World Series 2023: How Rangers' rapid rebuild led to a title - ESPN

PHOENIX — There is no one way to rebuild a baseball team, and there is no one way to exit that rebuild and ramp up to contention. There is perhaps a sentiment common to the start of any such project, though, one expressed nine months ago in four words by the general manager of baseball's newest champions, the Texas Rangers.

«We're sick of losing,» Chris Young said at spring training in Arizona, answering a reporter's question about how and why the Rangers took an aggressive stance to free agency the winter before.

Nine months later, that sickness has been cured.

The road between that statement in February and Wednesday night's pileup at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix — only 37 miles away from the spring training facility where it was spoken — was long, meandering and filled with potholes.

In the end, though, those four words were profound enough to point the way to a new destination for the Rangers — the domain of World Series champions.

«Everybody wants to be a winner,» Texas reliever Will Smith said. «That's what you want to be known for, is a guy who wins.… It's a whole lot better than losing.»

Smith, incidentally, knows a thing or two about winning. He has now been on the roster of three straight championship teams — the Atlanta Braves (2021), the Houston Astros (2022) and now the Rangers.

«It's something I don't take for granted, for sure,» Smith said.

He shouldn't. Winning the World Series is hard. Entering the 2023 season, six of the 30 existing MLB franchises had never won a World Series. The Rangers, who began their existence with 11 lackluster seasons as the neo-Washington Senators, had played about 1,300 more games than any of the other titleless teams. In fact, if you zoom in on the 51 campaigns Texas played