Photo Courtesy: Dominic Ceraldi
The Texas Rangers cluelessly meandered through the first 95 games of the season. They enter the All-Star Break 45-50 and five games back from 1st in the division. The Houston Astros have surged as predicted and are hot on the tail of the Seattle Mariners. The Rangers spent the entire first half of the season playing like a team who expect to just magically turn it on at some point. They have wasted away almost to the point of no return. They have been so bad that the GM is considering selling major pieces and essentially forfeiting the season. It is standard practice for a GM to either buy or sell at the MLB trade deadline. The idea that the defending champion would even have the potential to be sellers at the deadline is sickening.
The Rangers ineptitude has been driven by the offense. The same names that butchered teams last season are performing poorly. It all starts with catcher Jonah Heim. Heim was the best catcher in the AL last season. He was great at the plate and defensively. His slugging percentage has plummeted to a laughable .359 this season. His backup, Andrew Knizner, is an automatic out. Through 31 games he is batting .154 with an OPS+ of 8. Last season the Rangers had Mitch Garver to hammer the ball on Heim’s off days.
Role players Robbie Grossman and Travis Jankowski were underrated parts of last season’s title run. Both backup outfielders got a tremendous amount of playing time and thrived. Jankowski was hitting .330 for months. Grossman was killing lefties. They were part of an unrelenting assault at the bottom of the order that contributed to massive nightmare innings for the opposition. Leody Taveras was also part of this outfield contingency. He was hitting very well, finding his stroke after years of non-development. These three putting in consistent at bats made the Rangers lineup the deepest in the AL and allowed them to bludgeon teams. Pitchers had no reprieve after facing stars like Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. This season those three outfielders have been awful. Jankowski is hitting .212 with no pop in 64 games. He has only stolen 7 bases. Robbie Grossman has turned in a tepid .219 average. His defense is awful and his speed is average. Most vexingly, Leody Taveras has not built on his progress from last season. The Rangers have given him a plethora of chances to develop and it looked like he turned the corner last season.
The rest of the outfield has been riddled with issues too. Adolis Garcia has not been the same since colliding with Marcus Semien a couple months ago. His average is down to .214 and he leads the team in strikeouts by a large margin. Evan “The Little Savior” Carter has been on the shelf with a back issue for what seems like an eternity. He last played in May. The longstanding nature of Carter’s back injury is deeply concerning. Wyatt Langford, the other insanely hyped prospect, struggled for the first few months of the season until he pulled his hamstring. When he returned he found his stroke, crushing the ball with consistency. Langford lived up to his top prospect billing upon his return. The issue has that left the Rangers with one good outfielder through the first 95 games of the season.
The two cornerstones of the Rangers offense, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, started the season slow as usual. Both of these players got massive contracts a couple years ago and were anointed the carries of the offense. They were excellent last season, finishing second and third in AL MVP voting. They both started insanely slow this season. This was a massive reason why the Rangers have had such a hard time getting anything going consistently. Semien has an OPS+ of 99. 100 is always average, higher is always better. So Semien has been below average. Seager woke up after 50 games and has started to find his stroke, but it is nowhere near his peak form. Semien and Seager spending the first 50 games of the season doing nothing was cute in 2022 when the team had no expectations, but after three years it has become a tired act. A big reason why Semien has never hit .300 is because he wastes the first two months of the season. It has been galling watching players like Semien and Heim underperform and pedantically pretend like they have 200 games to find their peak rank again. Both of those stooges have slept through so many games that the Rangers are hanging over the precipice of having to sell at the deadline.
Nate Lowe missed about a month but has been solid. Utility man Josh Smith changed his batting stance in the offseason. He went from a .200 hitting scrub to a very solid hitter. This was a deeply unsuspected turn and massive windfall for the Rangers. Smith slid in perfectly to third when Josh Jung got hurt. Jung’s injury was severe and he still has not returned. When you see the tepid, lifeless performance of the Rangers offense, one wonders what the point of rushing guys like Jung back is. Why not just let him and Jake rest and rehab until next season? If the offense wants to go through the motions to the point of selling, why not just be super conservative and shut everyone down until next season? Defending World Series champions having to consider selling because the offense never showed up is laughable.
The entire season can be defined by a total lack of understanding of how to actually act like a winner. From the terrible production at the stadium to the tepid play on the field, this has been one of the worst Rangers seasons ever. It is actually way worse than all the forgettable losing seasons they played in the past because this season they actually had expectations.
The pitching has actually been pretty good. Andrew Heaney has made all of his starts. He has been above average despite the 3-10 record. Nathan Eovaldi has been the Rangers best starter. He posted a 2.97 ERA and stops the bleeding when the Rangers are on a losing streak, which has been frequently this season. Memorable baseball seasons are often defined or marked by certain series. Think about last season. There were many memorable series. The opening sweep vs the Phillies which included deGrom’s debut. The disaster in Cincy. The almost sweep against the White Sox with the blown call. The disaster against Houston that preceded Carter’s callup. The last series in Texas against the Mariners, which were essentially playoff games. The Rangers fan who followed the team last year can surely remember at least a few of these.
