After outplaying the favorites in their respective League Championship Series, the Rangers and Giants will be playing for the 2010 World Championship title starting this Wednesday, October 27th.
The Texas Rangers are one of eight franchises to have never won a championship, but the Rangers have a chance to achieve that goal this year. Tampa Bay, Seattle, Washington, Houston, Milwaukee, Colorado and San Diego have to wait until at least next year. Washington, which came into existence as Montreal in 1969, and Seattle, which joined the AL as an expansion team in 1977, have never even been to a World Series.
Texas opens the best-of-seven affair on Wednesday night at AT&T Park facing the San Francisco Giants, a team that hasn’t won a world championship itself since 1954, back when it was still in New York, playing in the Polo Grounds, and seven years before the Rangers came into existence as the 1961 expansion Washington Senators.
Only the Chicago Cubs (1908) and Cleveland Indians (1948) have suffered a longer drought than the Giants, who’ll be making their fourth World Series appearance since their 1958 arrival in San Francisco. They lost in seven games to both the Yankees in 1962 and Angels in 2002, and were swept in four games by Oakland in the earthquake-interrupted World Series in 1989.
Not to take anything away from the San Francisco Giants, but after manhandling the team with the best record in baseball in the first round, then doing it again to the defending World Champions (My NY Yankees…and yes, I’m still hurting from that beating!), I think the Texas Rangers has what it takes to be the last team standing this year. They simply have too many hitters-with Young, Hamilton, Guerrero, Cruz, Molina and Moreland all comfortably hitting over .300-and their starting pitchers-Lee, Wilson and Lewis-can certainly matchup with the Giants rotation. When all is said and done, I think Nolan Ryan and the whole state of Texas will be celebrating their first ever MLB World Championship.
My prediction: Rangers in 6.
