Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

We have some movement in the race between immovable objects.

The Rangers on Monday capped a four-game, wraparound series win over the Mariners to take what feels like a commanding 2 1/2-game lead over them and a two-game lead over the Astros in the AL West. Texas followed that up by dropping a series to the AL-best Rays, while Seattle dropped a series from the NL-best Dodgers and Houston swept the Angels. Entering Friday’s action, the Rangers lead the Astros by a half game and the Mariners by 2 1/2 games. That’s how it’s gone for the league’s most languid division in 2026.

Monday’s win gave the Rangers a 7-3 record against the Mariners on the year, securing Texas the tiebreaker should that become relevant in late September. Meanwhile, the Rangers head to Houston this weekend for a three-game set with the Astros currently holding the tiebreaker, 6-4. A Texas sweep in the road series would give it the head-to-head advantage against both of its AL West rivals. If not, things could get even more interesting come the final week of the season.

Even so, our Playoff Odds aren’t expecting the Texas-Houston tiebreaker to matter too much. That’s because, for the first time in 2026, the 55-54 Rangers look like the favorites to win the division.

I wrote recently about the missing star power in the AL West. The top two players on both the Rangers and Mariners had been bad or hurt, and their missing performance was a big reason the top of the division appeared stuck in a sort of tug of war against .500. “The race will likely be won by whichever team gets something — anything — out of its star tandem the rest of the way,” is what I wrote at the time.

Wyatt Langford seemed to take this literally in the four-game set against the Mariners. He picked up five hits, including two doubles and a home run. Langford has been exceptional when he’s been on the field in 2026, with a 131 wRC+ and solid defense to make him the prorated equivalent of a 5-WAR player. Unfortunately, he’s made two separate trips to the IL, once in May for a forearm strain and once (briefly) in early July with a hamstring strain.

The xStats imply there may be some good fortune for Langford at the moment. His .356 wOBA far outpaces his .309 xwOBA. He isn’t hitting the ball particularly hard, and his popup rate has nearly doubled since last season. He’s also halved his walk rate from 2025. Some of that is an uptick in his chase rate, but there does appear to be a notable change in approach, which hasn’t been all bad. As Ben Clemens recently noted when ranking him 37th in our annual Trade Value series, Langford is attacking earlier in counts this year. He’s especially keen on punishing get-ahead benders. His 2.4 runs per 100 against breaking and offspeed pitches is top 10 in the majors this year. Here’s a great example against Eury Pérez, who starts him off with a hanging slider; Langford is ready, crushing it 437 feet to left-center:

Langford pairs this with solid defense, splitting time between left and center field depending on Evan Carter’s platoon status. Langford’s jump gains him 4.1 feet relative to the average fielder, which is second best in the majors in 2026 behind only Pete Crow-Armstrong. That’s allowed him to make all three of his four-star play opportunities, including this effort to rob Cole Young on Sunday.

Langford is the Rangers’ best position player at the moment, but there is a bit of competition, as they’ve fielded a surprisingly deep lineup in 2026. Their 104 wRC+ is currently seventh in the majors, and since July 1, they have a 115 wRC+ — good for fourth.

One reason is the resurgence of Joc Pederson. After posting a this-is-the-end season in 2025, with a career-worst 76 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR in 306 plate appearances, he has more than bounced back, clubbing 19 homers and putting up a 134 wRC+ as the team’s strong-side DH. I can’t really tell you what’s new for Pederson. His stance is the same. His swing is the same. His strikeout and walk rates are the same — even his groundball rate is identical. But where last year he was popping up everything, this year he’s found the barrels that have kept him in the league for more than a decade. He doesn’t seem to know why, either.

“I just kind of do it. I don’t know how I do it,” he told MLB.com in June. “If I knew that, then I wouldn’t have sucked all last year, or ever.”

Ezequiel Duran has been one of the 20 most valuable players in the majors by WAR this year, with a solid 115 wRC+ propping up elite defense, though I don’t know how much I believe in the bat. He chases and whiffs a ton, and doesn’t hit the ball hard to make up for it, instead spraying low liners to all fields and occasionally finding a barrel. He did have some success with this approach way back in 2023, so this isn’t quite a fluke. But he posted a paltry 67 wRC+ in 504 plate appearances the last two years. Regardless, Duran has played every position (besides pitcher and catcher) in 2026 and played them well. His 12 Outs Above Average make him the fifth-best fielder in the majors this year. Most of that has come at shortstop, where his 7% success rate added is currently the best ever recorded in a season.

Duran is playing shortstop because Corey Seager isn’t. Seager is on the injured list for the third time this season and the second time with lower back inflammation. This is the story of his career, of course, but unlike in the past, Seager has struggled when on the field, with a career-low 87 wRC+ and a career-high 26.9% strikeout rate. Also on the injured list is Josh Jung, who suffered a mild calf strain last week. Jung is having an excellent season otherwise (128 wRC+, 2.5 WAR). He’s always had a nice line drive approach and the ability to hit the ball hard. But this year, he’s finally stopped flailing at pitches out of the zone, more than doubling his BB/K over last year.