The reason the Disaster in Cincy series was memorable last season was because it was so abnormal, but the Rangers recovered. It was an odd sweep, but the team moved on from it and avoided embarrassing sweeps until late in the year. There is an ebb and flow to a baseball season. Good teams neither get too high nor too low. Skipper Bruce Bochy preached the importance of being steady last season. Good teams might have embarrassing series, but they are highly abnormal and often make up for by sweeping other teams. Last year the Rangers swept and bludgeoned teams throughout the beginning and middle part of the year. This gave them a little cushion when they started to falter down the stretch. The Rangers have only swept three series this season: A two game set against the struggling Arizona Diamondbacks, and two victories in three game sets over the Royals and Rays. None of those teams are very good. The Rangers have failed to sweep the awful teams and lose the big series against the good teams. The vexing, season-defining instances are the atrocities like the Rockies and Brewers series. The Rangers got swept in these affairs and were utterly uncompetitive. These are not the habits of playoff teams. If the Rangers make a play pretend run at a Wild Card spot late and come up short, it should be the Rockies series that is remembered above all else. Many baseball fans only focus on what happens at the end of a pennant run. The season is a marathon. The games played in May matter just as much as the ones played in September. Well, in the Rangers case the ones in May will actually mean more, because the team will be gutted by August. The Rangers clueless, pathetic start to the 2024 season has hamstrung any potential comeback.
Forget injuries, forget exaggerated bullpen problems, this team has simply not shown up offensively all season. They keep looking at one another like the other will start to pick it up. It never happens. Jankowski is not hitting .330 again. Marcus Semien intends to collect his hits against the weak September callup pitching. Jonah Heim looks either hurt or distracted. Josh Jung got hurt but was replaced by Josh Smith, who is having a career year. The Rangers have gotten nothing out of the outfield, save for one month of Wyatt Langford. The middle infield stars have been coasting. The corner infielders have been fine. What part of this formula will change when Jacob deGrom returns? The pitching is not the issue. The same pieces the Rangers had last season simply are not performing. This makes GM Chris Young’s job very difficult. He has been patient all season, but the Rangers are playing for their future on a game by game basis, considering the implications of the trade deadline.
Michael Lorenzen has been very solid as a starting pitcher for the Rangers this season. 3.52 ERA, fights hard every start. Jon Gray has been good too. 4.01 ERA over 85 IP. In typical Gray fashion, if you omit a couple blow up starts, he has been exceptional. This applies to Andrew Heaney too. Dane Dunning and Cody Bradford were very solid in the rotation before they got hurt. Jack Leiter came up a few times and showed flashes of brilliance but was wild. Mad Max Scherzer has been good when healthy.
Kirby Yates has taken over the closer role and has been exceptional. 0.81 ERA over 33.1 IP. David Robertson has been the second best arm in the bullpen. 2.88 ERA over 40.2 IP. Robertson gets used in the late high leverage innings. Jose Leclerc has been solid after starting slow. Jonathan Hernandez has been decent in middle relief. Jose Urena has been good out of the bullpen. He throws a nice two seamer/slider combo. Josh Sborz has been hurt. Jacob Latz has been decent.
Considering how awful the Rangers pitching has been in the past, it is crazy to see them 5 games below .500 with all this great pitching. Eight good starters? When was the last time the Rangers even had four good starters? The oft maligned bullpen from last season has been buoyed by veteran free agent signings Yates and Robertson. Yates has recaptured his 2019 peak form where he led the league in saves. He has been essentially automatic all season. Robertson is tough as nails and has a big curveball. He is as solid as any veteran reliever. Even with lights out high leverage flamethrower Josh Sborz being hurt for most of the season, the Rangers got enough out of Urena, Latz, Hernandez, and Leclerc to have a nice little bullpen. That is what is so vexing about the Rangers failures this season: Jung and Sborz were very important pieces, but their replacements have performed far beyond expectations. It is the failures of the everyday players on offense that have sunk this team. This makes the solution on how to fix it extremely hard to figure out. The Rangers fan who cites injuries as the reason for the team doing nothing for 95 games simply has not been watching the games. The Rangers have been trotting out lineups full of the same “name” guys as last year. Josh Smith is having a career year many thought impossible from him in lieu of Jung. Other than that, what changed? You cannot even really blame the skipper. The skipper is future Hall of Famer Bruce Bochy. Perhaps Bochy needed to start screaming at his players like Big Dallas Green until they started playing up to their potential. The approach of doing nothing is not working. The Rangers are essentially blinding down out of a poker tournament. That is to say, they are basically just going to lose because they sat there and never started playing.
The Rangers are turning in one of the most disappointing seasons in their entire history. They are a couple more bad games away from having to sell their assets and give up on the season. The All-Star Game is at their sterile ballpark this season. They will send a tepid two representatives this season. Last year there were a plethora of Rangers on the roster. The Rangers will try to right the ship in the second half of the season. The following narratives should be dismissed: Injuries derailed the season, the season will be saved by players returning from injury.
The season will be won or lost on the backs of Seager, Semien, Heim, Lowe, Smith, Langford, Garcia, and Tavares. This season is reminiscent of the 1987 Mets. The ’87 Mets turned in a tepid and uninspired follow-up to their excellent 86 title season. This made ’88 the most important season of that little dynasty. That is the trajectory the Rangers are on now. They blew an entire season taking victory laps and are already pivoting to making the following season the everything year. The AL West is very weak and the bar was set very low for the Rangers this season. In classic Rangers fashion, they have still managed to screw it up.
