Position: Texas Rangers Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Arlington, Texas

Description:
The developer will be responsible for supporting, maintaining and expanding our baseball operations software systems. A knack for compelling visuals and design is preferred. The Rangers are looking for strong team players with outstanding people skills. Applicants who can provide code samples (any language, doesn’t have to be baseball related) will be given strong preference. Diverse applicants are encouraged to apply. Spanish fluency is a plus.

Responsibilities:

• Web development, design and testing.
• Database queries to support the application.
• Designing and maintaining reports.
• Application support for the front office, scouts and coaches.
• Update and maintain internal system documentation.

Qualifications:

• Passion for the game of baseball.
• 1-3 years professional experience in a similar capacity and/or degree in computer science preferred.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Highly organized.
• Occasional evening, weekend and holiday availability. Support is provided 24/7/365 and is shared among the team.

Technology:

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• ASP.Net
• C#
• JavaScript/AJAX
• Microsoft SQL Server
• SQL Reporting Services (SSRS)

To Apply:
Please apply here.

There are certain players who are made more interesting by the greater context. Why is Team X suddenly so successful? Credit should go to the surprising Player Y. Certain other players, though — with some guys, the context is almost irrelevant. They can’t help but be compelling, regardless of whether their team is great or terrible. Joey Gallo is one of these players. Gallo is fascinating, and the Rangers are 8-16. Gallo would be no more fascinating if the Rangers were 16-8. Gallo is forever interesting to me, and he is forever interesting to you, because he might well be baseball’s most extreme hitter. He’s a project, a test of a prospect model we’ve hardly ever seen.

In a sense, Gallo has already passed the test. In his first year as a full-time player, he was worth 3 WAR, with a low batting average but a strong batting line. It’s one thing for a player to succeed over a month or a month and a half, but for me, personally, I like to leave time for opponents to adjust. Opponents adjusted, and Gallo adjusted back. He was better in last year’s second half than he was in the first. Over the course of 2017, Gallo proved that he’s a big-league ballplayer. It was a triumphant season for his extraordinary skillset.

And yet it’s not as if Gallo is all through with his progress. What we’re seeing in this year’s early going is something incredible indeed. One of the core things that’s made Joey Gallo Joey Gallo is starting to go away. Every good hitter evolves, but Gallo was starting with a truly weird foundation.

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In a game that will be remembered more for a bench-clearing seventh-inning brawl between the beasts of the AL East — we’ll get to that, you blood-lusting rubberneckers — Gary Sanchez scored some points with a few swings of the bat himself on Wednesday night against the Red Sox. While the early struggles of reigning NL MVP and Bronx newcomer Giancarlo Stanton have gotten more attention, it was the Yankees’ 25-year-old catcher who owned the dubious title not just as the team’s coldest hitter, but as the majors’ single worst batting title-qualified player in terms of both wRC+ and WAR. Whether it was the intimate confines of Fenway Park, the struggles of the Red Sox pitching staff, or the inevitability of positive regression, by the fourth inning of the Yankees’ 10-7 victory, Gary got his groove back, at least for one night. Sanchez clubbed two homers and added a double, driving in four runs and more than doubling his season totals in hits, homers, and RBI.

Sanchez, who last year led all major-league catchers with 33 homers and a 130 wRC+ while batting .278/.345/.531, began the 2018 season in a 2-for-36 skid. Through Tuesday, his positive contributions at the plate could be counted on Mordecai Brown’s pitching hand: an RBI double off the Blue Jays’ John Axford on Opening Day, a two-run homer off the Rays’ Blake Snell on April 4, and a hit-by-pitch against the Orioles’ Darren O’Day on April 5. He went 0-for-17 between the first two hits, and 0-for-15 between the latter one and Wednesday’s game. Since he hadn’t drawn a single walk, that hit-by-pitch juiced his batting line all the way to .056/.081/.167. That’s a -42 wRC+, which is something closer to an ASCII approximation of a smashed fly than it is a comprehensible comparison to league average. He entered Wednesday as one of eight qualifiers with a negative wRC+

Sanchez had some good company in this particularly decrepit Small Sample Theater: a guy who hit even more homers last year (Morrison), two of the game’s best defensive center fielders (Kiermaier and Buxton, who is apparently constitutionally incapable of hitting major-league pitching before May 1), a top prospect (Brinson), and so on.

