The Loss of Corey Seager Threatens the Rangers’ Hot Start

Corey Seager
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

The Rangers have spent virtually all of the young season atop the AL West, and they solidified their position this weekend by taking two out of three games from the Astros in Houston. Though they’re off to their best start in seven years, they lost Corey Seager to a left hamstring strain last week and may not get him back for a month, threatening the momentum they’ve built.

The 28-year-old Seager came up limping while running out a fifth-inning double against the Royals last Tuesday; he grabbed at his left hamstring shortly after rounding first base, hopped his way to second in awkward fashion, and then started back to the Rangers’ dugout before the trainer could reach him. On Wednesday, general manager Chris Young told the media that an MRI revealed Seager suffered a Grade 2 strain.

This is unfortunately an all-too-familiar position for Seager — on the injured list — and an all-too-familiar injury for him as well. While a member of the Dodgers in 2019, he missed a month with a similar left hamstring strain, not to be confused with the myriad other injuries the shortstop suffered with the Dodgers, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament requiring Tommy John surgery in 2018 and a right hand fracture in ’21. After playing 157 games and winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2016 and then 145 games the next year, Seager played in a total of 307 games out of a possible 546 from ’18 to ’21, the equivalent of 91 games over a full season.

After signing a 10-year, $325 million deal in December 2021, Seager was healthy enough to play in 151 games last year, his highest total since 2016, but despite clubbing a career-high 33 homers, he slumped to a .245/.317/.455 line, setting full-season lows in all three slash stats. That was still good for a respectable 117 wRC+, five points higher than his injury-marred 2019, but it wasn’t exactly what the Rangers had in mind when they signed him.

As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello wrote in February, Seager may have been hurt by infield shifts more than any other hitter last year and might be the biggest beneficiary of the new anti-shift rule. He led the majors in both batted balls against a shift (481) and pulled grounders against a shift (107) and collected just six hits (!) for a .056 batting average. Take those away — as if we could — and his batting line would have been .286/.367/.543.

With the new rules in place, Seager is 2-for-7 on pulled grounders, which doesn’t tell us much but is a step in the right direction. Likewise regarding his overall .359/.469/.538 line; through Sunday he ranked fourth in the AL in on-base percentage and sixth in both batting average and wRC+ (182), but once the Rangers play on Monday, he’ll slip below the qualifying threshold. His batted ball totals are short of the point of stabilizing, but so long as we’re here, we’ll note that he’s been lighting up Statcast, with a 95.2 mph average exit velocity, 18.2% barrel rate, and 54.5% hard-hit rate. Particularly when he’s so locked in, losing him now really stings.

The Rangers were 7–4 when Seager went down and are 9–6 now, making this their best 15-game start since 2016, when they went 95–67 and won the AL West. The division title has been the property of the Astros in every full season since, though the A’s snuck in a first-place finish in the 60-game 2020 season. Texas, meanwhile, managed just a .429 winning percentage from 2017 to ’22, the sixth-worst record in baseball and roughly the equivalent of a 69–93 season. After committing half a billion dollars to Seager and second baseman Marcus Semien last year, the team went 68–94, an eight-game improvement over 2021… yet finished further from first place, as the Astros improved from 95 wins to 106.

The Rangers have no easy way to replace Seager, but then which team can do that with their lineup’s centerpiece? In our preseason Depth Charts, we projected Semien to get 77 PA at shortstop, the position he played regularly from 2015 to ’20 and for 17 games last year, often while Seager DH’ed. But both Semien and manager Bruce Bochy have already indicated a preference for keeping him at the keystone, so instead the plan is for lefty-swinging utilityman Josh H. Smith to take most of the starts at shortstop, with righty-swinging utilityman Ezequiel Duran contributing as well; the pair did the same in left field for the season’s first nine games to help cover for Leody Taveras‘ absence due to an oblique strain. Both players were rookies last year, and neither has hit much at the major league level. The 25-year-old Smith slashed a meager .197/.307/.249 (68 wRC+) in 73 games last year, though his minor league track record is strong enough that he projects to bat a respectable .240/.333/.357 (102 wRC+). Thus far this season, he’s just 4-for-26 with four walks and five (!) hit-by-pitches. The 23-year-old Duran played in 58 games for the Rangers last year, hitting .236/.277/.365 (82 wRC+); he projects to hit .241/.286/403 (94 wRC+) but so far is just 3-for-20.

