2026 ZiPS Projections: Texas Rangers

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Texas Rangers.

Batters

Finishing the season with an exactly .500 record seems a fitting fate for the 2025 Texas Rangers, a team that spent most of the year jumping into and out of the playoff race, until their demise was eventually sealed by an eight-game losing streak in September. The oldest team in baseball this year, the Rangers got a lot of production out of their core performers, but a pitching swoon in August and September, and holes at the offense-heavy positions, left the team short of its goal of getting back to the playoffs and grabbing a second World Series trophy. That 2023 championship campaign is the only season in the last nine in which Texas finished with a winning record.

At first glance, the lineup still looks very playoff-worthy, though it’s stocked with more contributors over the age of 30 than one might like. Corey Seager spent his usual time on the IL, first with a nagging hamstring injury that put him on the shelf twice, and later with an emergency appendectomy. But he also played at his usual superstar level, so anyone who suggests that shortstop was a weak spot is wearing pants that are on fire. Marcus Semien is clearly past his peak, but he played enough like himself during the season to end up with respectable final numbers, though they paled compared to his usual efforts. ZiPS thinks Semien will bounce back a bit in 2026, but twilight is approaching.

ZiPS has liked Wyatt Langford from the second it ran a projection for him, so seeing him at the top of the ranks is hardly surprising. And it’s good news for the Rangers if accurate, given that Langford is in his mid-20s rather than on the downslope of his career. Jonah Heim and Kyle Higashioka are getting up there in years, but the catching situation is fine for now, and Josh Jung managed to more or less stay healthy in 2025, though he was demoted to Round Rock for a reset in July. Josh Smith would probably be stretched playing at a prime defensive position full-time, but he’s around as a highly useful, nearly all-purpose Plan B.

Adolis García’s offensive decline continued, perhaps unsurprising given his age; because he didn’t get his first extended shot in the majors until his age-28 season, he’ll be 33 next Opening Day. ZiPS expects a better season from a healthy Jake Burger, but he remains a rather one-dimensional player who is best considered a stopgap until the Rangers have a better idea at first base. Like Steamer, ZiPS thinks Joc Pederson still has some life left in his bat; we may yet live to see another Joctober.

While I think the Rangers should be looking into options at first base and in right field, I’m not sure either is necessarily a priority given some of the things we’ll see in the next section.

Pitchers

Jacob deGrom dialed back his fastball a couple of notches in 2025, and while correlation isn’t necessarily causation, he had his first healthy season since 2020, with the Rangers rightly delighted to get 172 2/3 innings out of him. The projections knock him down a tick here, as at 37, he’s finally at the point where pitchers are likely to experience substantial age-related decline rather than simply break, and ZiPS, for obvious reasons, isn’t going all-in on how healthy it expects him to be. Still, his outlook is a lot better than it was a year ago, and I think he’s now passed the Koufax threshold on my eventual Hall of Fame ballot.

Nathan Eovaldi was arguably having the best season of his career through the end of May, and was in the early Cy Young conversation, but an elbow injury and a rotator cuff injury cut his season short, and he had offseason sports hernia surgery. He’s also getting up there in years, so ZiPS is being fairly conservative with his projection.

ZiPS is at the point where it’s confident that Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker are good mid-rotation options, but as eventual deGrom/Eovaldi successors, not so much. Jacob Latz was quite successful as both a starter and reliever in 2025, but ZiPS thinks his 2.84 ERA, and even his 3.89 FIP, is a little ahead of where he’ll likely be next year; he should probably be seen as more of a versatile fourth starter than anything else.

The big worry here is that ZiPS sees the rotation depth as quite weak after the assumed starters, an especially concerning issue given how many have long-term injury questions. This would be a suitable place for the Rangers to spend some cash.

As for the bullpen, let’s just say that I’m hoping my computer crashes while I’m typing out this paragraph. More than any other team in baseball, ZiPS sees the bullpen as the difference between the Rangers being a first-tier Wild Card contender and a fringe one. The top four Rangers relievers in WAR, Shawn Armstrong, Hoby Milner, Phil Maton, and Chris Martin, are all free agents, and few bullpens are going to look great when you chop off the top four guys. Robert Garcia returns, but after him, all I can say is that I’m pretty sure that all of these players actually physically exist and that ZiPS didn’t accidentally interface with my fictional player name generator. The computer basically thinks everyone after Garcia is somewhere around replacement level — or worse — and Texas isn’t exactly overequipped with starting pitchers who can be used as lights-out relievers. Unless the projections are very wrong, the Rangers are probably one of the teams that should be willing to overpay to rebuild their bullpen this winter. It’s necessary to get the most out of their aging core.

If the Rangers play things extremely conservatively this winter and go with this roster, they look like they’ll land somewhere around .500, perhaps a skosh better, with some real downside due to age and injury risk. But it wouldn’t require a huge offseason to get this team to a high-80s win total and a return to October baseball.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.