A Brief Postmortem of the 2025 Texas Rangers’ Season

While the 2025 regular season is not yet complete, the Texas Rangers were just yesterday eliminated from the postseason hunt. Given that fact, in tandem with my fandom of the Rangers, this post will diverge some from the data-focused posts more typically offered here and instead simply offer a quick retrospective of what has been a persistently mediocre campaign.

For a team that has 7 losing seasons in the last 8 years —though crucially featuring a World Series championship in the lone season that proved the exception— the jury is still out on how this season will end relative to .500. What seemed like a lock just a week ago is now looking decidedly uncertain.

All the way up until September, the Rangers played relentlessly average baseball. At no point until this season’s final month did the Rangers fall more than 6 games below .500 or rise more than 6 games above that mark. Prior to this current 8-game losing streak the Rangers had not had any streak —winning or losing— of more than 6 games. The early September push alone enabled their season’s high water mark of 79-70, which proved short lived as they have since promptly regressed back toward a more even record.

September specifically though has been a month of extremes for the Rangers. At the outset, the team seemed to overcome significant injuries to core players —Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Nathan Eovaldi— to push themselves back into the periphery of both the AL West and AL Wildcard races. However, things have turned ugly fast and now those meaningful September baseball games suddenly feel quite distant. That a September 15-17 sweep in Houston at the hands of the Astros marked the inflection point of an exciting stretch of baseball only adds to the disappointment.

Mired in their current 8-game losing streak, the Rangers have managed just 22 runs over that stretch, good for fewer than 3 runs a game on average. It seems fitting that the lineup ultimately sputtered in what felt like an anticlimactic season for the offense. The refashioned lineup featuring Joc Pederson, Jake Burger, and Kyle Higashioka struggled out of the gate this spring and, while there has been improvement, the lineup as a whole still pales in comparison to the 2023 edition that management has been trying to reawaken for nearly two full seasons now.

Given that context, it makes sense to start with a look at the lineup.

Team wRC+: 93 (23rd); wRC+ vs RHP: 96 (25th); wRC+ vs LHP: 84 (23rd).

Note that I’ve deferred to wRC+ here as it’s a strong catchall for offensive production and is normalized around 100, making it easy to interpret. Evaluating the lineup through the lens of wRC+ makes for a quick assessment: the Rangers’ offense was a bottom-third group in 2025.

If 2025 has told us anything, it is that the 2023 version of the Rangers is not liable to reappear. Since the start of 2024, Adolis García (89 wRC+), Marcus Semien (95 wRC+ ), Josh Jung (95 wRC+), and Jonah Heim (71 wRC+) have been below average performers at the plate. Semien’s age suggests 2026 may offer more of the same and García, deserving (and hopefully enduring) fan favorite though he absolutely is, may be a clear non-tender candidate given his age and performance over the last ~1200 PAs. Jung and Heim, meanwhile, suddenly don’t seem to be the building blocks that they appeared to be just a season ago.

All of these performances taken together make a continued reliance or expectation on forthcoming positive regression dubious. For the lineup to improve in 2026, additions will have to be made.

Generally speaking, the Rangers still appear strong up the middle. Semien and Seager, bat and health notwithstanding, are really valuable players up the middle. Heim and Higashioka have made a serviceable duo behind the plate and each have just one more season of team control. Evan Carter has had a rough time staying healthy and is still unproven against LHP, but 2025 seems to have proved that his floor is still a relatively high one. Wyatt Langford‘s continued emergence as a strong defender and viable option in CF further strengthens the Rangers core up the middle.

The edges of the field are much murkier. Adolis García simply does not look capable of recapturing his prior form and Josh Jung looks like he might be a change-of-scenery candidate. Jake Burger’s performance against RHPs in 2025 (2.2% walk rate vs. 27.5% strikeout rate and a resulting 74 wRC+) suggests he and Joc might be best suited as platoon options at DH unless or until either one performs better.

Given these points, first base, third base, and right field appear to be key points of weakness the Rangers will aim to address if the lineup is to be back above average. A knock-on effect of the poor performances and injuries has been players being overextended; Josh Smith has filled in admirably but realistically has no business playing first base and owned a 44 wRC+ (sub-.500 OPS) against LHPs this year; Alejandro Osuna and Ezequiel Durán, even at their best, are probably not players to replace peak-Adolis, or Jung for that matter, in a lineup.

The pitching staff, meanwhile, has been incredibly strong.

Pitching Staff fWAR: 18.5 (3rd); ERA: 3.48 (1st); xFIP: 4.05 (9th); K-BB%: 14.6% (9th).

