Is There Hope For the Rangers Offense?

Any fan, analyst, or baseball executive would be hard-pressed to say that the Rangers pitching staff has failed to do its job in 2025. The rotation has been especially solid, ranking first in baseball in ERA, seventh in FIP, and sixth in WAR. If the bullpen hasn’t been as dominant, they’ve also improved significantly compared to last season, already accumulating almost as many wins above replacement as they did in the entire 2024 season. And yet the Rangers, less than two years removed from soaking each other with champagne to celebrate a World Series championship, sit below .500. A losing season here would be the franchise’s eighth in the last nine years, its worst showing since the move from Washington to Texas. The bats have let the team down, ranking near the bottom of baseball, and what’s worse, the underperforming offense consists mainly of players who the Rangers wanted in their lineup. So is there hope for a turnaround, or will the Rangers need to find new solutions to their run-scoring woes?

First, let’s assess just how lousy the offense has been. Well, ranking 25th in the majors in runs scored is their sunniest number. The Rangers rank 28th in on-base percentage, 27th in slugging percentage, and 28th in wRC+ at 80. The latter number outpaces only the Pirates and Rockies, two teams you don’t especially want to model your ballclub after. While the team has played solid defense, the abundance of leather hasn’t come close to making up for the shortage of wood, leaving the Rangers’ position players 25th in the league in WAR. What little offense there has been has come in very short bursts:

When a team of established players struggles, you can frequently point to injuries as a leading reason why. That’s not the case here. While the team has had injuries to deal with, most notably that of Corey Seager, many of the other primary offensive cogs — Marcus Semien, Wyatt Langford, Adolis García, Jake Burger, Jonah Heim, Josh Jung — have mostly been present and accounted for. It’s nice to imagine that these two months might just be a bit of a fluke, and that the offensive core will right itself, but the early season struggles have been enough to have a serious impact on the group’s expectations going forward, suggesting that bad luck is not a significant part of the equation. Take a look at now their projections have changed since the start of the season. I’m using ZiPS here because, well, that’s the system I have access to. I’ll also note that there will be some slight differences between these numbers and the ones you see on the player pages, since I’m using the more robust ZiPS in-season model that can’t run every night:

None of the core players here have seen their outlook improve this season, an unusual consistency of bleakness (Taveras has since gone to the Mariners as a waiver claim). To illustrate this point, let’s take a plausible Rangers lineup with everyone healthy and put it through the old Baseball Musings lineup simulator, with an adjustment for the fact that run scoring is down a little across the league:

Based on preseason projections, you’d expect this fictitious lineup to score 4.86 runs per game. Now, however, it’s down to 4.57 runs per game. The difference amounts to roughly 47 runs over the course of the season, or nearly five wins. For a team that is currently below .500 and was only projected for 85 wins coming into the season, that’s a highly concerning change.

It’s also not due to the specific lineup I chose here; a version that includes Josh Smith or Ezequiel Duran or Alejandro Osuna for the benched García doesn’t flip the script. I went through all 51 actual batting orders the Rangers have used this season, and they all lost between 5-8% of their expected runs scored per game, similar to the 6% of the example lineup.

Unfortunately, if the Rangers are going to make major changes to their personnel, the Triple-A roster is unlikely to be a source of help. Only two players with at least 50 plate appearances have a minor league translation this year that comes out to an OPS above .650, Justin Foscue and Blaine Crim. Crim’s been the best performer, with a .260/.311/.469 translation, but the Rangers already briefly experimented with him and decided to cut it short after just five games. In any case, ZiPS only projects a .237/.293/.388 line from Crim, hardly a panacea.

So a big change to the roster looks like it will have to come from another team. The problem, however, is that the pickings are slim on most of the teams that clearly aren’t going to be in a pennant race. A deal with the Orioles might have the most potential, with Cedric Mullins and Ryan O’Hearn free agents at the end of the season, but I don’t think the O’s are quite at the point where they’re thinking of throwing in the towel.

Nathan Eovaldi’s injury makes the run scoring issues for the Rangers even more urgent. Eovaldi looks headed for an All-Star appearance if he’s healthy, and losing him removes a key part of the rotation that has kept the team afloat this season. Without a major, unexpected turnaround, the team’s best approach might be becoming sellers rather than buyers. Unlike teams like the White Sox or Rockies, the Rangers have a lot to offer that could help them restock the farm system. I don’t actually think the team will go that route, however; the last time the Rangers went into a rebuilding period, they did what I called a “skinny” rebuild rather than a massive teardown.

A World Series victory goes a long way, but for the Texas Rangers, that championship is the lone bright spot in a decade of lackluster baseball. The offense is not going to fix itself, and if the Rangers just wait around for everything to work out, it’s likely that 2025 will end in disappointment.