This Texas Rangers stat illustrates lengthy journey back to relevance

The 2022 season is still young, so there’s still much left to learn about this year’s Texas Rangers team. But if one thing has come into focus recently, it’s that on-field improvement has become tangible for this club.

With an 8-5 win over the Oakland A’s Friday night at the Coliseum, the Rangers secured their first winning month since… June 2019, Chris Woodward’s first season as skipper. So yeah, that’s quite a long while.

Texas is 14-9 in May, so the worst they could finish is 14-13 and they’d have to lose out the rest of the month for that to occur. But the way they’ve been playing lately? That seems hard to believe, especially with two games remaining vs. the A’s this weekend.

Texas Rangers are guaranteed a winning month in May 2022, their first since 2019

Over this winning month, we’ve seen the Texas Rangers climb back to relevance by putting themselves just 3.5 games out of an AL playoff spot heading into Memorial Day, which is far more than what we were saying about this team at the same time last season. We can’t talk about playoffs, though, unless we talk about .500, which still eludes this team by two games (21-23 at the moment). Once they cross that threshold, perhaps we can start viewing playoff talk with more seriousness.

The journey back to relevance is a long one, and no team seems to exemplify that more than the Texas Rangers, who haven’t had a winning season (or playoff appearance) since 2016 nor even a winning month since 2019 as mentioned earlier. But now, the patience and the process may finally start to be paying dividends.

Marcus Semien is heating up. Sam Huff and Jonah Heim have become electric as a catching duo. Kole Calhoun has provided offense. Martin Perez is pitching like a Cy Young candidate. And perhaps most importantly, the Rangers are playing together, like a team that’s motivated to win. They’re resilient and are approaching each game the right way.

Make no mistake, this team is still flawed. But they’re making progress.

We can only hope this momentum can carry into the long summer months!