While the lineup has been bottom-third in baseball, the Rangers pitching staff has occupied the top third. That said, there exists some clear evidence that regression is in store.

That potential regression risk is further amplified by the amount of turnover in store: Patrick Corbin, Tyler Mahle, and Merrill Kelly are all set to be free agents; together they covered 280+ IP this season, the majority of which have been of good quality. There is reason to be optimistic though. Jacob deGrom has made it through the year healthy, Eovaldi has again proven his value into his mid-30s, and Jack Leiter has taken a meaningful step forward. Those three developments cannot be considered anything less than exceptionally meaningful. Should that trio be able to provide ~450 IP again in 2026, there is reason to be excited about the rotation.

Meanwhile, Kumar Rocker, Jacob Latz, and Cody Bradford provide crucial depth given the inevitable rotation turnover. Pretty simply, that is not enough. The back of the rotation will need backfilling; a Patrick Corbin-type signing for 2026 will be the minimum requirement to do so. More realistically, it will need to be more than that.

As for the bullpen, Chris Young will likely have to compile it on the fly yet again. That said, his work constructing the bullpen for 2025 has been one of the clear successes of this season. Chris Martin, Hoby Milner, Shawn Armstrong, Danny Coulombe, and Phil Maton are all set to become free agents, so the backfilling will be considerable.

Given the strength of the bullpen and pitching staff more generally, it is reasonable to expect the emphasis this offseason to again be on the lineup. Still, ~10 million is coming off the books between Martin, Milner, and Armstrong’s departures; another ~33 million in payroll is on expiring contracts between Mahle, Jon Gray, Kelly, and Corbin. Assuming payroll remains generally stable from 2025 to 2026, some of that cumulative 43 million should probably be reallocated to reinforcing the lineup, but a significant portion will likely remain tied to filling out the back of both the bullpen and rotation.

Defensive Value: Def: 22.4 (6th), Errors 53 (1st, i.e. fewest), OAA 30 (4th), DRS 89 (1st)

Defensively, the Rangers have been rock solid. If there was a place of concern it might be behind the plate, where the Rangers’ throwing and blocking metrics, as measured by FanGraphs, have been middling. So too have there been issues with controlling the running game. One bright spot there has been framing though, where the tandem of Heim and Higashioka has been above average.

This section can largely be sped through, though, given the aforementioned core of players up the middle, who are responsible for a lot of this defensive value and also are likely to reclaim their positions going forward.

Stepping back, it doe not take a ton of analysis to diagnose the Rangers’ shortcomings in 2025. The lineup was inconsistent and scuffled for extended stretches throughout the season, an issue that was exacerbated by a consistent parade of trips to the injured list for key contributors. Still, there is clear evidence that the Rangers are a quality team; even after 8 straight losses, they have +79 run differential, more than any team in the AL West and good for 7th best in MLB. Many of their core players are returning in 2025 and significant money is being freed up by free agent departures that hopefully can be effectively reallocated.

The balance that Chris Young and the front office will need to strike in the coming offseason includes again bolstering the lineup while backfilling the pitching staff enough to ward of some of those more damning cases of regression. They certainly don’t want to give with one hand and take too liberally with the other when it comes to the overall roster construction. In my view, trying to land Cody Bellinger and resign Merrill Kelly would go a long way in addressing some of the downside risk. Bellinger has positional flexibility and shores up the Rangers’ thin outfield depth while Kelly is a strong mid-rotation that won’t likely secure maximum dollars given his age and injury history. To be clear though, moves along those lines will be necessary, but far from sufficient.

And finally, 2026 will be meaningful for the Rangers franchise direction on an even more macro level. It’s increasingly tough to disregard the critiques that 2023 was a flash in the pan given that Rangers’ performance over the last decade and especially in the last two seasons. While flags fly forever, it is important that the Rangers can continue to cultivate the culture and direction for a franchise that has had some considerable peaks and valleys in recent seasons.

The presence of Bruce Bochy will certainly play a role in that culture, but finding a way to be consistently competitive —particularly now in a division with a seemingly fading Astros juggernaut— will be crucial for the culture and, yes, vibes. Rebuilding does not appear to be a necessary step now, but action does need to be taken in order to keep that option off the table in the not-too-distant future. With a strong, albeit thinning, core still in place the Rangers need to establish that they are closer to a World Series contending team than one that allows for the better part of a decade to be lost; a team that is well run and non-reactionary, but simultaneously constantly iterating in the pursuit of winning baseball.