PHOENIX — Zac Gallen was noble. He was pugnacious, tenacious and for a while darn near perfect.
At the end of a long year in which no one threw more innings, Gallen found a reserve of greatness that nearly extended the Diamondbacks’ season. But Nathan Eovaldi met greatness with grit.
He had a Van Wyck at rush hour Game 5 — facing unrelenting traffic. Yet he never crashed. Instead, he delivered one clutch pitch after another in World Series Game 5. He did that long enough and well enough so that when Gallen showed his lone glitch within a splendid pitching duel, it was enough — finally — for the Rangers to be the last team standing in a season.
It was a Ranger year. At last, they had the magic that escaped them in 2011 when they were twice one strike away in World Series Game 6 from the franchise’s first title and ended up losing that game and the series in seven games. This year they lost their thundering cleanup hitter, Adolis Garcia, to an oblique injury in Game 3. Then clinched the elusive championship by getting their only run against Gallen on an RBI single from Mitch Garver — from the cleanup spot.
That was the only run the Rangers had until the ninth, when they erupted for four runs against closer Paul Sewald to win 5-0. Thus, the franchise that began in 1962 as the Washington Senators won it all thanks to a spending spree that brought — among others — Eovaldi, World Series MVP Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, whose two-run homer in the ninth provided an exclamation point that the Brewers, Mariners, Padres, Rays and Rockies would be left as the only current teams to never win it all.
The finale of the 119th World Series stood in contrast to the eyesore that was Game 4. It was hard to fathom that Games 4 and 5 were the same sport, much less happened within 24 hours.
Game 4 on Tuesday was a pitching sacrilege. Arizona started a lefty relief specialist, Joe Mantiply, and teetered on having to use a position player to pitch. And somehow the Diamondbacks used fewer pitches (6) than the Rangers (7) and threw fewer pitches (166-152). All in all, it was a 318-pitch, 18-run, 23-hit abomination to the memory of Gibson, Koufax and Morris as the Rangers won 11-7 to go up three games to one.
Gallen did not appear as if he were ready to be a weight lifter. He threw 210 innings in the regular season — second most in the majors — and another 27 ¹/₃ innings this postseason going into Game 5. Gallen was perhaps the NL Cy Young front-runner through Aug. 27 with a 3.11 ERA within a workhorse season. But in the next 12 games, he had a 5.06 ERA and that included a Game 1 in which he surrendered three runs in five innings.
Yet, he was perfect for 4 ²/₃ innings and had a no-hitter through six. Texas was contributing. It put the ball in play on the first pitch six times resulting in six groundouts. Thus, Arizona’s ace had just 72 pitches through six innings.
But Seager dribbled an opposite-field grounder to left to open the seventh and close the no-hitter. Impressive rookie Evan Carter doubled and Garver — who at the end of the 2022 lockout was traded from Minnesota to Texas for Isiah Kiner-Falefa (who was then redirected to the Yankees) — lined an RBI single up the middle.
By that point, Eovaldi had concluded his six innings. The leadoff man got on in the first three. The Diamondbacks had at least one runner in scoring position in the first five innings. But Eovaldi held the Rangers to 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position.
In four postseason clinching starts, Eovaldi is now 4-0 with a 1.08 ERA (three earned runs in 25 innings). His pitching helped the Rangers improve to a staggering 11-0 on the road in this postseason.
In the end, the Diamondbacks after such an uplifting and surprising run began to look like the 84-win team from the regular season. They finished 1-for-15 with runners on base in the clincher and had usually reliable center fielder Alek Thomas make a key ninth-inning error to open up the game and lost all three games at Chase Field.
And after so many years of frustration — and often humiliation from the nation’s capital to the Lone Star State — it ended for Texas with Josh Sborz striking out Ketel Marte looking. The Rangers stormed the field. A season ended. And for the first time in their six-plus decade history, the Rangers were the ones piling upon each other in championship jubilation.