Despite Ryan's longevity, his place among the game's greats has been questioned.[5][6] A major complaint against Ryan is his low winning percentage, .526. Statistical comparisons with Walter Johnson, Ferguson Jenkins, Lefty Grove and other Hall of Fame pitchers have been run, showing that Ryan was only slightly better, in winning percentage, than the teams he played on. These studies have shown that despite the common belief that Ryan played mostly for bad teams, his teams (disregarding Ryan's own wins and losses) had a .503 winning percentage over his career (.506, if you disregard the 1966 New York Mets for whom he pitched three innings and who lost 95 games). Thus, Ryan's winning percentage was only .023 better than the teams for which he played. (By comparison, Walter Johnson, whose Washington Senators didn't win a pennant until his 18th season, was .107 better than the teams on which he played.) Other Hall of Fame pitchers studied in this respect fare worse than Johnson, but better than Ryan. Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract shows that only a few Hall of Fame starting pitchers do worse than Ryan in this area. Notably, only two teams (the 1973 New York Mets and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals) have reached the World Series with a winning percentage worse than Ryan's lifetime percentage.
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Obviously you haven't watched the Rangers of late and are going by what you have heard in the media for the last several years. The Rangers bullpen is much more consistent than the Astros, and since the All Star game the defense is at least as good if not better. It was the starting pitching and hitting that has been the biggest problem this year. That said, since the trading deadline the Rangers have had fairly consistent starting pitching but not much hitting. Before the 30 run game against the O's the Rangers had not scored 30 runs in the previous 9 games combined, and lost a lot of of 2-1, 3-2, and even a couple of 1-0 games.