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With over 3,000 hits and his status as one of the greatest defensive third basemen in history, Adrian Beltre is already a lock for Cooperstown. On Thursday, he claimed a particularly cool slice of history. With his double off A’s starter Daniel Mengden, he collected hit number 3,054, surpassing Hall of Famer Rod Carew, whom he had tied on Tuesday night, for the most hits of any player born in Latin America.

Here’s the record-setting hit, whose significance was acknowledged by the Rangers’ broadcasters a few moments after the clip:

With this hit Adrian Beltre passes Rod Carew as the @MLB career hit leader for Latin-born players. Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/XlISb2HhG1

— Bally Sports Southwest (@BallySportsSW) April 5, 2018

At some point later this season, Beltre will likely overtake Ichiro Suzuki, now a 44-year-old reserve, as the all-time leader in hits for a player born outside of the United States:

Note that I’ve included Puerto Rico-born players here. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated US territory, and its citizens are US citizens, but the Caribbean island is also considered part of Latin America, and its ballplayers have long been recognized and celebrated within that context, particularly during and after the career of the iconic Clemente.

Looking at the above list, it’s remarkable that for all of the talented Latin American players that have starred in the game over the past several decades, only four have reached 3,000 hits (out of 24 such players since World War II), with Pujols poised to become the fifth; none has advanced much further than that. Clemente ranked 11th on the all-time hit list at the time of his December 31, 1972 death, but the total number of players above him has more than doubled in the 45 years since. He was 16th at the end of 1985, Carew’s final year, while Carew himself was 13th. Beltre, who turns 39 on April 7, is still playing at a consistently high enough level to think beyond 2018. Assuming he can total 200 hits over this season and next — a conservative assumption given that he had 106 in just 94 games last year — he’d climb to 14th all time, with 3,248, seven shy of Eddie Murray at number 13, and 35 shy of Willie Mays at number 12. He’d need a total of 3,320 to crack the all-time top 10.

(All of these rankings rely upon the inclusion of Cap Anson’s National Association stats from 1871-75 towards his career total of 3,435, as recognized by Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference. Elias Bureau and Major League Baseball, which do not recognize NA stats, credit him with 3,011 hits.)

Beltre is also bearing down on another very cool distinction within this group. His 84.2 WAR is the second-highest total of any player born outside of the US, trailing only Pujols, who’s at 89.1 but moving backwards (-2.1 since the start of 2017). Beltre will probably need at least another season to close the gap, but if he does, the Hall of Fame will have to break out a very narrow typeface for his plaque in order to fit all of his accomplishments.

It was only one start, but when you’re coming off an age-44 season featuring a 6.48 ERA, a 5.21 FIP, and a 5.4% swinging-strike rate (the lowest among pitchers with at least 140 innings), you’re on a start-to-start basis anyway. So it counts as good news that, on Monday night, Bartolo Colon made an impressive debut with the Rangers — his 11th franchise — throwing six innings of one-run ball against the A’s in Oakland.

After three surprisingly strong seasons with the Mets, during which he averaged 196 innings, a 3.90 ERA, 3.79 FIP, and 2.7 WAR, Colon signed a one-year, $12.5 million deal with the Braves for last season, but he struggled mightily, first in Atlanta and then Minnesota after being released in July. With no major-league deal forthcoming, he inked a minor-league deal with the Rangers on February 4, with a base salary of $1.75 million plus another $1.3 million in incentives. With Martin Perez still on the disabled list as he rehabs from a bull-induced elbow fracture that required surgery, Colon had his opening to make the team, but only after being released and then re-signed last week in order to work around his opt-out clause.

Colon retired the first six A’s he faced, bookended by caught-looking strikeouts to Marcus Semien and Stephen Piscotty on sinkers, something he’s done 245 times since returning to the majors in 2011, more often than any pitcher this side of David Price. He would later victimize both hitters again, the former swinging at a slider, the latter swinging at an 0-2 sinker.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Eugenio Suarez and Jose Altuve extensions, whether this offseason’s slow free-agent market will make players more likely to sign extensions, the industry’s latest effort to avoid paying minor leaguers, and the debate about where Shohei Ohtani should start the season, then preview the 2018 Twins (18:52) with Baseball Prospectus’s Aaron Gleeman, and the 2018 Rangers (56:45) with The Athletic DFW’s Levi Weaver.

