MLB playoffs 2023: The Texas Rangers' pursuit of pitching — and their season — comes down to Max Scherzer in ALCS Game 7

HOUSTON — Of course it would come down to this.

On Monday, Max Scherzer will take the mound for the Texas Rangers. His previous start — the first in more than a month — was a disaster that helped push the team to this point. But his next outing will tie the record for most starts in a winner-take-all postseason game. His next outing will determine if Texas plays in the World Series.

This is why he is here; this is what they brought him here to do.

The 2023 Rangers were always going to live by their new-and-improved rotation — or die by it. Ahead of 2022, the Rangers, coming off a 102-loss season, were aggressive in free agency. From the outside, their contention window looked shuttered. But, as far too many teams refuse to recognize, timelines are subject to change. Contention is something that can be pursued with impatience. And so, the Rangers signed a couple of pricy All-Star shortstops, adding more than $50 million to their payroll, which jumped from bottom-10 to right around league average. That year, they lost 94 games, finishing 38 games back of the Houston Astros, who went on to win the World Series.

“We knew it was a multistep process,” said Chris Young, who joined the Rangers as general manager after the 2020 season and became the head of baseball operations after president of baseball operations Jon Daniels was fired in August 2022.

Firing Daniels reflected what was probably an irrational expectation by ownership of how much and how quickly the team could turn things around. Especially given the state of the Rangers’ pitching last year.

“We put up runs. We scored,” Young said of the ‘22 club. “We knew we were going to have the same offense returning. But our pitching, depending on what metric you looked at as a staff, we were roughly 25[th], 28[th]. We knew we had to improve, so we made a very concentrated effort to upgrade our pitching, specifically our starting pitching, and that's a huge reason why we've improved this year.”

The 2022 Rangers were 12th in runs scored — with a starting staff that was 25th in ERA. This year, the hitting has certainly taken off. In the regular season, the Rangers were third in runs scored. And the rotation has been completely overhauled. The team’s relentless quest to compile pitchers has been well-documented, including here, but perhaps nothing encapsulates how impactful those acquisitions have been as well as this: The Rangers are 8-3 this postseason, one win away from the World Series, and every game has been started by a pitcher who wasn’t on the team last year.

Jordan Montgomery has been the Game 1 guy this month. After the Rangers acquired him from St. Louis at the deadline, he was phenomenal down the stretch, posting a 2.79 ERA in 11 starts. In the playoffs, he has been even better — 2.38 ERA and second among all starters in innings pitched. Nathan Eovaldi, signed as a free agent in December after a strong stint in Boston during which he earned a reputation as a big-game pitcher, is 4-0 in October, despite struggling while coming off an injury at the end of the regular season.

“He’s a winner — winning person, winning player, winning teammate, just a winner,” Young said after Eovaldi won Game 6 to keep the Rangers' season alive. “I can't articulate enough to do him justice in terms of what he means to us. He's just a winner.”

On Sunday, Eovaldi held an Astros’ lineup that scored 23 runs in three games while taking a 3-2 lead in the ALCS to just two runs in 6⅓. It allowed the Rangers to even the series. The 9-2 victory felt far closer for most of the night than the final score would make it seem, but after a ninth-inning grand slam from Adolis García gave the Rangers a comfortable lead, manager Bruce Bochy brought in Andrew Heaney to pitch the ninth. It was his third appearance this postseason; the other two were starts (of varying success). After a stint in Los Angeles to hone his approach, Heaney signed with the Rangers as a free agent last December, a few weeks before Eovaldi.

Heaney is not in the same echelon as Montgomery and Eovaldi — his starts have been brief, part of a two-pronged approach to avoiding true bullpen games along with Dane Dunning — but until this series, the Rangers got by with just those three taking the ball to begin games.

Which brings us back to Max.

A seven-game series necessitates more than three starters. The Rangers know that — that’s why they traded for Jake Odorizzi early in the offseason, that’s why they signed the most talented pitcher on the market in Jacob deGrom. And when both of those suffered season-ending injuries, that’s why they also traded for Scherzer. The 2023 team was not going to be undone by a lack of options on the mound.

“You can never have enough pitching,” Young said after Game 6 — as well as many times before.

Young played against Scherzer during his own pitching career.

“I've always respected him, love the way he’s pitched,” Young said back in August, shortly after the Rangers acquired Scherzer from the free-falling Mets. “You hear the stories about the intensity he brings, the preparation, the commitment to winning — and it's been great. Who doesn’t want that?”

Over eight starts with the Rangers, Scherzer was better than he’d been earlier in the season. Then, in September, he suffered a teres major strain and was presumed to be out for the remainder of the year. But the same intensity that Young had admired from afar drove Max back to the mound. Bochy said he began lobbying to return “not too long after the injury,” and for Game 3 of the ALCS, he did.

It was the first time all postseason that the Rangers lost.

But the truth is, for all their effort, the Rangers do not have many other options to start Game 7 of the ALCS. This is why they went out and got Scherzer, and so now, all they can do is trust that his track record means more than his recent history. Tuesday will be the second time that Scherzer has started a Game 7 at Minute Maid Park; the first was four years ago. It was the 2019 World Series, and the wild-card Washington Nationals had pushed the Astros to a winner-take-all game. Just days after he was scratched from a scheduled start in Game 5 due to neck spasms, Scherzer gritted through five two-run innings to help bring a championship to D.C.

He has been trying to get back to that stage ever since — spending time in Los Angeles and New York because he thought those teams could take him there. Now, his third team in as many years might be the one.

“They want to win now — not next year, this year,” Scherzer said in August while discussing the decision to waive his no-trade clause to come to Arlington. “I think they got the team to do it. They got the offense to do it.”

Now, they just need the pitching.