One Win Short: How the Rangers Watched an 81-81 Astros Team Take the AL West

The Texas Rangers' season ended exactly where it had been pointing for weeks — agonizingly close to the finish line, and just short of it. A 6-4 loss to the Twins in Game 162 dropped Texas to 80-82, eliminated them from the playoff race, and handed the AL West to a Houston club that finished 81-81. That makes Houston the first division champion in MLB history without a winning record, a distinction that says as much about the Rangers' missed opportunity as it does about the state of the division.

For a team that was hunting a division crown and a .500 record entering the final day, the math was brutal in its simplicity. One more win, and the Rangers would have been the ones limping into October instead of watching from home.

The final week told the whole story

Look at the last nine games (Sept. 18–27) and the shape of the collapse is clear. Texas went 4-5, scoring 35 runs while allowing 42. The offense, which managed a .241/.314/.396 slash line and 187 home runs on the season, went cold at the worst possible time: a .203 average and .647 OPS over the final ten games. Those aren't the numbers of a team winning a pennant race — they're the numbers of a lineup running on fumes.

The bullpen didn't help. A 4.93 season ERA and 1.385 WHIP is a season-long problem, and it showed up in the biggest moments, including two blown saves during the stretch. The staff's ERA over its last five games ballooned to 5.62, and a 10-2 blowout loss in Minnesota on Sept. 25 effectively slammed the door.

deGrom's final start was the gut punch

Jacob deGrom's 2026 line will read as perfectly respectable — 11-11, a 4.20 ERA, 201 strikeouts in 162.2 innings, and a 1.14 WHIP — and his underlying expected ERA of 3.47 suggests he pitched better than the surface numbers. But the timing was merciless. In what became the most consequential start of the season, deGrom lasted just four innings on Sept. 25, surrendering eight earned runs in a game the Rangers absolutely had to have. His slider remained a genuine weapon all year (opponents hit .176 against it with a 40.2% whiff rate), but the fastball got punished — a .256 average and .463 slugging allowed — and on that night, it cost Texas dearly.

Injuries finally caught up

You can't separate the late-season swoon from the medical report. Joc Pederson landed on the injured list with a left-hand fracture and never got the chance to prove he could play through it. Josh Jung's season ended with a fractured hand. Cal Quantrill was transferred to the 60-day IL and ruled out for the year, and the pitching depth behind him was already thin — Jack Leiter, Jalen Beeks, Cole Winn, Jose Corniell, and Carter Baumler all finished the season on the 60-day list, with Chris Martin on the 15-day.

That's not an excuse, but it is context. When a club loses its designated hitter, its starting third baseman, and a rotation piece in the same window, the margin for error in a division race this tight disappears entirely.

What it means for 2027

The Rangers now head into an offseason with real decisions: a trio of veteran contract options, a list of impending free agents, and a young core — Wyatt Langford among them — that the front office has to decide whether to build around or extend. The gap between 80-82 and October was a single game. Closing it starts with the health of a roster that spent September held together with tape, and with an offense that has to find a way to avoid disappearing in the season's final week.

The painful part isn't that the Rangers were far away. It's that they were just close enough to feel it.