Photo Courtesy: Michael Kolch
The 2025 Texas Rangers were stacked with talent and tasked with erasing the forgettable World Series Hangover throwaway 2024 season. They managed to disappoint in agonizing ways never seen before by Rangers fans. The Rangers have always been an organization that lacked pitching. Going back to their inception in 1972, through the middling 80’s, the 90’s years that included 3 playoff runs from teams that were all offense… The 2000’s brought three of the worst ERA seasons in baseball history. Even in the 2010 and 2011 glory years the team lacked truly great pitching depth. The much heralded Cole Hamels/Yu Darvish duo were obliterated in the 2016 ALDS by Josh Donaldson. Even when the Rangers won it all in 2023 they did it without Jacob deGrom. Nathan Eovaldi and Jordan Montgomery stood tall, but the pitching situation was ultimately a Bruce Bochy masterclass as opposed to riding an ace. That team’s bullpen was perceived as laughably bad going into the playoffs. Bochy showed off what he was best at: managing the pitchers. Bochy did this again in the 2025 season. That was about all he did right this year.
The 2025 Texas Rangers had the best ERA in baseball. This is the only time in team history they have ever achieved this. They also led the league in DRS, (defensive runs saved) which is the most useful and accurate advanced stat when assessing defense. Imagine telling a Rangers fan of yesteryear the team would have the best pitching and defense in the league… and finish .500. It is almost unfathomable. The Rangers offense waded listlessly through the entire season. They employed a selfish approach. In the 2023 World Series season, the hitters were selfless and employed a “next man up” approach. The 2025 failure cannot be dismissed by “injuries” or any other pedantic excuse. This is an odious, malignant failure that will stand out in team history as one of the most brutal, impactful, and important seasons in team history.
Postmortem: The Texas Rangers brought in two main players during the offseason preceding the 2025 atrocity. Jake Burger was brought in to play first. Incumbent first baseman Nate Lowe was shipped out to save money. Joc Pederson was brought in for thump in the lineup. He was supposed to provide pop from the left side and consistently DH. Both of these players were a TOTAL TRAINWRECK and a major reason why the Rangers could never get anything going. They were both insane black holes in the lineup for the first few months of the season before getting hurt and missing the middle part of the year. Both were consistent negatives in the lineup on a daily basis. Pederson was particularly awful. He offered nothing but hitting ability as a player and was putrid. These two players brought the team down in a corrosive way. They woke up a bit after the team was dead and buried in September, so their end of season stats are not as wretched as their play was. Pederson and Burger being the only two new players brought in as free agents says a lot about why this team was so flawed.
Utility man Zeke Duran was awful all season. He hit over .300 for much of the 2023 season. He was a useless player for all of 2025. He is sort of a positionless, hitting-focused player. Sort of like what the Rangers pretended Nick Solak was. When he failed to hit at all this season it gave Bochy few choices. Leody Taveras posted 3 WAR the year the Rangers won it all. He has been so awful for the last two seasons the Rangers cut him halfway through the year. Adolis Garcia predicted he would hit 50 homers before the season began. He finished with less than half of that: 19. Garcia is the perfect example of why the 2023 Rangers were special and why the subsequent two seasons were so wretched. Garcia played selflessly and patiently in 2023. He cut his strikeouts WAY down and walked more. He got runners over and took pitches. The next two years he reverted back to the hilariously flawed player that strikes out almost 200 times a season. He still played killer defense though.
Lazy Marcus Semien began the season unprepared to play, as usual. Marcus has a habit of using the first couple months of the season to get into “playing shape.” Marcus coasting through the first two months of the season ran concurrently with Jake Burger and Joc Pederson having a race to the bottom. Having these three run it down relentlessly day after day for the first two months of the season was the main reason the Rangers could never really get anything going.
