Rangers-Astros beef timeline: A look back at the Lone Star Series’ most heated moments

The beef is back.

When the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros squared off in a heated seven-game American League Championship Series last fall, the still relatively new rivalry between the two franchises reached its peak.

How did what was once a casual rivalry between two teams that used to play in a few meaningless interleague games per season turn into one of the spiciest showdowns in the big leagues?

Here’s a look at the timeline of Rangers-Astros heated moments:

Early 2010s Rangers dominance

Let’s start with the last time the Rangers were here, the Championship Series round of the MLB playoffs, in 2011. The Rangers and Astros still played in different leagues, and Houston was starting what would become one of the most efficient tank-jobs the MLB had ever seen.

By 2011 the Rangers had won five “Silver Boots” in a row, awarded to the winner of the season series between the two franchises.

So, suffice it to say, the Astros were thankful they didn’t yet have to play the Rangers 19 times per season. That’d soon change.

2013: Astros head West

In 2013 the Astros migrate leagues and join the Rangers in the AL West. With the different trajectories the two franchises are on at this point, it was always going to be a slowly simmering “rivalry,” at first based purely on geography.

Texas won 17 of the 19 division games played against Houston the first year the teams were AL West bunkmates, the seventh straight year the Rangers won the season series.

2014: Worm starts to turn

The Rangers’ Silver streak would end at seven. Texas’ 2014 down year was the anomaly during its 2010-2016 success, and that included losing the season series 11-8 to the lowly Houston Astros for the first time since 2006.

But, you know, they don’t really look all that lowly anymore. The Astros win 19 more games in 2014 than the year prior, from 51 victories to 70, and some little fella named Jose Altuve makes his first All-Star appearance amid a 225-hit season. Looks like he could be a problem down the road...

2015: ‘We seem to have a rivalry’

Things start to crank up by the mid-2010s. These teams have played an awful lot of games against each other the past three seasons.

It comes to a head during a game in mid-July in Houston, an incident that led to a benches-clearing scuffle on a day when the teams were clad in throwback retro uniforms. It made for an aesthetically-pleasing fracas, if nothing else.

It began when Astros catcher Hank Conger presumably requested that Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor kindly step into the batters box, post-haste. Odor — unsurprisingly, perhaps — didn’t exactly back down to Conger, and the result was the two players going face-to-face at home plate.

The benches emptied, eventually leading to the teams’ managers, Jeff Banister and A.J. Hinch, going face-to-face as well, the two having to be restrained from each other by umpires and by their own players. Ultimately, no punches were thrown and nobody was ejected.

The drama didn’t stop there, though. Later in the season, with both teams in contention, Texas swept a crucial four-game series that lifted them from 1.5 games behind first-place Houston into a 2.5-game division lead. They’d go on to clinch the AL West, their third division title in five seasons, and mock Houston’s “Come and Take It” mantra that season with their own “Came and Took It” retort.

The Astros instead make the Wild Card and defeat the Yankees, while the Rangers meet the Blue Jays in the ALDS. Both Texas and Houston won two games in their respective ALDS’s, and were both a victory away from meeting in the ALCS for the first time. Instead, both lose Game 5 to put an end to the busiest Silver Boot season yet.

2016: The Carlos Gomez saga

Carlos Gomez was a lightning bolt in the shape of an MLB outfielder, and unsurprisingly his mid-2016 swap from the Astros to the Rangers did nothing but stoke the fire of the budding rivalry.

Houston acquired Gomez at the 2015 deadline and the Astros, for whatever reason, weren’t a fit. Gomez hit just .210/.272/.322 through 85 games in 2016, and the Astros DFA’d him in August after the trade deadline. The Rangers must have seen something in Gomez and picked him up as a free agent, and Gomez would promptly turn it around — he went deep in his first plate appearance as a Ranger — and hit .284/.362/.543 with eight homers and 24 RBIs in 33 games down the stretch of the season. Texas would go on to win its second straight AL West title.

The Gomez defect wasn’t appreciated too highly by Astros fans. They were so soured on Gomez, in fact, that they threw a lime at him in the final Rangers-Astros game of the season.

