The Texas Rangers rank dead last in runs scored per game. Exceptional pitching has kept the team afloat so far this season. Tyler Mahle has been the best starter in baseball. Jacob deGrom has been elite as usual. Nathan Eovaldi has been great too. Jack Leiter appears to have finally turned the corner. The Rangers have even gotten good innings out of notoriously inept Patrick Corbin. The bullpen has been very sharp too. Robert Garcia has been excellent. Chris Martin, Hoby Milner, and Shawn Armstrong have been very consistent too. The fielding has been good. The Rangers rank top five in most advanced fielding metrics. The offense has been grotesquely inept.
The Texas Rangers offense is at risk of destroying the season in the month of April. They rank dead last in runs scored per game. It is truly unbelievable how bad they are. They rank around league average in homers and steals. The “name” guys still fill the lineup. A handful of players playing wretched, selfish baseball is dragging this team down.
Joc Pederson managed to get his batting average to triple digits in the last two series. The fact that he was the only offensive piece brought in during the offseason makes his historical ineptitude more grating. Pederson’s start was so grotesque that judging his subsequent games is difficult. Is 1-4 to be treated like some big accomplishment? Is the walk in an 0-3 performance to be pedantically pointed out because it is Joc? Pederson is so insanely lost at the plate that he makes covering it difficult.
Jake Burger was brought into play at first base. He has made a fool of himself on a nightly basis. He is no Nate Lowe. It is sort of amusing to say that as though Nate left big shoes to fill. He was above average at most baseball skills and an amiable person. You would think Nate Lowe was Lou Gehrig the way his replacement seems utterly unable to come close to him. Burger was merely asked to be average. He has been aggressively bad, like the movie The Lighthouse.
Marcus Semien has been mailing it in for the first two months of the season, as expected. His .150 batting average is as gross as it is predictable. Semien, guaranteed long-term deal in hand, has made no effort at all to solve the problem of his “slow starts.” Semien is a pathetic and lazy incompetent.
Leody Taveras has regressed back to his real level, as expected. 66 OPS+. 100 is average. Higher is better. Taveras is at least bunting and stealing a bit more.
Adolis Garcia has regressed to the wildly undisciplined hitter he was when he joined the Rangers initially. In the World Series Title season of 2023 he was very disciplined. He cut down on his chase rate. His at bats this season are very low quality. He often flails cartoonishly at breaking pitches well out of the zone. He still has power and value, but his game is deeply flawed. He is becoming a player like Javy Baez in many ways.
That is the crux of why the Rangers are imploding out the gates of their most important season in team history. Those players have been utterly awful. They have not just been bad, but bad in a malignant and odious way. Negatively contributing to such a talented lineup in such a puissant manner is truly staggering. Baseball history is rife with catchers and shortstops that never hit. In the NL the pitcher hit, until recently. Yet even with most teams rolling out two automatic outs like that in their lineup, it never cratered an offense like this.
Injuries have less and little to do with the Rangers ineptitude. Josh Jung and Wyatt Langford have taken turns on the IL. Corey Seager has been hurt as usual. Evan Carter is still figuring out his back issues in AAA. Seager, Langford, and Jung have all played most of the games in this disgusting season. Just like last season, the casual fan can be led astray into thinking the ineptitude can be dismissed with injuries. It cannot.
Squandering this level of talent is backwards and wrong. The Rangers employ a deeply flawed hitting approach. They chase constantly and are impatient. When they won the World Series, the offense was relentless with their “next man up” approach. This season is the total opposite, to a comedic extent. It looks as though each Ranger is always pressing and trying to do too much with runners on. Garcia especially. Pederson and Semien look like they do not care. Semien is essentially solo losing some of these games, especially when one considers the size of his contract.
The Rangers look uncoordinated and lost. Every batter except for Wyatt Langford, Corey Seager, Josh Smith, and Josh Jung are playing too aggressive. The catchers are decent. The Rangers are rapidly careening down a path of embarrassment and the hitters seem to be racing towards the abyss.
Bruce Bochy needs to have a talk with hitting coach Justin Viele. Viele is another 2-0 loss away from being canned. The batters do not simply look like they are slumping. They look like they are employing an incorrect approach. The offense is terminally ill. The Rangers cannot wait for another lifeless performance in the Jokeland A’s AAA bandbox. How many times can a team be shutout, look utterly lost against bad pitching, and not adjust? Clearly there is something deeply wrong with the hitting side of the coaching staff. Bochy is getting the most out of his starters and bullpen. The fact that the offense scores fewer runs per game than teams like Miami and Colorado is a joke. Those two teams are actively tanking and are robbing their fans. The Rangers are trying to win and barely putting up 3 runs a game.
