Rangers can't afford to settle for wild card

At the risk of appearing ungrateful for how far they’ve come this season, it seems as long as the Rangers keep winning anyway, they might as well go all out. Don’t settle for a wild card, I mean.

Because it would be a shame to get this tantalizingly close — two games back of the Astros with seven to play against the West leaders — and not close the deal.

The reason I bring this up is because as welcome as a wild card would be for the Rangers, they’re better than you think they are. And history says not so fast on wild cards.

Maybe you remember 2012, which ended like a ride on a plastic toboggan down Mount McKinley or Denali or whatever it’s called these days. The Rangers lost nine of their last 13 games, including a season-ending sweep by Oakland. All their 93 wins earned them was a wildcard game against Baltimore. Still, no sweat, right? Joe “Rocket Man” Saunders vs. Yu Darvish? Goodell had better odds against Brady.

Only Saunders somehow out-dueled Darvish, and the Rangers’ unraveling continued in earnest.

Of course, the 2012 Rangers and the current variety came at September from difffffffffffferent directions. The ’12 bunch went in as the two-time defending AL champions. This club came straight out of a screenwriter’s fevered imagination.

Rookie manager Jeffff Banister often sounds like the son of a high school football coach that he is when describing his team. He uses words like grit, scratch and claw for a clubhouse that keeps reinventing itself on the fly.

Calls The Globe “our house.” Doesn’t mind a dust-up. Baseball isn’t football, but the rhetoric plays well here. Listening to Banister, I can envision him standing tall and imposing in the middle of the clubhouse, firin’ up the boys, and then Jim Harbaugh breaks up the reverie like the old Visa commercial.

“What the heck is going on in here?”

For all he’s done keeping this team facing forward, Banister has positioned himself as a favorite for Manager of the Year. He’s a mix of oldschool and new numbers. Texas wouldn’t be here without his leadership.

But whatever the Rangers were in the fifirst half, they’re no longer a plucky pack of scufflers, either.

This is a different roster from the one that seesawed through April, May and June. Any success the fifirst- half Rangers had was buoyed by cameos from the likes of Chi Chi Gonzalez, Joey Gallo, Wandy Rodriguez and, to some extent, even Nick Martinez.

The main reasons for their resurgence lately: the addition of bonafide talent through shrewd deals by Jon Daniels and the fact that some of these guys are finally playing up to their pedigrees.

For every Chris Gimenez — who’d averaged a home run a year his fifirst six big league seasons and currently wallops at a Ruthian 9.8 per at-bat — there’s an Elvis Andrus fifinally living up to his contract. Shin-Soo Choo, too.

Delino DeShields has been a revelation in center, an incredible fifind as a Rule 5 pickup.

Adrian Beltre, heart and soul of this club, has proven in the second half that there’s no hurry on Gallo after all. The bench is better than either of the World Series teams. Mitch Moreland has at long last made his breakthrough, and Prince Fielder is a contender for AL Comeback Player of the Year.

Meanwhile, a pitching staffff devastated by the loss of Darvish has been replenished with Cole Hamels, a healthy Derek Holland and Martin Perez and power arms for the bullpen.

Going into Anaheim for a three-game series this weekend promises to be a little difffffffffffferent experience from the fifive -alarm disaster in Arlington just before the All-Star break, when the Angels swept the Rangers by a combined score of 33- 8.

But getting back to my original point, which, granted, seems like last month, here’s why this new-and-improved team must put pedal to metal:

Since the All-Star break, when reinforcements began arriving in force, the Rangers are 9-41 in the 14 series, a postseason rate at that. But even in the midst of such success, they haven’t exactly been fast starters.

Eight of those 14 series started with a loss, including three of the last four.

I couldn’t tell you what this means, other than it doesn’t seem to bode well in a one- game playoffff.

Maybe it’s just a microcosm of what this club has been all year, a little slow to burn. All the more reason to keep the fifires going.