You’ve heard the old one about Buck Showalter, the one that makes him a Moses-like figure who can build a team up but never gets to take them into the Promised Land? Showalter managed the Yankees and got fired, and then Joe Torre took the team into the end zone for the World Series win. Showalter literally helped create the Diamondbacks franchise, saw the team go 100–62 in its second season, but was booted when the team regressed. Bob Brenly, a replacement-level manager if there ever was one, took his job — and got Showalter’s ring.

Showalter managed the Rangers between 2003 and 2006, never finishing higher than third place. Ron Washington now skippers the team, but there is zero chance that he’ll be following Torre and Brenly into the winner’s circle. As the Yankees have shown by relentlessly pounding them, the Rangers are just that bad.

The Yankees owe the Rangers a debt of gratitude. New York was a sick team when they first met the Rangers in Texas last week and the Rangers helped them get well. Now, they’re doing it again after two troubling losses in four games to a miserable Seattle Mariners team, the first a 15–11 drubbing that punched Kei Igawa’s ticket to Tampa, the second a 3–2 loss in which Kyle Farnsworth and Mariano Rivera tossed away Matt De-Salvo’s successful major league debut. In the first game of the threegame set the Yankees romped 8–2. In the second, still ongoing at press-time, the Yankees led Texas 6–2 in the fifth.

The Yankees have had special luck against the Rangers over the years, rarely losing to them in recent seasons and knocking them out of the playoffs in 1996, 1998, and 1999, but more than fortuitous bounces of the ball the Yankees have been run at a high level and the Rangers have not. It’s odd how some teams can develop a sore spot and be unable to fill it for years. The Yankees couldn’t figure out what to do with the shortstop position between Bucky Dent and Derek Jeter; for the first 20 years or so of their existence, the Mets couldn’t keep a man on third base, and the White Sox and the Cubs also had famous third-base droughts.

The Rangers’ problem, and it has been the case almost continually since the former Washington Senators II franchise relocated to Texas, is that the team cannot develop pitching. The winningest homegrown pitcher in franchise history was Kenny Rogers, who has gone 133–96 with a 4.16 ERA in three stints with the club. The second most successful starter was the incurably wild Bobby Witt, who served two separate terms with the club, going 104–104 with a 4.85 ERA. The best pitcher ever developed by the club, Kevin Brown, didn’t really take off until he left town, going 78–64 with a 3.81 ERA as a Ranger. After, his ERA was 2.93 in nearly 2,000 innings.

Witt, Brown, and Rogers actually overlapped in the majors, between 1989 and 1992, and the club posted winning records in its first three seasons together, when the staff also included veteran warhorses Charlie Hough and Nolan Ryan. Rogers, though, was in the bullpen until 1993, so those staffs were always a little short. With Witt pitching poorly except in 1990, and the fifth spot in the rotation held down by journeymen such as Mike Jeffcoat, Jamie Moyer (who would blossom late in his professional life but was inconsistent in his 20s), a superannuated Dennis Ray “Oil Can” Boyd, and prospects who didn’t develop such as Brian Bohanon and Roger Pavlik — the team couldn’t dominate.

What was true 15 years ago is true now, except that no one on the current team is as good as Brown, Rogers, Witt, Hough, or Ryan. That brief flowering was one of two islands in the franchise’s history, not unlike an earlier period when the Rangers had pitchers such as Fergie Jenkins, Bert Blyleven, Doyle Alexander, and Gaylord Perry but failed to win because they couldn’t hit.

That was 30 years ago, and little has changed. That earlier group of pitchers went on their way, just as Brown, Rogers, and Witt did. The names of those running the Rangers have changed repeatedly. Dan O’Brien and Eddie Robinson ran the team in the 1970s; Tom Grieve was at the helm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Jon Daniels is the general manager today. Ownership has changed hands a number of times: Since 1978 there have been 12 managers and innumerable pitching coaches, and yet the Rangers’ problem is the same as it has always been.

A good rule of thumb is that when there’s no reason for a phenomenon to persist it will soon stop. The Rangers’ inability to stock a pitching staff has lasted for so long it defies reason.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.comand is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.’