Rangers Making Schedule Work for Them

There's an old saying that every baseball team is going to win a third of their games and lose a third of their games, leaving the final third to determine their final fate.

It's hard to argue with such a thing because, well, that's a fairly obvious observation. There's no real insight into how a team is supposed to win those 54 games. The real key, at least under the current setup of the American and National Leagues, is to get the league to schedule you well in interleague play.

The Rangers have won 10 of their last 12 games against four National League teams that aren't currently leading their divisions. The Giants are at least in position to grab a Wild Card spot, but the rest of the selection is pretty low on the pecking order.

The Diamondbacks are hovering around .500, but the Astros and Padres are bottom dwellers who offered little resistance. The same should be true of the Rockies, this weekend's opponent and the final opponent of the interleague portion of the schedule.

There's nothing the Rangers can do about getting this schedule as opposed to one that features the Dodgers, Reds or Nationals, but they are certainly allowed to do something about their good luck on that front. Not that they need a reminder of that.

Good pitching will always help you win games, but it's a virtual guarantee when you're going up against this level of opposition. The backs of the baseball cards make it hard to believe that the offense won't come around, so there are worse things than allowing the pitching to do the heavy lifting in the short term.

Throwing in the earlier series with the Astros, the Rangers are now 12-3 against the National League this season. The Angels are 10-5 and close out with the first-place Dodgers this weekend. That advantage could well wind up deciding the division, something that would probably make the Angels reach for a few other old sayings.

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