For the first time since 2016, the Orioles are in the playoffs, and likewise for the Rangers, as both teams’ lengthy — and very different — rebuilding efforts have finally paid off. Under Brandon Hyde, the largely homegrown Orioles won 101 games, their highest total since 1979, and claimed the AL’s top seed, giving them a first-round bye. With future Hall of Fame manager Bruce Bochy coming out of retirement, the Rangers, who have been built much more through trades and a whole lot of money spent in free agency, won 90 games but coughed up a 2.5-game AL West lead. As they finished with the same record as the Astros but lost the season series, 9–4, they wound up seeded fifth as a wild card but ran circles around the 99-win Rays in the first round, outscoring them 11–1 in two games in front of paltry Tropicana Field crowds.

Injuries will color this series, most notably the absences of the Orioles’ Félix Bautista, who dominated hitters for five months before tearing his UCL, and Max Scherzer, who came over via a deadline trade with the Mets and pitched well before straining his teres major. Rotation-mate Jon Gray is also out due to a forearm strain.

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The Texas Rangers locked up their first postseason series since 2016 with an exclamation point, once again dominating the Tampa Bay Rays, this time by a score of 7-1. Nathan Eovaldi shook off his late-season struggles to deliver a masterclass, while Corey Seager and Josh Jung chipped in a pair of doubles each (with the latter also adding a triple), and Adolis García and Evan Carter went deep. For the Rays, this marked their third season in a row of playoff disappointment, and while they won’t sit atop the list of postseason scoreless streaks after Curtis Mead’s RBI single in the seventh, they’ll head into the offseason with more question marks than they’ve had in recent memory.

After the lefty Jordan Montgomery shut them down in Game One, the Rays made a couple of notable changes in advance of facing the right-handed Eovaldi. First, they shed the Devil Rays uniforms that may have doomed them to the fate of their World Series-less ancestors. Second, and more directly in response to yesterday’s events, they swapped the recently returned Jose Siri — who made critical errors on both sides of the ball yesterday — for the left-handed hitting Josh Lowe, shifting Manuel Margot from right field to center in order to accommodate him. Read the rest of this entry »

Extremes in defense were on display as the Wild Card round kicked off on Tuesday afternoon. In the Rangers-Rays opener, Texas left fielder Evan Carter laid out for a great catch of an Isaac Paredes line drive in the first inning, starter Jordan Montgomery dove to make an impressive snag of Jose Siri’s popped-up bunt in the second, and Josh Jung made a nice grab on Manuel Margot’s soft liner in the seventh. On the other side, Siri’s day from hell continued as he missed catching Corey Seager’s wall-banging double in the fifth, then deflected and briefly lost control of a Seager bloop before airmailing it over third base in the sixth, costing the Rays a run. And misery loves company — his Rays teammates made three additional errors in their 4-0 loss.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, center fielder Michael A. Taylor made a pair of exceptional catches, and Carlos Correa saved a run in the fourth by fielding a dribbler that had gone under third baseman Jorge Polanco’s glove, making a sidearm throw home while on the run to keep Bo Bichette from scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that was decisive. The Texas Rangers dominated the first contest of their Wild Card Series in all three phases of the game. Bruce Bochy’s club outhit, outpitched, and absolutely out-defended the Tampa Bay Rays en route to a 4-0 victory. If baseball involved special teams, they surely would’ve crushed Tampa on that front too. Fresh off the best season of his seven-year career, Jordan Montgomery silenced a Rays team whose 118 wRC+ was second in the majors only to Atlanta’s this year, and whose 120 wRC+ against left-handed pitching ranked fourth. Meanwhile, the Tampa defense, which ranked 18th on our leaderboard this season, set a franchise single-game postseason record with four errors.

Surprising no one, Randy Arozarena’s playoff heroics continued, as he went 2-for-4 with a double. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much help, as the rest of the team notched just four hits.

Defense was the story from the very beginning of the game, overshadowing an impressive performance from ace Tyler Glasnow. Clad in their fun (but possibly cursed) throwback Devil Rays uniforms, Tampa Bay made three errors in the first three innings. Although none of them led directly to a run, they did contribute to Glasnow’s rising pitch count; he needed 51 pitches to get through those first three frames. And it wasn’t just the errors. There were several plays, some of them very tough but all of them makable, that the Rays just couldn’t come up with. Corey Seager, batting second, reached on an error by first baseman Yandy Díaz in the first. Glasnow was able to work through the mistake, striking out the last two batters of the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being second and third in record among AL clubs and sporting the top two run differentials in the Junior Circuit, the Rays and Rangers will meet in the wild card round as the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively. Tampa Bay secured the top wild card spot after losing a close division race, finishing just two games behind the first-place Orioles, the only 100-win team in the AL, and will play host to the Rangers. Their 90 wins tied them with the Astros for first place in the West, but they lost the division crown via tiebreaker under the new rules that sent Game 163 into extinction. These two squads may be a bit above the caliber of the average wild card series, but only one will be on a flight to Baltimore this weekend for the ALDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, I took a look at Adolis García, a player who had long vexed me. Here was one of the few remaining survivors of the Rangers’ late-2010s rebuild, coming off back-to-back three-win seasons just as his club was swinging back into contention.

García may have been an above-average all-around right fielder, but he got there creatively: Good defense, aggressive baserunning, and hard contact when he got wood on the ball. But because he swung the bat more or less indiscriminately, he never walked and contact was hard to come by.

I try not to be too much of a sabermetrics 2.0 stick-in-the-mud, but OBP is really important, particularly at a position like right field, which comes with high offensive expectations. The ability to get on base might be the single thing I’d value most in a corner player, and García just wasn’t good at it. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Player Development, Data Apprentice

Description:
The Texas Rangers are seeking multiple apprentices in Player Development. Each Apprentice will work with one of the Rangers’ minor league affiliates and report to the Minor League Video Coordinator. Apprentices will operate as an extension of the coaching staff and be a resource for both players and coaches. They are expected to manage the collection and application of data and technology at their respective affiliate and will gain experience across multiple areas of Baseball Operations.

Job Responsibilities:

Video & Technology Operation:

• Operate bat/ball tracking technology and baseball technology
• Capture game video and manage upload process for all games
• Gather high frame rate video of hitters and pitchers
• Manage data and collection process and assist with interpretation with coaches and players

Advance Scouting:

• Collaborate with coaching staff and player development staff to monitor player goals and player progress
• Conduct research and analysis, both at the request of staff and independently
• Use internal system tools to assist
• Communicate research in simple and concise manner to Minor League coaches, players, and Player Development staff

Systems Support:

• Support field staff with on-field responsibilities
• On field skills such as throwing BP is a plus
• Support field staff and players with coach education and various administration tasks
• Support Strength and Conditioning and Athletic Training staff to provide assistance and application to their fields of your finding

Education and Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree
• Demonstrated passion and understanding for biomechanics, pitching or hitting analysis or sports science.
• Spanish speaking a plus

Job Requirements:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Availability to start working in January 2024
• Ability to work seamlessly in teams
• Working knowledge of advanced baseball statistics and publicly available research
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office

To Apply:
Send your resume via email to texasrangersda@gmail.com

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Texas Rangers.

In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »