Doomsday is Upon Us

Game 162 should not have mattered this year.

When I was an eleven year-old kid, if you had told me that at some point in the future, I would be watching the last Rangers game of the year and it would affect playoff seeding, I would have told you that the Rangers will never make the playoffs, so you must be lying. We have to keep that in perspective. For life-long Rangers fans, we have to remember where we came from.

But we also came from April, during which this team was being compared to the '27 Yankees. This team ain't no '27 Yankees. And at this point, we're just hoping they're not a Wild Card team.

Doomsday is upon us. There's no doubt about it. Lose today and we've got ourselves a heck of a situation.

But win today . . . and it's all out there in front of us. The only thing that we can't have is home-field advantage (unless a miracle Yanks/O's situation plays out. But those situations never play out, right '11 Red Sox???? Right '11 Braves????).

It is all there in front of us. And today will tell us a lot. One thing it will be a report card of is the front office's trade deadline moves and non-moves. We traded for Dempster. We'll see how that worked out today. We didn't trade for any bats off the bench. We'll see how that worked out today.

What we really need is Dempster to keep us in the game long enough for our overpriced, supposedly incredibly talented offense to turn the tide and actually start hitting, especially with RISP.

My prediction: it comes down to one matchup today . . . Cespedes v. Dempster. We have held him largely in check so far this series. I think Dempster will handle the other eight guys fine. But hang an off-speed'er to Cespedes and it may not come down.

So we've got to be careful today . . . but we also have to remember that just about everything (except AL home-field advantage) is still on the table for us.

We just have to execute.