams that got off to slow starts suggest playing from behind and with high expectations can be too much of a burden.

“I don’t think it’s a burden at all,” manager Bruce Bochy said of his team’s position. “Everybody here is disappointed at our struggle. But it’s not a burden. I’ll never feel that way. This club will keep fighting. We will power through this and we will come out of this in a really good way.”

Bochy has been here before. His 2013 Giants were one of seven defending champions in the playoff era (since 1969) to limp into July below .500. Those Giants went 10-17 in June to turn the calendar at 39-42. On Sunday, he acknowledged similarities between the Giants’ 2013 season and this Rangers season. He also noted the Giants did eventually come out of their funk. In September. After falling 20 games behind.

San Francisco still finished 10 games under .500.

His Giants weren’t alone. None of the seven defending champs in the playoff era that took a losing record into July rallied to finish at .500 or better.

“There are some similarities,” Bochy said of comparing these Rangers and those Giants. “What could go wrong, did. Health. A lack of timely hitting. But I was proud of the way that we finished up in September.”

Everything that could go wrong for the Rangers seemed to in June. It’s been a mix of bad luck, bad hitting and bad injuries. The Rangers were within a game of .500 on June 2 after consecutive shutout wins at Miami. They then went 8-16 before beating Baltimore on Sunday.

Seemingly nothing close went their way in the stretch. They lost nine consecutive road games and went 1-6 in one-run games. They did not hit when scoring opportunities arose batting .241 with a .689 OPS, both in the bottom tier in MLB for that period and both buoyed by a big game Sunday. They had both poor performances at the plate, with the fifth-lowest expected batting average in the majors (.234) in June, and bad luck with the fourth-lowest average on balls in play (.273). GM Chris Young saw almost all of it up close, as he was with the club for the first five games of the just-completed road trip.

All that said, there is still time to believe — maybe hope is a better word — the Rangers have a once-in-a-century comeback in them. The trade deadline isn’t until July 30. The Rangers don’t have anybody with so much value they could get a premium by trading early. It gives them at least three more weeks to start piling up wins before seriously considering cashing things in.

There are some peripherals that indicate things could turn. It starts with the remaining strength of schedule, which is the third easiest in the majors, according to Tankathon. They also have six more games at home (42) than on the road (36). Their balls-in-play average, which attempts to quantify a team’s luck at the plate, is lower than league average (.289), so the luck factor suggests it should tick sharply upward. A bit of health and a bit of luck and, well, you might say crazier things have happened. Except, technically, they haven’t.

Still, Max Scherzer knows a bit about coming back from a slow start. While with Washington in 2019, the Nationals were 12 games below .500 just 50 games into the season. They got Juan Soto, Trea Turner and Anthony Rendon back from injuries and took off. Won the team’s first-ever World Series. The Rangers comp: They got Scherzer back two weeks ago, hope to have Jung back from a fractured wrist in the next two weeks and hope Seager’s wrist, hit by a pitch Saturday, recovers quickly.

“We got healthy, that was all,” Scherzer said of 2019. “And we started to play better. We knew we were a good team and good teams beat bad teams. We started to sweep bad teams. To win is always a heavy lift. It takes unbelievable effort. Everybody’s got to click, come together and play good baseball. In totality, we are probably a pretty good team, but we haven’t been able to get everybody in sync yet.”

Is there time to still do it?

“We know it’s now or never,” starter Andrew Heaney said.

The Rangers believe there is.

History suggests otherwise.

Undefended

The Rangers go into July with a losing record, only the eighth defending champion in the 54-year-old Divisional Era to enter the following July below .500. None of those teams finished .500, much less made the playoffs. A look:

*Strike-shortened season with no playoffs or World Series

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