The Rangers have gone 1-8 over the past ten days and the season is absolutely lost. There was a sliver of hope right before this losing streak when we recovered from a disastrous start to make it back to .500 and start making moves on the playoff race. That’s all gone now.

Not only did we plummet in the standings, but we got embarrassed in the national media for being on the pussy end of an ‘unwritten rules’ controversy.

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I’ll just say this about the beanball – I think it was overblown as most of these stories usually are. All sports have moments where players just need to take out their frustrations on an opponent. Hockey has fighting, basketball has hard fouls, and football has the general play of football.

In baseball, the only options on the table are hard slides and beanballs. Hard slides end seasons while beanballs are just temporary pain and a free base. It’s not that big of a deal and I don’t care that the Rangers wanted to take out frustration on someone running up the score.

What I am embarrassed about is that our beanball just completely missed Machado. We then proceeded to have a historically humiliating week by giving up grand slams in each of the remaining games in the series.

Hey Padres announcers… ER!! It’s not “everything’s big in Texas”.  It’s “everything’s bigg’ER” in Texas. Get it right.

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The season is fucked. Dietrich has gone 2/17 since I last wrote about him as a savior for the offense. Montero, as seen in the video above, has looked human since the time I sang his praises. Everybody else sucks too.

There are only two bright spots and they come in the form of trade chips. Lance Lynn is easily the best pitcher on the market. He recorded the only win of this 1-8 streak. Joey Gallo has two more years of control and is one of the most valuable bats on the market.

In what should be a major seller’s market with over half the league in a playoff race, those two assets alone could yield the type of return that we got for Teixeira back in 07.

And that’s the key here. We are in full rebuild mode for the first time since that Teixeira trade kickstarted an almost dynasty. JD has been selling prospects for most of his tenure here and it’s reaped a lot of rewards that unfortunately fell one strike short (twice) of the ultimate prize. Now he gets another crack at doing it from scratch.

The season wasn’t supposed to be about winning; it was about getting better. Let’s see how deadline week works out before calling the entire thing a failure.

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Side note – the Padres, who are run by former JD protege AJ Preller, acquired Fernando Tatis Jr in a swap for James Shields. Jesus christ that is such a ridiculous trade.