The loss of Seager is magnified by the sluggish starts of Semien (.237/.270/.356, 68 wRC+) and Adolis García (.218/.267/.400, 78 wRC+); the outfield as a whole has combined for just a 76 wRC+, the majors’ sixth-lowest mark. First baseman Nathaniel Lowe, third baseman Josh Jung, and the catching tandem of Jonah Heim and Mitch Garver (the latter of whom additionally shares DH duties) have bolstered the offense, which ranks third in the AL at 5.60 runs per game. A closer look shows that Texas’ current 98 wRC+ merely matches that of last year’s team, and according to BaseRuns, the team’s 0.96-run per game gap between its actual scoring and projected scoring is the majors’ largest, nearly double that of the second-ranked Red Sox:

Actual and BaseRuns Scoring and Run Prevention
Team W L Win% RS/G RA/G BaseRuns R/G BaseRuns RA/G Dif R/G Dif RA/G
Rangers 9 6 .600 5.60 4.27 4.64 4.14 0.96 -0.13
Red Sox 8 8 .500 5.44 5.25 4.93 5.57 0.51 0.32
Reds 6 9 .400 4.93 5.27 4.45 5.44 0.48 0.17
Diamondbacks 9 7 .563 4.31 4.44 3.85 4.55 0.46 0.11
Cubs 8 6 .571 5.21 4.07 4.85 3.60 0.36 -0.47
Angels 7 8 .467 5.07 4.33 4.72 4.07 0.35 -0.26
Dodgers 8 8 .500 5.31 4.19 5.00 4.48 0.31 0.29
Rays 14 2 .875 7.13 2.63 6.88 2.61 0.25 -0.02
Nationals 5 11 .313 3.88 5.13 3.70 4.92 0.18 -0.21
Mets 10 6 .625 4.69 3.94 4.53 4.77 0.16 0.83
Rockies 5 11 .313 3.94 5.63 3.78 4.83 0.16 -0.80
Tigers 5 9 .357 3.57 6.21 3.43 5.95 0.14 -0.26
Brewers 11 5 .688 4.81 3.06 4.70 3.35 0.11 0.29
Braves 12 4 .750 5.44 3.94 5.35 3.92 0.09 -0.02
Mariners 8 8 .500 4.63 4.13 4.55 3.85 0.08 -0.28
Twins 10 6 .625 3.94 2.81 3.88 3.15 0.06 0.34
Padres 8 9 .471 4.18 4.29 4.15 4.57 0.03 0.28
Royals 4 12 .250 3.38 5.13 3.47 5.31 -0.09 0.18
Astros 7 9 .438 4.81 4.38 4.94 4.67 -0.13 0.29
Giants 5 9 .357 4.93 5.36 5.09 4.76 -0.16 -0.60
Yankees 10 6 .625 4.63 3.06 4.81 3.50 -0.18 0.44
Guardians 9 7 .563 4.63 4.75 4.83 4.40 -0.20 -0.35
Orioles 9 7 .563 5.88 5.44 6.13 5.21 -0.25 -0.23
Pirates 9 7 .563 4.13 4.44 4.38 4.84 -0.25 0.40
White Sox 6 10 .375 4.63 6.06 5.03 6.42 -0.40 0.36
Blue Jays 10 6 .625 5.00 5.00 5.41 5.20 -0.41 0.20
Athletics 3 13 .188 3.88 7.81 4.43 7.15 -0.55 -0.66
Marlins 8 8 .500 3.06 4.69 3.63 4.37 -0.57 -0.32
Cardinals 7 9 .438 4.19 4.63 4.79 4.95 -0.60 0.32
Phillies 6 10 .375 4.69 5.69 5.40 5.23 -0.71 -0.46

One factor that helps to account for that gap is that the Rangers have hit .321/.386/.557 with runners in scoring position. With or without Seager, it’s not much of a stretch to say that they won’t maintain that.

Where this year’s Rangers team shows the most promise in improving upon last year’s is that they’ve invested in run prevention this time around, committing about $265 million to wooing Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, and Andrew Heaney and retaining Martín Pérez after he broke out to become a first-time All-Star. The individual stats of those four and holdover Jon Gray are all over the place thus far, but while their 3.67 FIP and 4.34 ERA don’t look like much to write home about, those figures respectively rank fifth and seventh in the AL, vast improvements from last year, when they placed 13th in ERA and 12th in FIP. Even bigger things should be expected — the unit did rank third behind only the two New York teams in our preseason Positional Power Rankings — but for now the best news is that everyone’s healthy, no small matter when considering that bunch. After a dud of a debut on Opening Day against the Phillies (3.2 innings, five runs), deGrom has pitched much better against the Orioles and Royals.

The Rangers aren’t the only team in the AL West that’s without a lineup linchpin. The Astros are missing Jose Altuve after he fractured his right thumb in the World Baseball Classic, and so far they’re just 7–9; meanwhile, neither the Angels (7–8) nor the Mariners (8–8) have come out of the gate strong in what projects to be a much tighter division race than we’ve seen in recent years. The Rangers have gotten an early leg up, but we’ll see if they can keep things rolling until Seager gets back.





Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jay_jaffe... and BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.

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Carson Kahlamember
11 months ago

And then they come out and sweep the Royals, Yes its the royals but still they look to be doing okay