In 2024, the Rangers' hopes to compete, and potentially win a second World Series in a row, were thwarted by their own injuries. deGrom, Scherzer, Seager, Jung, Bradford, Mahle and Gray all spent significant time on the IL, and the replacements could only do so much. Heading towards 2025, and with even more young promise hitting the roster, the Rangers looked to capitalized on a new promise to bring home rings on odd years, as opposed to Bochy's even year runs in San Francisco.
And while many of the injured Rangers of 2024 have factored greatly into this season, new and different injuries have prevented this team from getting ahead, and now they're getting over losing a series to the White Sox. Not even two years after winning a ring they're dropping games to the worst team in the AL. Something has to be up.
I mean, the good news is that Wyatt Langford, a 2023 draft pick who made the majors to begin the 2024 season, is now a fully realized, multi-faceted ballplayer in his second season. He's excellent defensively, combining with Adolis Garcia and Kevin Pillar for a very strong outfield, he's a terrific hitter, with 10 homers and 21 RBIs, and he's stolen 10 bases. He's rounding out several of the categories you need to fill out as a great player, and he's been one of the Rangers' surest bets this year.
But in Langford's stats, you can see a troubling trend with this team. Langford leads the team in homers...with 10. Need I remind you how much of a power-hitting team this was in 2023? You have Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Joc Pederson, Adolis Garcia and Kyle Higashioka on this team. All of them, quite famously, have hit plenty of home runs. But so far, through about 2 months of play, none of them have hit more than 7 of them. That perplexes the hell out of me. And it's not like they're all completely cold either. Seager, through injuries, has hit .300, Garcia has 27 RBIs. Though Semien and Pederson sure are cold, like...worryingly so. And you hope they can eventually get it together, even if that's usually Semien's thing, really slow starts.
I never thought this team, with these players, would be a 'leave it to a strong rotation' type, but that's where we're at. And luckily they do have guys like Jacob deGrom, Nate Eovaldi, Tyler Mahle, Patrick Corbin and Jack Leiter on excellent runs at the moment. It's a very strong rotation, and it's weird that Corbin has factored so heavily into it. Someone did point out that Corbin's best numbers happened from 2017 to 2020, stopped when a democrat entered the White House and continued at the start of 2025. This sort of behavior I'd expect from Josh Hader rather than Corbin. This rotation has garnered 19 of the team's 27 wins, and a lot of those have stayed exceptionally close, which, again, remember back in 2023 when this team blew everybody out by 10 runs?
They've got to wake up eventually, right? Maybe June is when it happens. A lot of these guys are just waiting to really go on a tear, and if it all happens simultaneously they could even leave the similarly streaky Angels in the dust. How wild would that be?
Coming Tonight: Five years in he's undeniably one of the most consistent, and ferocious, pitchers of the decade.
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