Major League Baseball

Within reach

Published Oct. 10, 2010 10:11 p.m. ET

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To this point, it all looks suspiciously easy. For this franchise in particular, one would have to say too easy.

By scores of 5-1 and 6-0, the Rangers have dismissed the team with the American League's best record. In one-sided fashion, the Rangers have moved within one victory of moving on in the playoffs, and they have three chances to make that happen.

The great mystery of how the Tampa Bay Rays managed to score 802 runs this season remains. And the Rangers hope it stays that way.

It's not a matter of disrespect to this current group of Rangers to say this is a stunning development. For the most part - for everyone, really, except 40-year-old reliever Darren Oliver - these Rangers are not burdened by history.

Only those of us who have been around to bear witness understand that something remarkable is close to taking place here. To the players, they are merely doing what their talents tell them they are capable of accomplishing.

As for fans and those who chronicle the highs and lows of baseball teams, the Rangers are not like the Red Sox were or like the Cubs still are. The Rangers have never been so blessed as to have a curse.

On a national scale, they have never been relevant enough for their losing to inspire books and documentaries.

Rangers fans have mostly suffered in silence without calling attention to their plight. If the shouts for Josh Hamilton at the plate or Elvis Andrus in the hole seem a little louder this weekend, consider them a product of 38 years of pent-up frustration.

When Major League Baseball created divisions in 1969, the League Championship Series were born. For the next few years, even for a couple of decades, players talked about the tensions generated from the LCS as being even greater than those the World Series produced.

The Rangers and their fans wouldn't know.

In 1983, when the Chicago White Sox captured the AL West, the Rangers were the only team in the division yet to reach the postseason. Despite their 85 losses that season, surely their time was near.

A year later, the Cubs and Padres played in the NLCS. All 12 National League teams had reached the playoffs since 1969. Of the 24 franchises that had been around since '69, only Cleveland and Texas (transplanted from Washington after '71) had failed to capture a division crown.

Cleveland broke through in 1995. Rangers fans kept waiting.

This team's three trips to the postseason in the late '90s were short-lived. The Rangers never came close to reaching an ALCS while going 1-9 against the vaunted Yankees.

Now they are one victory shy of finally erasing that stain as the only franchise that has never reached an LCS.

Most likely, the Yankees would await them, but that's getting ahead of the story even now.

Teams that win the first two games of baseball's best-of-5 first-round series win more than 90 percent of the time. The Rangers have owned the Rays the first two games, and all looks rosy for the home team just now.

But that's the mistake we can make in the playoffs. We know it makes more sense to look at how the Rays played over 162 games than how they performed in two games this week.

And yet just as we see the Yankees (runners-up to the Rays in the AL East) as invincible in this postseason, we tend to view the Rays as a team preparing for its own burial here at the Ballpark.

Best to take nothing for granted right now. Rangers fans would love to see their team advance this afternoon. But they will take it if it happens Sunday or even if this series goes all the way back to Tampa Bay where Cliff Lee will be the Rangers' ace in the hole.

As long as the Rangers move on - whether it's in the dominant fashion they have shown in this series or by the walk-off strikeout they used to win a game last week - patient Rangers fans will take what they can get.

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