Texas Rangers And The Relevance Of Run Differential

There has been a lot of fuss made in articles about the run differential or more-so the lack there of that the Texas Rangers have managed this year. Well I have a secret to all of that talk that hasn’t been made the focal point of an article just yet.

I’d like to start by pointing out that something special is happening in Texas with the Rangers this year and the outcome doesn’t always follow what the stats suggest. Here is what everyone is telling you, the Texas Rangers are 80-54 and currently have a run differential of +22.

To be fair, the Rangers last game was a 14-1 win so that stat has been padded and that is not the exact number that others have been reporting about. For the rest of the article we will take that game away and base the tone of this piece off of a 79-54 record with a run differential of +9.

With a +9 run differential you would guess that the Texas Rangers would be an average .500 win percentage team, they are not that. This is actually the first time the Rangers have been 25 games over a .500 win percentage since Oct. 2,2012 (93-68).

Those same Texas Rangers have a MLB and could end up being a historically best 30-8 record in 1 run games this season, this is a loaded stat. Much like the bullpen having a 4.71 ERA currently ranked 27th in the league, loaded stat. Those are stats that are true but also you have to take with a grain of salt. The bullpen on e mainly because this bullpen now was not the bullpen that was their during mid-May.

The 30-8 reflection of 1 run games is a great indication of a resilient “Never Ever Quit” kind of team, or of them “living on the edge”. But you also have to disect that and understand how many of those games became close because of a blown lead by the bullpen.

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Now here is the secret about run differential…  are you ready?…   As long as you have one more run than the other team in a singular game, then you win. Then you take on the next day the same way and if you stack enough of these up then you are considered a good team. Now in the MLB you have 162 of those games and if you take them one at a time, caring about the run differential of that one day, then you’ll have a good record.

The overall run differential does not mean anything, at the beginning of this article I gave you the stat of +22 for the Texas Rangers run differential. When we took the latest game away from that stat we were left with +9, see how one day can alter stats and change the perspective of the teams overall season.

Next: Texas Rangers Summarized Season In One Game: Part 1

The Texas Rangers are a team who have adopted the philosophy of their manager Jeff Banister. That philosophy is of the “power of now” in the way that if you do the job you are supposed to do right now and don’t worry about another time other than now, then you won’t be cheating yourself or your team.