The Texas Rangers were thrown a major wrench an already wheels-off season when on Sept. 5, the club's all-time winningest manager Ron Washington unexpectedly resigned over what we now know to be a personal matter involving his marriage — at least that's what we know.
Since then, Washington's bench coach Tim Bogar, who came on board prior to this season, has been tasked with being the interim manager for a team full of guys who shouldn't even be in the majors and are looking at the possibility of finishing the season with the worst record in all of baseball.
Yet, the Rangers are currently on their best stretch of the season after they won a season-high seven straight games and eight of their last 10 while winning three straight series, including sweeps of the Atlanta Braves and the Oakland A's before taking two of three against the AL West champion Angels over the weekend.
While that surely isn't the only criteria the Rangers' brass is looking at when considering Bogar for the full-time gig, it certainly has to be helping his cause, and Bob Nightengale of the USA Today is reporting that Bogar is the heavy favorite to win the full-time job this winter.
Bogar, 47, has never been a big-league manager, but has been a successful manager in the minors and has been on staff for some very successful, highly regarded big-league skippers, including Tampa Bay's Joe Maddon and Cleveland's Terry Francona, who won a couple of world titles in Boston.
Maddon, specifically, is widely regarded as possibly the best manager going in baseball right now, and it says a lot about Bogar that both of those guys always speak highly of him.
