Remember back, if you will, to Game 6 of the 2011 World Series when the Texas Rangers seemingly had their first-ever World Series title in the bag not once, but twice.
It's not much of a comparison to Wednesday night's game between the Rangers and rival Los Angeles Angels, a simple regular-season game, but the parallels are there.
The Angels held a six-run lead early in the game, and the Rangers fought back to send the game into extra innings when Ian Kinsler mashed a first-pitch homer over the left-field wall after committing an error earlier in the game that pretty much led to six of the Angels' seven runs.
Of course, in the top of the 10th inning, the Angels took any momentum the cornered, backs-against-the-wall Rangers had taken when Chris Ianetta led off the inning with a homer and then Albert Pujols hit a two-run blast (his second homer of the night, and fourth of the series) to give the Angels a 10-7 cushion heading into the bottom of the 10th.
That's when it happened. Hit after hit. Errors. An 11-pitch at-bat that ended in a walk by David Murphy after being down 0-2 in the count, and RBI single from Mitch Moreland and then arguably the biggest hit of the year for the Rangers — a two-run double to walk off in jubilation and save themselves from seeing their AL West lead cut to just two games.
As a team that scored the fewest runs in the AL in July, the Rangers needed a spark to start August, and it's safe to say they got it. Now, they've scored 11 runs in one game in August (about one-eighth of the runs they scored in all of July). And just as the Rangers' hearts would've been ripped out with a crushing loss on Wednesday, the Angels' had to have been.
There's big wins throughout a 162-game season. But in the grand scheme of things, there haven't been and likely won't be a bigger win for the Rangers than Wednesday's.
