The Texas Rangers had a sketchy history. It’s finally vanquished.
PHOENIX — History can’t matter to the players who fill out a lineup or line the steps in a dugout. How are the events that happened before their births supposed to affect whether athletes trained to live in the present take a pitch or swing at it, whether they hang a curveball or snap it off, whether they win or lose?
But tell the fans who filled the stands behind the Texas Rangers’ dugout — the visiting dugout — Wednesday evening at Chase Field that their own history, their own backstory, was irrelevant to how they felt in the moment. On the field before them, dancing and embracing in newly minted World Series champion hats and T-shirts, were heroes whose place is now secure on the stretch of Interstate 30 that runs between Dallas and Fort Worth, and all the Texas towns to the north and south.
“I just know that the wait is over,” said Chris Young, the Dallas kid who once rooted for his hometown team, later pitched for the Rangers and now serves as their executive vice president and general manager. “Our history has changed, and I just am so happy for so many people that have waited a long time for this.
The distance between the Rangers’ first game representing the Lone Star State and Wednesday night’s tenser-than-it-sounds 5-0 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 5 of the World Series spanned 51 years. In the time since the Washington Senators relocated to a patch of prairie known as Arlington, Tex., 23 franchises had won World Series. It was never the Rangers’ time.