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Three years ago, Kris Bryant ranked as the best prospect in baseball. Then 23 years old, Bryant had brutalized minor-league pitching the year before and destroyed the competition in spring training with nine homers and 17 total hits in 44 plate appearances. Despite a clubhouse that now included Jon Lester and manager Joe Maddon among others — part of the Cubs’ signal to the world they were ready to compete — Bryant was easily one of the best 25 players in the organization, probably among the top five, and eventually proved during the season he was Chicago’s best position player.

And yet, the Cubs opted not to start the season with Kris Bryant on the roster. Once Bryant had spent enough days at Triple-A to extend his team control by a year — to become a free agent after the 2021 season instead of the 2020 campaign — the future MVP received a callup to the majors.

Bryant is still the most famous and most obvious case of a team’s effort to manipulate player service time to the potential detriment of the on-field product, but it happened before Bryant, has happened since Bryant, and is likely to keep happening. This season, there are several prominent players who might be kept off their major-league rosters for a time so that the team might save money and gain control of the player for an extra season.

For those unfamiliar with how service time works in these instances, here it is briefly. Players achieve free agency once they have six years of service time. Although the season lasts 187 days, a player is considered to have played a full season if he appears on an MLB roster or disabled list for 172 days. In any season where a player hits the 172-day threshold, that counts as one season of service time. If a player belongs to the roster for fewer than 172 days, he must combine those days with days from another campaign to reach the official “full season” mark.

Kris Bryant’s case is a useful example of this work. In 2015, he was on the roster for 171 days. That time counts only as a partial season. In the last two years, Bryant has been on the roster for more than 180 days each year, and each of those seasons count as one year of service time. At the end of the 2020 season, Bryant will have five seasons and 171 days of service, one day short of the six seasons necessary for free agency. As a result, he will need to play in 2021 to become a free agent. An extended discussion of service time appears in the FanGraphs glossary.

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One year ago this month, the Seattle Mariners signed Gordon Beckham to a minor-league contract, hoping that he could jumpstart a career in decline. That didn’t happen. The 31-year-old infielder slogged his way to a .706 OPS in Triple-A, then went an uninspiring 3 for 17 after a September call-up.

Despite those doldrums — and a lackadaisical track record that has seen him slash just .239/.303/.369 over parts of nine big-league seasons — Jerry Dipoto’s club is giving him another chance. So far he’s making the best of it. Going into yesterday, Beckham had nine hits, including a home run, in 13 spring training at bats.

The University of Georgia product was refreshingly honest when I asked him to assess his career thus far.

“I would describe it as having underperformed,” admitted Beckham, who was drafted eighth overall by the White Sox in 2008. “I started off well, and did some good things for a few years, but since then I haven’t played anywhere near my capabilities. If I don’t get it right soon, I probably won’t be playing much longer.”

Beckham was equally candid when asked why he hasn’t fulfilled his potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

50 FV Prospects

Calhoun doesn’t have a position (he’s been tried at third, second, and in the outfield since college), but he’s going to rake. Scouts have him projected for plus hit and power. He takes huge, beer-league-softball hacks but has the hand-eye coordination and bat control to make it work. He could yank out 30 or more homers as soon as he’s given regular at-bats. The corner-outfield and DH situation in Texas is pretty crowded, but he should start seeing regular big-league time this year. There’s some risk that Calhoun’s aggression is exploited the way Rougie Odor’s has been, but otherwise Calhoun looks like a stable mid-order slugger.
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Pardon our inconsistency. On the one hand, we love having projections. Projections allow us to have an idea of what the future could bring. Projections let us think we know what’s going to happen, and we believe in them because they’ve proven themselves. On the other hand, we love the exceptional. That which doesn’t follow, that which takes us by surprise. We don’t want to actually know the future. We want for the world to mostly make sense, I suppose, but no one wants to close the door on the unpredictable. It’s the surprises that bring life to the living.

Tim Lincecum is back. Tim Lincecum is signing a major-league contract, having been inked by the Rangers. When Lincecum last pitched in the bigs, he might’ve been the very worst pitcher at the level. His ERA soared over 9, and the Angels couldn’t bring themselves to give him ten starts. If you want to get right down to it, the last year Lincecum was an effective major-league pitcher was 2011. That year’s best players by WAR were Jacoby Ellsbury and Matt Kemp. It’s been a long time since Lincecum was Lincecum, but hope blows on the embers of a dying fire. Baseball is better with Lincecum in it. There’s renewed reason to think he could surprise.

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