2017: It’s official.

2017 can be seen as the year when, as all great rivalries do eventually, it got pretty personal.

First: A sure-fire way to crank up the vitriol from the Rangers side of things is to throw at all-time franchise favorite Mike Napoli.

That ball came from Astros pitcher Lance McCullers, who quickly became a main player in the intensifying Silver Boot series. McCullers was responding to a pair of plunked Astros hitters by firing one behind Napoli, leading to the benches clearing, with the aforementioned Gomez, Odor, and Shin-Soo Choo heavily involved as well. But that was really only the start of the 2017 drama.

There were little things: Jeff Banister threw out a playful barb during a radio interview saying “All I know is they get to put Houston on their chest, we get to put Texas on ours.”

McCullers, as he is wont to do, fired back: “It’s because nobody knows what Arlington is.”

But there were some things that went deeper too as the Rangers-Astros relationship took on some fractures that still haven’t healed.

Hurricane Harvey

In late August of 2017, the Gulf Shore was devastated by Category 4 storm Hurricane Harvey, causing major flooding throughout the city of Houston. With home ballpark Minute Maid Park unplayable, the Astros offered up the Rangers a home-series swap: They’ll play the upcoming series against each other in Arlington rather than Houston, then the late-September series in Houston rather than Arlington, presumably when Minute Maid doesn’t require a kayak to get into.

The Rangers declined the offer, and the teams instead played the late-August series at Tropicana Field in Florida, essentially costing the Astros three home games.

McCullers had more to say on this as well.

The state of Texas’ first World Series

The pendulum had fully swung Houston’s way by the end of the messy 2017 season, with the Astros finishing 23 games better than the Rangers and winning their first-ever AL West championship.

They’d go on to win the World Series, a bitter pill for Rangers fans after the “one strike away” of 2011. Instead, it was Houston — tanking, 50-wins-for-three-straight-seasons Houston — winning the state of Texas’ first World Series.

That it was all wrapped up in a controversial cheating scandal couldn’t have made that pill easier to swallow.

2018-22: Houston takeover

The series got just a couple of seasons where both teams were good before things went lopsided once again. The Astros have won the West five more times since their first in 2017, only the odd COVID-impacted 2020 season breaking their streak.

Houston’s also won the season series with Texas in every season since 2017, including winning the 2023 season series nine games to four. That ended up weighing heavily: The Rangers and Astros wound up tied in 2023, and the Astros won the AL West by way of tiebreaker.

Overall, the Rangers have a slight edge in the all-time record between the two teams, leading 136-132.

2023: Rivalry re-boot

Finally, the Lone Star Series heats up again. After alternating periods in which the teams simply bullied each other, the Rangers from 2007-13 and the Astros from 2017-2022, the teams are both good again.

The 2023 version of the rivalry had its own bench-clearing, with Marcus Semien and Framber Valdez as the main players this time. But the rivalry reached its apex in the postseason.

The Rangers and Astros duked it out in the ALCS last year in a series that lasted seven games. The most heated moment came in Game 5.

Astros pitcher Bryan Abreu hit the Rangers’ Adolis García with a pitch in the eighth inning, two innings after he hit a go-ahead home run. García took issue after taking the hit on his upper left arm, getting into the face of catcher Martín Maldonado. Benches cleared soon after.

The Astros went on to win that game, but García got his revenge. He hit a grand slam late in Game 6 to force a Game 7, where he led the Rangers to a series-clinching win. García was named the ALCS MVP.

The Rangers went on to beat the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series, but they still didn’t forget about the Astros.

During the championship parade in November, Corey Seager took another jab at the Astros.

“I’ve just got one thing to say. Everyone was wondering what would happen if the Rangers didn’t win the World Series,” Seager said. “I guess we’ll never know.”

Seager was mocking the Astros’ celebration for winning the AL West division championship at the end of the regular season. During Houston’s celebration, Astros third baseman Alex Bregman trolled the Rangers in a clip that went viral.

Twitter: @coylio33

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