It’s a Lone Star State showdown with a trip to the World Series on the line as the Texas Rangers face the Houston Astros in the AL Championship Series of the 2023 MLB playoffs. There’s certainly no love lost between these two in-state rivals, but things are about to hit a whole new level on the postseason stage.
Twins vs. Astros history
Have teams ever played in postseason?
This series will mark the first time the Rangers and Astros have played in October. Which isn’t too surprising, considering that Texas didn’t even make the playoffs until 1996 — 24 years after moving from Washington to Texas — and that Houston was a member of the National League until 2013. The Astros were in the doldrums during the Rangers’ two World Series runs in 2010 and 2011, while Texas has only made two postseason trips in the years since, losing to the Blue Jays in the Division Series both times. Still, while this will be the first October meeting, it’s far from the first time these rivals’ paths have crossed.
The history of the Lone Star Series
Houston and Texas didn’t play each other at all until 2001, a few years after MLB instituted interleague play. They’ve matched up every season since, and the all-time series is about as close as you can get: The Astros and the Rangers have faced off a total of 266 times over the last 22 years, with Texas winning 134 times and Houston winning 132 times.
The bad blood in this rivalry dates all the way back to before there were even two big-league teams in Texas, when Roy Hofheinz spent years trying to block a club coming to the DFW metroplex. (Legend has it that president Lyndon B. Johnson himself once tried to sway Hofheinz, but he wouldn’t budge.) In the years since, they’ve fought over everything from Nolan Ryan’s legacy — the righty spent eight years in Houston to just five with the Rangers but has a Texas cap on his Hall of Fame plaque, at least in part because the Astros asked him to take a pay cut in the late 1980s — to how long it took Rougned Odor to get in the batter’s box.
But with the teams not even belonging to the same league until a decade ago, true bad blood was slow in building — especially considering that they’ve rarely been competitive at the same time. That’s all changed in recent years, though: Whether it was Texas clinching the West in 2015 and telling Houston “we came and took it” or Alex Bregman tweeting out #BTSOOTR (code for Beat the Stuffing Out of the Rangers) in 2017, this rivalry has been threatening to boil over. And then came 2023, with a benches-clearing brawl back in June and Alex Bregman openly trolling the Rangers after the Astros rallied to win the division on the season’s final day.
Texas and Houston in the 2023 regular season
The Rangers were in control of the American League West division for a majority of the season on the back of a white-hot offense, but a slump in late August and September saw them fall out of first place after holding the top spot for more than 100 days. That opened the door for the Astros, who stole the AL West crown with a sweep of the Diamondbacks on the final weekend of the regular season — winning the head-to-head tiebreaker thanks to taking the season series.
