ARLINGTON, Texas — The Texas Rangers lost 7-2 to the Toronto Blue Jays on Sunday at Globe Life Field and kept their one-game lead in the American League West. Earlier in the day, the Houston Astros lost 4-2 at home to the Atlanta Braves, leaving Texas (78-78) a game ahead of Houston (77-79) with six games left in the regular season.
Houston holds the tiebreaker between the two clubs. Both teams are off Monday, the last scheduled day off of the regular season for each.
From the leadoff spot, Brett Bateman reached base three times and scored all three times for Toronto, which avoided a three-game sweep. Two of those trips started with walks from Jacob deGrom (11-10), who took the loss.
After winning 7-1 on Friday and 6-2 on Saturday, Texas finished the season series against Toronto 6-1. The Rangers are unbeaten in nine straight home series, going 8-0-1, the longest such run since Globe Life Field opened in 2020. They have not swept a series since taking four games at Rogers Centre from June 25-28, and their last home sweep came against the Kansas City Royals from May 29-31. Sunday was the Rangers’ chance to add another, with deGrom on the mound against a Toronto bullpen game.
“I mean, you want to win every game. I mean, that’s for sure,” Rangers manager Skip Schumaker said. “I don’t look at it as a sweep or not sweep. I look at it as trying to win every single game, and did we prepare and did we play the game the right way, and I think we did all of that.
“It wasn’t, we didn’t make a bunch of errors or anything,” Schumaker continued. “We had guys on base, didn’t really hit good with runners in scoring position today. That’s going to happen. We did the last two days. Hopefully we can start another winning streak, and it starts with a game one on Tuesday.”
Jacob deGrom Walks Four As Toronto Blue Jays Score First
The Rangers entered Sunday 21-55 when their opponent scores first. To open the game, deGrom walked Bateman, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. singled him to third before Nathan Lukes brought him home with a sacrifice fly. Guerrero left in the fourth inning with lower back tightness. Blue Jays manager John Schneider said the tightness stemmed from a stretch at first base a couple of days earlier.
“It was kind of tight before the game,” Schneider said. “We just wanted to be careful, and hopefully he’s good for tomorrow.”
In the third, Lukes singled and scored on an RBI double by Sean Keys for a 2-0 Toronto lead. With two outs in the fourth, Jake Burger tied it with his 27th homer of the season, a two-run shot off Spencer Arrighetti two batters after Ezequiel Durán drew a walk. The ball went 398 feet and deflected off Bateman’s glove as he leaped at the wall in center field.
Bateman drew another leadoff walk in the fifth. Kazuma Okamoto singled him home for a 3-2 lead, and deGrom walked another batter to load the bases before Schumaker went to the bullpen. Left-hander Robert Garcia got an inning-ending double play on his first pitch, then threw a scoreless sixth.
“It doesn’t always have to be a hit,” Schneider explained. “You want to get on base in the walks against deGrom, just fighting him off, fighting him off and taking some really close pitches. It kind of sets the tone, and I think it kind of just bleeds into everyone else up in that lineup.”
In all, deGrom finished with 4 1/3 innings, 5 hits, 3 earned runs, 4 walks, and 2 strikeouts, and he hit a batter. The two-time Cy Young Award winner’s ERA rose to 3.86. He has 196 strikeouts this season and has reached 200 in four previous seasons.
In the first inning this season, deGrom has an 8.40 ERA and a .949 opponents’ OPS. He has been pitching through mild groin tightness since it ended his Sept. 10 start at Seattle.
“I didn’t have a real good feel for anything today,” deGrom said. “Maybe the changeup or curveball, but I wasn’t really able to locate the fastball and didn’t throw the slider well off of it. I didn’t make pitches when I needed to. That was frustrating. I was kind of all over the place.”
On Tuesday against the Boston Red Sox, in his first start back from the groin issue, deGrom allowed 2 runs over 5 innings with 8 strikeouts in a 4-2 win. Schumaker said afterward that deGrom did not feel 100%.
“I saw his command was off from the get-go, just uncharacteristic of him, getting guys 0-2 and just kind of getting back to 3-2 and then walks,” Schumaker explained. “And that’s ultimately when he walked two guys in the fifth, that’s when I went to Garcia. It’s just that just wasn’t him, unlike him. Guys are going to have those days every now and then. Hopefully he’s going to, he’s going to bounce back and have a big next start.”
Toronto finished with 11 hits, its most since it also had 11 on Sept. 12. Six of them came after deGrom left.
“It was a good approach against a really good pitcher,” Schneider said. “And on a day like today, you need that when you’re running from the bullpen a little bit. We just kind of grinded him, got his pitch count up. I think up and down, it was a really good approach.”