This is not another predictably awful Rangers season to be dismissively mocked. This season was very important for the history of the team and the 2023 title. It has begun in an unfathomably awful way. The team has been way, way worse than their record indicates. They have been getting some of the best pitching in baseball. This will eventually regress a bit. The bullpen is not that good, Tyler Mahle is not Bob Gibson, and Kumar Rocker looks hopeless. This team is in stunning freefall, it is just not that obvious because they get an excellent pitching performance every other night.
Nathan Eovaldi managed to solo carry the team to a win in the weekend series against the Giants. The other two games were uncompetitive slogs. Both of the games were slow torture masquerading as pitchers duels. The names might have been big, but the Rangers make even the most inept pitcher look great these days. There is a special sense the Rangers offense gives you this season. The sense is sort of like depression or disgust. The Sunday game was a perfect representation of this season and everything that is wrong with the team. After the Giants tied the game at 2-2 in the 4th you knew the Rangers would not only fail to answer, but look uninterested while doing so. It is one thing to be dominated by an ace pitcher, quite another to be blistered and strafed by no-namers ad nauseum. It felt like the Rangers were never going to score. The game felt over at 2-2. Sure enough, the Rangers played pretend for one tepid inning after another until committing an atrocity in the 9th inning.
“Closer” Luke Jackson fielded a dribbler a few feet away from the mound. He threw the ball down the first base line. Adolis Garcia had not bothered to move and backup the play. Much like Yasiel Puig, the ultra flashy style grows thin quickly if the fundamentals are not executed. Jake Burger uncorked an insipid, nonsensical throw to third after waddling over to retrieve the ball. The throw sailed past the third baseman Josh Smith and in between two goofballs named Dustin Harris (LF) and Luke Jackson (Comedy Pitcher.) The Giants runner sprinted home to complete the embarrassment of the Rangers.
The grotesque, embarrassing play defines the season in many ways. Guys on the offensive end mentally checked out, thinking about themselves and yet another win is given away. How are you going to end a game on a ball hit seven feet where a grand total of zero players back the ball up with any enthusiasm? Why did the team sleepwalk through all of 2024? What the hell is going on in 2025? Why do all the players look utterly disinterested? Half the lineup looks as though the only thing they are playing for is the RBI and HR.
The level of play the Rangers display is staggeringly low. This team should win the division on paper. They are playing listlessly. They are playing selfishly and stupidly. How long can you call swinging at obvious 2 strike breaking balls a foot off the plate “pressing?” At what point are Marcus Semien and Adolis Garcia dismissed as hilariously flawed players, and not just All-Stars “starting slow?”
The Rangers are mired in an offensive cesspool. The rot is too deep to see. Obscured by beautiful pitching, the Rangers are a broken team lucky to be a mere game back from the division lead. The division lead is only worth talking about as a relative reference point. Make no mistake, this team just lost a series to the A’s for a reason. The Rangers need to hire a new hitting coach immediately. Perhaps they should seek out an established power hitting star. There are a plethora of “name” guys with pop, like Jason Giambi, on the market. The idea that Justin Viele is going to call the offensive strats for the most important season in Rangers history is laughable. Who the hell is this guy and what has he done to deserve this job? The Rangers are suffering in a humiliating and irreversible way. There are options out there that can get the offensive weapons back to their peak power levels. These options need to be aggressively explored NOW. Not in July when the season is over.
“Today. NOW!” – Frank Sobotka
Bruce Bochy has the pitching humming. He understands the mind of the pitcher and gets the most out of his pitchers. His batting lineups are subpar at best. The batting strategy itself, which is presumably not an area Bochy spearheads, is nothing short of horrific. The Rangers are getting the least out of their offense talent at the moment. The insane drop off in the quality of at bats is stunning. Half of the lineup is erratically flailing at every pitch.
The Rangers are in dire straits. Their offense is a clownshow. A mere six more weeks of kicking the can down the road could result in a fracturing of the entire core after a spectacularly failed season. If the offense is not addressed it will alter Rangers history forever. Although seemingly hyperbolic, these coming weeks are some of the most important in Rangers history. You cannot take a young talented core, pay top end vets big deals, and fritter away year after year pedantically making obvious errors. That is a perfect description of why the Dak Prescott era has been such a JOKE. If Dak could not even come CLOSE to getting it done on a rookie contract with one of the best offensive lines in NFL history, how are they going to win with a bad line while he takes up a third of the cap? The idea makes no sense, even on a surface level.
Sports teams have defined, short windows to win. These brief windows are often derailed or cut short due to injury. So in reality, oftentimes a team has one or two real chances at a title. After that, free agents leave or big players exit their prime. The Rangers kicked the can for an entire season last year. This was an incredibly important “prove it” year for them. The only thing they have proven is something is seriously wrong with the coaching staff.
Upcoming Schedule – All Times Central
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