There are others, too. Brandon Nimmo has maintained his steady pace at the plate (115 wRC+) after coming over from the Mets for Marcus Semien. Carter has hit fairly well against righties (110 wRC+ vs. RHP, 94 overall); Justin Foscue has crushed lefties (170 wRC+ vs. LHP, 120 overall). And Jake Burger has hit really well or really poorly depending on the month. And so the story of the Rangers’ season has been this deep, well-rounded, more-than-competent lineup. It’s the best their lineup has looked since their 2023 World Series team:

For decades, the offense was something of a given for the Rangers, with balls flying at their previous home ballpark. But since moving to their baseball-themed airport terminal in 2020, they’ve struggled to hit, especially at home. Globe Life Field in 2024 and 2025 played as the second-most suppressive park in the majors, behind only T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Baseball Savant publishes a “variable extra distance” leaderboard on its park factors page. It shows how much distance a park adds or subtracts from batted balls, given its elevation, temperature, and wind patterns. In the first four years of the park, it added about six feet of extra distance to batted balls relative to average, which was typically one of the five largest. In 2024 and 2025, it added approximately zero feet, and performance on batted balls took a dive. In 2026, however, the park is back up to about six feet added. I don’t have an answer for the “why” here, but I can tell you the Rangers’ home wOBA has leapt from .289 in 2025 to .318 this year.

Their pitching has been fine. They’re 11th in starting pitcher WAR, 13th in reliever WAR, and 10th overall — just good enough to be competitive, but not quite a repeat from their best-in-the-AL performance last year.

I wrote recently that Jacob deGrom should have been an All-Star. He’s on pace for 4 WAR, which would be the most he’s posted since 2021. I wouldn’t call this “vintage” deGrom, as he set far too high a bar for himself in the late 2010s, but he’s still getting tons of chases and whiffs on that fastball-slider combo. Nathan Eovaldi has posted the same strikeout and walk numbers that he’s maintained since 2021, now primarily as a splitter-first pitcher. He’s also maintained the pattern of giving up tons of homers every other season — his 1.62 HR/9 is fifth highest in the majors this year. MacKenzie Gore has been fine in his first year in Arlington. If you like ERA estimators, and I do, he’s essentially been the same pitcher, with lots of strikeouts, a reasonable number of homers, and too many walks. His 3.81 FIP is only a skosh higher than the 3.74 mark from last year, even if his 4.77 ERA would be a career worst. It’s a solid top three that would make the Rangers competitive in a postseason series.

Jacob Latz has been the star of the bullpen. Michael Baumann wrote about him last week, if you want more specifics on him. The rest of bullpen has been OK. Peyton Gray and Tyler Alexander have been fine mid-relief options. Jakob Junis has continued to thrive on weak fly balls, though he landed on the IL this week with a right adductor strain. There just isn’t much help beyond, which explains why the Rangers on Wednesday made a trade with the Angels for the perfectly adequate Chase Silseth.

The Rangers enter the final third of the season as a pretty good, well-rounded, borderline playoff contender. And that makes Texas the best positioned team in a poor year for the AL West.

The Mariners haven’t been awful in a literal sense, just relative to expectations. “Who to fire and when” is the talk of the moment, with assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallanes the first to go. No team has gotten less than expected from its top two players. Cal Raleigh reportedly hurt himself while trying to cram for the season after the World Baseball Classic, and he’s been awful before and after a trip to the IL for an oblique strain. Julio Rodríguez hasn’t been quite so bad, providing a familiar up-and-down performance at the plate. The difference this year is his defense has slumped. Even if I don’t buy it as a long-term concern, the flubs haven’t helped in what’s been the worst team defense in the majors this year.

The Astros… I don’t believe in. I’m sorry. They were terrible to start the year. And they haven’t been much better even as they’ve inched their way back to .500. General manager Dana Brown doesn’t agree with my assessment, and says the team could be buyers at the trade deadline. Maybe that’s the right call given the state of the division and league. This could be a chance for a last gasp before looking to rebuild. But unless Houston is able to trade for an entire rotation — it ranks 29th in starting pitcher WAR right now — I don’t quite see the point.

I’ll leave you with a final plot:

Despite my general impression that Texas is the best team in the AL West at the moment, it clearly isn’t a great team and it isn’t expected to run away with the division. The Rangers are still under water by run differential, and they aren’t clearly trending up. Their record is largely propped up by a 19-11 mark in one-run games, which is second best in the majors. That’s to say, they don’t seem likely to separate from .500 any time soon, and the division should remain tight the rest of the year.