Oftentimes, the baseball season can be seen as an hourglass. Early in the year with a struggling team and high expectations, you can always look to the sand in the hourglass as justification for a tough start… after all baseball has 162 games for a reason.

However, at this point in the season, you can’t just look at the hourglass to justify your team’s struggles and the Texas Rangers can attest to that.

The frustrations of both the small and big pictures came to fruition on Wednesday as the Rangers dropped the rubber match with the Astros by a score of 6-4.

With the loss, Texas dropped the Silver Boot series for the eighth year in a row.

“You move on, is what I think,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said after the game. “I keep saying that [but] that’s all you can do, it was a tight series. The bats did come to life, trying to get back in it but that’s always tough when you lose the series to the team you’re chasing but it was a tight ballgame”.

The Rangers were able to get the tying and go-ahead runs to the plate multiple times in the game but just couldn’t get the big hit when they needed it. As a team, Texas was just 3-12 with runners in scoring position and left nine men on base.

In the sixth inning, the Rangers had their biggest signs of life offensively as Marcus Semien led off the inning with a home run, and two batters later Nathaniel Lowe came through with an RBI triple. Leody Taveras came off the bench and scored Lowe with a sac fly to cap of an inning in which Texas scored three of their four runs.

A Jonah Heim RBI single in the 8th was the only other run the Rangers managed to score in this one.

“As far as pressing, I don’t know why they’re pressing. They’ve been through this so I don’t think that’s the case” Bochy added. “I think it’s a couple of things, we’re seeing good pitching and you battle to try and get some runs on the board and we saw good pitching in this series”.

On the pitching side of things for the Rangers, it was the inability to finish innings that caused Texas much of their troubles.

In the sixth inning, Jose Leclerc surrendered three straight two-out hits to give up two of his three runs and in the 8th, Brock Burke gave up a huge two-out single to Alex Bregman to help Houston put this one away.

A loss like this often makes fans and media alike flash towards the bigger picture and that is not a pretty one for the Rangers right now.

With today’s loss, Texas now sits at just 54-61 with 47 games to play. The Rangers are now 5.5 games back of both Seattle and Houston who sit tied atop the AL West standings for now.

However, no matter how murky the big picture looks now, Bruce Bochy isn’t ready to call it quits just yet.

“We still gotta look it [the fact] that we got games left, we still have a lot of August left and we have September, we gotta find a way to get on a roll. We’ve been saying that but it’s gonna happen. How that’s gonna happen is you pitch a little bit and swing the bats a little bit better. This team has it in them, I still believe that you just have to keep believing too”.