We've got a question for you to ponder on this Tuesday.
Would you rather your favorite team be the Buffalo Bills or the Cleveland Browns? Or, put another way, would you rather suffer through the agony of watching your favorite team lose in the Super Bowl (or World Series or NBA Finals or Stanley Cup) four straight years or suffer through the agony of rooting for a team that hasn't even experienced playing for them?
Most people would probably pick the Bills in that scenario because the ending can't take away the enjoyment of the journey to the cusp of a championship. But that enjoyment can't come close to filling the void left by those four brutal losses.
By now, you might be wondering why we're talking about the Bills and Browns on a website devoted to the Rangers. It's because they've lost in the last two World Series and because Derek Holland was talking about those losses in a recent radio interview passed along by the Dallas Morning News.
"To me, it’s never a failure if you get to where you want to be. We’ve come so far. We’ve achieved so much. I feel like if we lose a game, it’s like we let everybody down like Game 4 against Minnesota. It felt like we got booed, but I could be wrong," Holland said. "The expectations are really high and we have those same expectations as well. We feel like we need to win it all but if we put too much pressure on ourselves then it’s going to be a lot harder to win. We just need to let things happen."
We agree with the sentiment that the Rangers need to win it all. Two straight losses in the World Series mean that the team only has one way to make this season into a success. That doesn't mean they can't have smaller successes on the way, but those smaller successes can never add up to the ultimate marker of winning the World Series.
It's not the first time that we've heard a member of the organization talk about overly negative responses to losses or slumps this season. It hasn't been a comfortable fit for the team, which speaks to how dramatically things have changed for the Rangers over the last three seasons.
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Holland might not like the pressure of being measured by winning the World Series, but it's an unavoidable byproduct of doing everything except celebrating with champagne after the final game of the season. Better to embrace it and adopt the same stance than try to convince anyone that there's not unfinished business.
There is, even if Rangers fans would be wise to remember now and again how lucky they are to root for this team instead of the Rangers that made up most of the team's first four decades.
