Rangers are pulled together from many directions

This is a disparate group — one from Japan, one from drug rehab, one traded to his third team in a year — bonded through a very strange chemistry into the American League champions.

Through a season of bankruptcy and spring-training turmoil, the Texas Rangers grew together. And grew up.

And with Friday’s 6-1 victory over the New York Yankees, they changed the culture of a football town that for the first time will have a taste of the World Series.

So where did it all start for this team pieced together by General Manager Jon Daniels and President Nolan Ryan?

It was a spring day in Surprise, Ariz., when Manager Ron Washington offered his resignation after testing positive for cocaine, when his players, 30 of them, showed their support in front of Daniels and Ryan.

“Jon Daniels and I did a lot of soul searching on that,” said Ryan, the Hall of Fame pitcher, “and we just felt that we had given a lot of other people in our organization a second chance and we certainly felt like Ron was deserving of that.

“And we felt that Ron as a manager was maturing and developing as a manager, and we just felt like it was the right thing to do, and that we should stand behind him. Then, when that became public this spring, the players stood behind him and I think it united them. … It brought the club even closer together.”

Washington said the players developed a cause and that “was to protect their skipper” after Washington spoke to them about his problem.

“I didn’t want their sympathy,” he said. “I just want their heart, and they gave me their heart because they know they had mine.”

Josh Hamilton, the AL Championship Series most valuable player who went through drug rehabilitation, said of Washington: “An unbelievable manager. A great players’ manager. A guy of great integrity.”

The MVP could just as easily have been Colby Lewis, who rehabbed his career in Japan before winning two of the six games in the series. Or ace Cliff Lee, obtained from the Seattle Mariners in a July trade.

All have bought into Washington’s message, one he repeats over and over: “Just play baseball.” His directive is to approach the game the same way every day.

“In my baseball life, that’s the attitude I’ve always had and that’s the attitude I portray around my players,” he said. “That’s how I get them to buy in, because when they look at me, I’m the same every day. I figure I can make a difference every day by the way I go about my business. So that’s the way they go about their business.

“And right now, we are making a difference.”

dvandyck@tribune.com