The Texas Rangers, and The Skinny Rebuild

In 2015 the Texas Rangers won the American League West. Texas’ front office was rewarded for its faith in the 2015 Rangers roster when it acquired Cole Hamels at the Trade Deadline despite the team’s middling record. The clubhouse responded that summer, captured a division title, and only succumbed to the Blue Jays in the fifth game of the ALDS, after some brutal mishaps in the field. 

In 2016 the Rangers once again gambled with a big trade, and acquired Jonathon Lucroy from the Brewers in an effort to attain back-to-back postseason berths. It worked. Despite having grossly over-performed in 2016 relative to what their run differential suggested, the Rangers won their division for the second straight year. Their October gauntlet was even shorter lived that time around though, as Cole Hamels and Yu Darvish couldn’t give the Rangers the short-series edge that they were hoping for. 

Here on the eve of the 2020 season, the Rangers have since endured three straight years of losing records, all the while watching their interstate rivals achieve glory, and later infamy. It’s hard, for me at least, not to wonder whether the 2015 and 2016 Rangers imbued the front office with more confidence than it ought to have had heading into the later years of the 2010s. 

One cannot blame them completely. 95 wins in 2016, despite just a +8 run (!) differential, certainly at least feels legitimate. That’s a lot of team handshake lines after games. Going into 2017 with Yu Darvish and Cole Hamels at the top of a rotation can bolster confidence too. The presence and agelessness of Adrian Beltre alone warrants efforts to keep any and all windows open. 

But three straight years of losing, all the while engaging in disparate and modest retooling, makes a couple key decisions look dubious in retrospect. With every year, Nomar Mazara’s often-discussed future value continued to collapse and converge with his pedestrian present value, finally resulting in a trade. Rougned Odor took two full steps backward, and was handed an excess of a thousand plate appearances for his efforts. Darvish, Hamels, and Lucroy were all dealt at points where each player’s trade value wasn’t exactly at its zenith. 

Going into the 2020 season though, there are reasons to feel as though this year will be a particularly crucial one for the trajectory of the Rangers’ upcoming years. They don’t project to contend, but internally they surely hope to at least compete, and progress in areas they desperately must, in order to justify their lightweight “retooling” over the past three seasons. Turning in a 75-ish win campaign in a new ballpark would feel distinctly Marlins-esque, after all. 

As Craig Edwards made clear in his piece on the Rangers about a month ago, the team simply doesn’t project to hit. At all. Their position players generated just 9.2 WAR in 2019 and project for only modest gains, to 11 WAR, in 2020. 

Projections, for their part, are simply intended to estimate the most likely outcome for any given player or team. For this reason, they don’t depict a scenario wherein key players perform to their own maximum potential. Joey Gallo has 5 WAR upside, for instance, but the projections don’t capture upside alone. The problem with the Rangers, though, is that even if you choose to neglect those projections (probably not advisable) and really squint at their lineup, those players still don’t stack up well.

Below is a table partially adapted from Craig Edwards’ piece, but featuring a few of those “best case scenarios.” 

The second column includes fWAR figures for each player if they replicated their best performance from the last three seasons (2017-2019) if a said player was in his 20s in that timeframe, or two seasons (2018-2019) if they weren’t. It’s an implausible outcome, and yet still this lineup doesn’t project to eclipse even 20 WAR, which represented roughly league average in 2019. The third column features each player’s fWAR career high. Shin-Soo Choo, despite having produced several decent quality seasons in recent years, cannot reasonably be expected to rack up 6.0 WAR (or even 3), but even if he did and the rest of the lineup miraculously hit their marks too, the Rangers lineup would still lag behind that of the Astros and Angels. 

This is a silly exercise, but it drives home the point that even under such wild circumstances, the Rangers don’t seem to have put together a competitive lineup. That’s not to discount a pitching staff that has benefitted from relatively modest free agent signings, some good discoveries, and their winter headliner, the acquisition of Corey Kluber. 

Yet almost because of the Rangers projected lineup, this year feels like a culmination of the Rangers bit-by-bit rebuilding efforts. The Rangers’ entire rotation, after all, is made up of players signed or traded, as opposed to developed or planned around. This is a club that has poured thousands of at-bats into the hands of Rougned Odor, Nomar Mazara, Ronald Guzman, Isiah Kiner-Falefa and more. One only hopes that these players can each turn the corner, but if they can’t it isn’t tough to imagine some of these players joining Mazara on the trading block, and the Rangers being forced to further adjust the trajectory after having waited years for this offensive core to develop.

This isn’t to denounce the skinny, or abbreviated, rebuild. Teams in recent memory have torn down more drastically, or experienced more prolonged valleys, than the Rangers and still haven’t come out of them so gracefully as the Cubs or Astros that we associate with “Tank It Til You Make It.” Still, the Rangers’ young lineup was intended to mature into a proficient core over the past couple years but hasn’t yet. Meanwhile, the stockpiling of young arms on the minors side has been dented by bad breaks and rough setbacks repeatedly it seems. Given these circumstances, it feels increasingly like 2020 will be a defining year for the Rangers, for better or worse.