The Texas Rangers will face the Arizona Diamondbacks tonight in what is essentially the most exciting World Series rematch, since the Diamondbacks have a wild-card berth and the Rangers have only a slim chance of making the playoffs. The Rangers are getting Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer back from the injured list this week, and Kumar Rocker is being promoted from the minors on Thursday against the Mariners, but this group of former Mets pitchers is entering the fray late. By slim, I mean a sub-.500 record and a 0.8 percent chance, according to Fangraphs—all but gone, even with the current state of the AL West. That’s worse than the Mariners.

Although it is difficult to repeat in baseball, a high payroll usually means you want to make more than one World Series run out of it. But even with the World Series appearances, neither the Rangers nor the Diamondbacks were the kind of team you would look at and predict a dynasty. Unlike, say, the Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves, the Rangers entered the 2023 postseason as a 90-win wildcard team. The Diamondbacks had 84.

If the UCLs allow it, the return of deGrom and Scherzer and the debut of Rocker at year’s end will be a cause for celebration and helpful in the lead-up to next year. But their late-season contributions won’t restore what made the 2023 team so successful. Scherzer was a trade-deadline addition who pitched eight regular-season games and two postseason games while battling injuries; deGrom pitched in six games before undergoing Tommy John surgery. Rocker was still in High-A after spending a year in independent ball due to the Mets’ concerns about his elbow health.

When the Rangers made the playoffs, they were only able to do so because Marcus Semien and Corey Seager were simultaneously putting together career-best performances. That year, they finished second and third in the AL MVP race, behind Shohei Ohtani. Even allowing for some aging-curve concerns, Semien and Seager are no slackers today; they both made the All-Star Game this year. But they now suffer from the same principle that underlies the sophomore slump: It’s hard to put in the kind of performance two years in a row that makes you a contender for the league’s best player. Players capable of doing that are the caliber of, well, Shohei Ohtani. There aren’t too many of those to draft, especially since the Dodgers have at least two of them, depending on how you count.

Thanks to the expanded playoffs, more average teams can participate in the postseason, and thanks to the general randomness that supports baseball with small sample sizes, an 84- or 90-win team that struggles actually has a shot at the World Series. As critic Anton Ego writes in Ratatouille“Not everyone can (win a World Series), but a (World Series winner) can come from anywhere.” It’s not so radical to say that it’s much harder to build a strong team like the Astros, Dodgers or Braves than it is to build a team that can win a World Series. Coaches like to say after losses that the team needs to find a way to be more consistent, but they might as well say that the team needs to miraculously find a way to be good. This is especially true in a game like baseball, where the law of large numbers applies.

The Rangers were successful last year and are now victims of their own success in a new postseason landscape. Conventional wisdom would label this season a failure, but with three wild-card spots, that opinion no longer really holds. In this environment, it’s hard to muster the energy for a thought experiment of completely rebuilding. If you superglue the UCLs of the pitching rotation together and invent some odd-year nonsense, the Rangers are still well positioned for next season.

Whatever the case, unless the ring-oriented American sports sector undergoes a drastic change in values, the Rangers have already done enough. That’s a sigh of relief for the team’s owners, at least: Even if they never return to the postseason, they’ll still have a ring to justify the expense. After all, the Rangers have won as many World Series as the Dodgers over the last decade, and that’s nothing to turn up your nose at.