Evan Carter began and ended the season on the IL. The Little Savior was solid when healthy. He plays good defense and is fast. He will be the cornerstone of the Rangers outfield along with Wyatt Langford. Langford had a great season despite missing about a month in the middle of the season. He hit for power and stole bases. He had 22 homers and steals. With players like Josh Naylor and Juan Soto stealing over 30 bags, one has to imagine Langford could swipe 40+ once he starts abusing the new stealing/pickoff rules like Soto and Naylor. Soto and Naylor are both slow sluggers.
Josh Smith was a solid player who played many positions. He was asked to do too much and ridden into the ground down the stretch. He really fell off in the second half and he was clearly running on fumes. The same could be said for Jonah Heim. Heim began the year doing well and splitting time with Kyle Higashioka. Both were playing pretty well until Higgy got hurt. Jonah was driven into the ground during the injury and never regained his form. His OPS+ of 77 is the lowest on the team that featured some all-time stinker seasons. Josh Jung had a frustrating 131 games played. He was a tick above average. He has the potential to be a 5 WAR player. He has had trouble finding his rhythm due to injuries. Corey Seager led the team in WAR with 6.1 He is the Rangers highest paid player. He only played 102 games this year. He continues to struggle with injuries. He is the Rangers hard carry on offense. The lineup does not look or feel the same without him. Ultimately the Rangers managed to be less than the sum of their parts as an offense. They allowed selfish approaches to define the season.
The pitching: The Rangers posted the best ERA in baseball, by a wide margin. 3.47. Next best was the Red Sox at 3.70. The offense really was a joke! Jacob deGrom turned in a top end season. The handsome Southern warrior had a sub 3.00 ERA and made 30 starts. He experimented with throwing more curveballs early in the year, but eventually reverted to his heater/slider mix. Nathan Eovaldi was truly brilliant this season. He solo won the Rangers multiple games before going down with an injury after the Rangers let him down for the 20th time that season. Eovaldi pitched to a 1.73 ERA over 130 innings! He was snubbed from the All-Star Game because the Rangers offense was such a joke. That is how awful and skewed this wretched season was. Tyler Mahle started red hot. He turned in 16 great starts before going down with a sore arm. Mahle was especially electric in April.
Former top pitching prospect and number #2 overall pick Jack Leiter made the leap this season. He found his command and became a true MLB starter. 151.2 IP, 3.86 ERA. He started red hot and was derailed by a blister. He will be an important piece for the Rangers going forward. Patrick Corbin was brought in to eat innings. He did just that and posted a respectable 4.40 ERA. Kumar Rocker was pretty bad and still needs time to develop. He had his moments, but is not ready to consistently start at the MLB level.
The Rangers traded for Merrill Kelly. He was good as well. The bullpen, led by Cole Winn, was used masterfully by Bochy. They were asked to defend 1-0 and 2-0 leads constantly. They were tasked with the impossible and did reasonably well. Bochy pulled the right strings, it’s just impossible to win every game 1-0.
The Rangers entered the season with an incredible roster. The roster was a proven World Series winner. The offense spent the entire season asleep at the wheel. Bruce Bochy tepidly bobbed his head and mumbled the same platitudes as the Titanic was sinking around him. Bochy’s “treat every day the same” approach needed to be amended at some point during the grotesque, browbeating of a season. Bochy just kept tepidly watching Garcia and Pederson swing for the fences as the offense got shutout AGAIN and AGAIN. Bochy needed to drop the boomerish hand-wringing and ream his entitled players out a bit. Instead he stood idly by as the best pitching and defense was wasted night after night. At no point during this horror show did Bochy berate his players like Billy Martin. He watched guys play magnitudes beneath their peak rank and just kept absent mindedly plotting along like it was all according to plan. Bochy might have managed the pitchers well, but the coaching of the hitters was truly wretched. The hitting coaches from Bret Boone to Justin Viele should all be canned. This cadre of dopes watched established stars flail wildly at breaking balls and get blown away by heaters without fixing it all season. It is almost unfathomable a team could have the best pitching and defense in baseball and not have a winning record. The hitters on the team are not even bad, per se. This was a total failure from a coaching perspective. This was a team consumed with a terminal case of The Disease of More.
