Following Tuesday’s dramatic walkoff home run ending that belongs in the pantheon with Carter, Alomar and Bautista, the Toronto Blue Jays have arrived in Arlington to try and vanquish another American League foe in the Texas Rangers.
We know what happened last year; “The Batflip” is forever etched in the minds of fans and onto silk-screened T-shirts. We know what happened earlier this season; Bautista and Rougned Odor squaring off at second base, fists thrown, dugouts and bullpens clearing.
So what will happen this time around? The Jays are hoping that momentum — and a regression to the mean for one of baseball’s luckiest teams — will be enough to see them through to the ALCS.
Edwin Encarnacion’s mammoth extra-innings home run not only put the Baltimore Orioles out of the playoffs, it put the rest of the league on notice: the scariest, swaggering squad in the American League is back.
Momentum is often overblown as a concept in sports, and often rightly so; if one loss can kill it, how powerful a force could it really be?
But there’s no denying its initial appeal, and any advantage — real or assumed — that the Jays can carry into Texas will be embraced for as long as possible.
A more concrete set of statistics could prove to have an even greater impact on the course of the series, specifically Texas’ run differential and its record in tight contests.
The Rangers finished the regular season with a plus-eight run differential, by far the lowest of any MLB playoff team and worse than four other non-playoff clubs. If you take away the games decided by one run, they were outscored by 17 runs.
Fortunately for the Rangers, they were nearly invincible in those one-run games, winning 36 of 47 and setting a major-league record. They also led all of baseball with 49 comeback victories, 21 of them in their last at-bat.
The law of averages would seem to state that Texas is due for some bad breaks in close games, especially against a Toronto team that could be said to “have the Rangers’ number” after winning the 2016 season series and ousting them from the playoffs last year.
Of course, there’s also a chance that the trend continues, which would be a bad combination with the Jays’ bullpen woes and lack of clutch hitting down the stretch.
Either way, expect a tightly-contested, dramatic, edge-of-your-seat series between two teams that, despite all of the fence-mending in public, clearly do not like each other.
Chris Suppa is a freelance writer and photographer based in Toronto. Follow him at @Suppa55 for somewhat-coherent ramblings about the Blue Jays and on Instagram at @chrissuppaphotography.