Toronto Blue Jays Score Four Off Rangers Bullpen In Seventh
Rangers relievers entered Sunday with a 1.84 ERA through the first five games of the homestand. They had covered 29 1/3 innings in that stretch and held opponents to a .163 average and a .468 OPS. Cal Quantrill left Saturday’s start after 1 1/3 innings with right lat tightness and went on the 15-day injured list Sunday.
Bateman led off the seventh with a double against left-hander Tyler Alexander, and Myles Straw walked. Lukes followed with an RBI single that ended Alexander’s afternoon. Against Chase Silseth, Charles McAdoo hit a two-out, two-run double, and Andrés Giménez singled McAdoo home off Adam Macko for a 7-2 lead.
“You saw some balls find some holes today,” Schumaker said. “Really in my estimation, McAdoo put a good swing on a split, but [Silseth] had him in the right count and just couldn’t put him away. I thought they pitched good. Balls just found some holes.”
Macko made his major league debut with Toronto on May 18 before joining Texas. Toronto acquired McAdoo from the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in 2024, and he debuted May 29. The Blue Jays scored their four runs in the seventh on four hits and a walk against three Rangers relievers.
“Toronto put together some good at-bats against Alexander, against Silseth. So, they’re good hitters over there, too,” Schumaker said. “And sometimes the split to McAdoo, he has a good swing pitch that was expanded and took a good swing on it and got a couple runs in. But I thought Garcia did really good. So, I mean, that was obviously a positive.
“Came in bases loaded, got a double play ball, and then came in and got the scoreless. So he was really good,” Schumaker continued. “Macko got three scoreless. So I thought the bullpen did fine. It was just, unfortunately, we just got two runs off kind of a bullpen day. Burger had a home run, but just didn’t get much going other than that.”
Toronto used seven pitchers. Opener Spencer Miles threw 3 scoreless innings, allowing 2 hits and striking out 4 on 46 pitches. In his four most recent appearances as an opener, Miles has thrown 9 scoreless innings, allowing 6 hits and 2 walks with 10 strikeouts. Arrighetti (9-9) got the win after giving up 2 runs on 2 hits with 2 walks over 2 1/3 innings. Burger went 1-for-3 with a walk and 2 RBI, and Lukes went 2-for-3 with a walk, 2 RBI, and 2 runs for Toronto.
Texas put runners on first and second with one out in the ninth, and Louis Varland got Corey Seager, the designated hitter for a second straight day, to ground into a game-ending double play. Varland was the last of five Toronto relievers who followed Arrighetti with 3 2/3 scoreless innings.
“You just keep trying to win series. That’s about all you can do,” Seager said. “That was a good series. You can’t dwell on today. Obviously, you’d like to win it, but overall, this homestand’s been really good. We’re playing good baseball right now.”
At 77-79, Toronto is tied with Houston and 2 1/2 games behind the Chicago White Sox for the third and final wild card. Texas has six games left, and none of them come against Houston.
“We know we gotta win,” deGrom explained. “We gotta win as many games as we can. It’d be nice to win all of them. It would have been nice to win today, but I didn’t do a great job of helping us in that situation. We have to go play good baseball in these last six games and see what we can do.”
Toronto opens a three-game series against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday and closes the regular season at home against the Cincinnati Reds. The Blue Jays sent Dylan Cease back to Toronto for an MRI on his pitching shoulder Saturday and scratched him from his scheduled start Wednesday.
“He felt good enough to go, but we kind of knew it was there,” Schneider said of Guerrero. “He was kind of just feeling a little bit as he was swinging. So he got some treatment, and hopefully he feels good tomorrow.”
Right fielder Brandon Nimmo was scratched with an illness about an hour before first pitch. He had played a team-high 149 games this season.
“I don’t know. He’s not here,” Schumaker said. “He was feeling pretty sick and we just didn’t want to get anybody else sick. I haven’t talked to him since the game ended.”
Texas is 4-2 on a homestand that ends with three games against the New York Mets from Tuesday through Thursday. The Rangers went 2-1 against Boston before taking two of three from Toronto.
“We won a series, a good series win against a tough team. Yeah, of course you would have liked to have swept and got a win,” Schumaker said. “We didn’t, but these guys fought and played hard. If you would have told me we won the first two series of the homestand, I would have taken it. And we did just that.
“And we have an off day, a much-needed off day, with a lot of these guys are feeling it a little bit,” Schumaker continued. “So hopefully we can come back and feel refreshed and play a really good Mets team that’s playing really good right now.”
First pitch Tuesday is at 7:05 p.m. CT on Rangers Sports Network. The Rangers close the regular season with three games at the Minnesota Twins from Sept. 25-27.
