MVP Adolis Garcia, Rangers cruise past Astros, win ALCS،
HOUSTON – Adolis Garcia admired, displayed and celebrated. He swung his bat and roared toward his own dugout and cupped his hands around his ears, seemingly reveling in every moment Game 7 of this American League Championship Series offered. At one point, as the Texas Rangers continued to pile up runs and the home crowd grew more and more distraught, they even heard faint “MVP” chants.
They were prophetic.
The Rangers defeated the defending champion Houston Astros in their own building on Monday night, earning an 11-4 victory to punch their ticket to the World Series. And Garcia – the man who instigated a bench-clearing incident with a controversial hit in Game 5, then delivered the devastating blow with a prodigious grand slam in Game 6 – had his fingerprints all over it, solidifying the MVP honors after a dynamic ALCS performance.
Garcia lined a Cristian Javier offering to the top of the left-field scoreboard in the first, settled for a single because he admired it too long, then quickly stole second base. In the third, he lofted a ball over the right field fence to give the Rangers their fourth run. In the fourth, he provided the two-run single that highlighted a four-run inning and helped turn Game 7 into a laugher. And in the eighth, he unleashed a towering ball that sailed into the Crawford Boxes and essentially ended the Astros.
Garcia finished the ALCS with 15 RBIs, a record for any playoff series. He has homered in four straight games, tied for first in the entire postseason. And he became just the second player in major league history — joining Willie Stargell in the 1979 World Series — with four hits and a home run in a Game 7. Garcia, of course, hit two.
“This team here, we are a family and they push me to play hard,” Garcia said from the podium. “It’s nothing without the love of my teammates.”
The Rangers, who will host the winner of the deciding National League Championship Series game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday, are the fourth team to reach the World Series in two years after losing 100 games .
The Rangers lost exactly 102 in 2021. Later in the offseason, they spent a total of $500 million on two key midfield players, Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. The following year, they spent nearly $250 million to equip their rotation with Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney. Midseason, they traded for Max Scherzer, who recorded the first eight outs of Game 7, and Jordan Montgomery, who had the next seven. Along the way, Jonah Heim improved behind the plate, Nathaniel Lowe became a Silver Slugger, Josh Jung and Evan Carter emerged and Garcia became a star, giving the Rangers one of the most prolific offenses in sports .
Their road was perilous. But Bruce Bochy, a three-time champion returning from a three-year hiatus to lead the 2023 Rangers, provided the steady hand that guided the Rangers through this ordeal. Texas surrendered the division to Houston on the final day of the regular season and was forced to play in the wild-card round with an unstable bullpen. This sparked a stunning seven-game playoff winning streak. The Rangers won back-to-back games against the Tampa Bay Rays, then swept the Baltimore Orioles in a three-game division series and took both games from the Astros at Minute Maid Park in Houston to start this ALCS. The Rangers have lost three straight games at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, the last on a ninth-inning three-run homer by Jose Altuve in Game 5. But they came back to win game six and never trailed in game seven.
“We’ve been doing it all year,” Bochy said on the podium during the trophy presentation. “We’ve had our streaks, we’ve had our injuries and we continue to get back up.”
Javier, who allowed just two runs in his first four postseason starts combined, allowed three runs in the first inning, serving up a 440-foot homer to Seager, a long single to Garcia and another scoring single one point to Mitch Garver. The Astros threatened Scherzer in the third, but the Rangers came back with four runs against JP France in the top of the fourth. In the sixth, Lowe’s two-run homer proved to be the dagger. Garcia’s homer in the eighth was superfluous. In his last six at-bats in this series, he has five hits, including three home runs. He had nine carries in that stretch alone.
The Rangers will be making their third appearance in the World Series, having appeared in 2010 and 2011. Their 60-plus year history does not include a single championship.
They can change that with four more wins.
