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On Tuesday, the Rangers squelched a ninth-inning comeback to prevail over the Astros by a score of 4-3 (box score). In doing so, Texas moved 8-0 on the year against their intra-divisional and intra-state rivals. As well, the Astros have now lost 12 straight in Arlington. Check the standings page on Wednesday morning, and you'll find that the Rangers hold a four-game lead over the Mariners and a nine-game lead over those third-place Astros.

All of that brings us to this, which is what Astros reliever Ken Giles said of the Rangers after Monday's game, which was, of course, a Houston loss (via Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle):

"We have more talent than this team does. That's what I believe, and we shouldn't be losing these kind of ballgames."

...

"We're going to go out there tomorrow and just put them to the ground," Giles said. "That's all we're going to do."

Bold words! They're also demonstrably wrong words when it comes to Giles' promise to "put them in the ground" on Tuesday.

Ken Giles isn't quite buying what the Rangers are selling. USATSI

As you would expect, Jeff Banister's club caught wind of Giles' bravado and leveraged it in accordance with competitive sports best practices ...

You'll generally see folks hew to one of two opinions when it comes to Giles' comments. One would be: "Good sir, the Rangers have lorded over you both head-to-head and in the standings to date, and they won the division last year. Please do forestall any wrecking of yourself with a thorough checking of yourself."

Another would be: "Well, what do you expect him to say?"

Neither is wrong. Sure, you can take the route of humility and genuflect before the Rangers, but sometimes that's not something that comes easily to elite professional athletes. Anyway, the posting of the quote is a nice touch, but this is baseball and those kinds of motivational tactics probably don't yield much in the way of on-field success.

For what it's worth, the SportsLine Projection Model would seem to disagree with Mr. Giles' sense of things. The system gives the Rangers a 72.3 percent chance of winning the AL West this season and expects Texas narrowly to outplay Houston over the balance of 2016 (.555 rest-of-season winning percentage for the Rangers versus a .545 mark for Houston).

These same two teams will get together on Wednesday, and, oh, Yu Darvish will be going for the hosts.