The Rangers needed a signature win to keep pace in the AL Wild Card race, and Cal Quantrill gave them exactly that. He walked into Tropicana Field against the division-leading Rays and pitched like the best arm on the mound, working 7 shutout innings in a 6-0 Texas win. That's not a fluke start, either — Quantrill was non-tendered by the Rockies over the winter, signed a minor league deal with Texas in February, got selected to the big league roster in April, and has since turned into one of the best stories in the Rangers' rotation.
It started early and stayed quiet. Justin Foscue's 2-out ground ball through the left side plated Wyatt Langford for a 1-0 lead, and the Rangers tacked on another run the ugly way — an O'Hoppe single, a Freeman bunt, and a 2-out oppo single, exactly the kind of situational baseball Evan Grant flagged as it happened (@Evan_P_Grant, 2095682114033480131). Then Corey Seager made it look easy.
Corey Seager takes Shane McClanahan deep to make it 4-0 Rangers!
Seager's homer came after working a 2-2 count, a small wrinkle worth noting given Grant's pregame data point that Seager swings at the 2nd-highest rate of first pitches in baseball but ranks just 184th in first-pitch batting average among qualified hitters. This time he took a pitch to hit, and it left the yard. That swing pushed Texas to 4-0 and, per Grant, into what the Rangers' own internal tracking calls "Scorevana" — reaching 4 runs after scoring first, a threshold they're now 46-3 in this season.
While the lineup did its work, Quantrill just kept mowing Tampa Bay down. He'd carried a 25-inning walkless streak into the night before finally issuing one, and pitching coaches and scouts online were marveling at his stuff the whole way through.
Cal Quantrill, Dirty 86mph Slider...and Sword. ⚔️
Since a rough outing in Atlanta right after the All-Star break, Quantrill has posted a 1.57 ERA that ranks second in all of baseball behind only Dylan Cease, according to Grant's numbers. Evan Carter added an RBI triple and Jake Burger tacked on a sac fly to make it 6-0, capping a night where two productive outs turned into two multi-run innings for the Texas offense.
The final score, 6-0, pulled the Rangers to within a half-game of an AL Wild Card spot against a Rays team that came in atop the American League. For a Texas club that's leaned on situational hitting and a reclamation-project rotation piece all summer, that's about as good a formula as it gets with a month left to play.