The Rangers Picked a Bad Time to Slow Down

It’s been a month of upheaval in the AL West. As Jay Jaffe detailed, the Mariners are playing their best baseball of the season right now. A 9-1 stretch has carried them to the top of the division, turning what had been a two-team race all year into a three-way showdown. It’s the most competitive division race remaining, so a lot of people searching for a jolt of excitement down the stretch will be looking west.

Of course, Seattle’s climb to the top of the division didn’t happen in a vacuum. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and at the moment, that reaction is happening in Texas. The Astros spent the last week treading water, which allowed the Mariners to roar past them. The Rangers did them one worse; they’ve fallen into a 3-9 tailspin that turned a season-long lead in the division into a deficit.

It’s always tempting to turn a 3-9 stretch – or a 4-8 stretch, or really any stretch that takes a team out of first place – into a referendum on the squad. The Rangers should have seen this coming, the thinking goes. This team? With these weaknesses? It was always going to happen. But let’s withhold judgment for a few minutes and break it down like this: What’s going on in Arlington, and what has to change to turn the team’s fortunes around?

First, we have to define the time frame we’re talking about. I arbitrarily chose August 14, about two weeks ago. Why? A win that day pushed them to 3.5 games ahead of Houston, their largest divisional lead since the middle of July. Those pesky Astros had been clinging to Texas’ coattails all year, but perhaps a series of deadline moves had finally moved the Rangers into the driver’s seat. Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, and Chris Stratton were just the boost the team needed.

Since then, the bottom has dropped out. Texas has gone 3-9 while getting outscored by 20 runs. Those 12 games might not hold the key to understanding what’s gone wrong, but if we examine them and strip out what’s gone right, maybe we can find some indication of what needs to change if the Rangers are going to trade blows with the Mariners and Astros down the stretch.

The major thing that has gone right is the same thing that’s been going right all year: Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Nathaniel Lowe have been pulling their weight. They’ve each played every game, and they’re the top three hitters in plate appearances over that span, naturally enough. Seager has been incandescent all year, and “all year” includes the past two weeks, during which he’s slashed .340/.431/.660. Add Mitch Garver to that list; while alternating between catcher and DH, he’s surged offensively in the second half.

If you split any season into small enough parts, you’ll find some weaknesses, because that’s just how baseball works. Jonah Heim and Adolis García, two of the players whose success has fueled the Rangers’ rise this year, have had a rough few weeks. Heim is hitting .167/.219/.267, and García’s .155/.191/.311 line is no better. But again, we’re talking about 11 games here. You can’t focus too much on any one player. In aggregate, the offense has produced roughly four runs per game – not great, but hardly disastrous – and an 87 wRC+.

If you’re diagnosing what ails Texas’ offense, you’ll likely come away with the same view that unbiased observers already had coming into the season: The team needs more contributions from the outfield. The problem isn’t so much that García had a down stretch; it’s that when he’s having a down stretch, there’s no one to pick up the slack. With Josh Jung’s injury, the Rangers are short on everyday regulars. Leody Taveras, Robbie Grossman, and Travis Jankowski are covering 2.5 spots (two outfielder positions and DH, more or less), and they’re not quite cut out for the job. They’ve produced an aggregate 48 wRC+ in this stretch. Ezequiel Duran, who would normally send one of those guys to the bench, is playing third base full-time until Jung returns. The offense is just one horse short, in other words.

That’s hardly enough of a problem to explain the team’s recent poor form, though. And another common explanation, their record in one-run games, doesn’t pass muster either. The Rangers are 1-3 in one-run games during their recent swoon, but that still leaves six multi-run losses, and it’s not like all of those were close. As you might expect, the pitching staff has struggled mightily.

It’s no coincidence that the Rangers focused on adding pitchers at the trade deadline. They spent the offseason upgrading the rotation, only to be stymied by Jacob deGrom’s season-ending UCL tear and a forearm strain that has sidelined Nathan Eovaldi since July 18. Montgomery and Scherzer were as much backfill for those two starters as an attempt to take a step forward.

Fortuitously for Texas, those deadline additions have been the class of the rotation even in the team’s recent dip. Montgomery has made three starts and compiled a 1.86 ERA; Scherzer is second on the team in starter ERA and FIP over that stretch. The problem? He’s second despite two poor performances, at least measured by Scherzer’s exacting standards: a combined 10.2 innings, a 4.22 ERA, and a 3.55 FIP thanks to control issues (he’s issued five walks).

Again, that’s the good pitching. The rest of the rotation has been somewhere between bad and unfathomable. Jon Gray has a 4.76 ERA thanks to an awful start against the Diamondbacks (four innings, five earned runs), though he’s been good in his other two turns. Andrew Heaney hasn’t made it out of the fifth inning in his last two starts. Dane Dunning has allowed seven earned runs in his last nine innings of work. Excluding Montgomery, the starters aren’t providing good run prevention or even good volume; they’re putting up ERAs in the sixes and leaving plenty of work for the bullpen to do afterwards, a rough combination.

And oh, that poor bullpen. It’s been a team weakness all year; trading for Aroldis Chapman helped, but it’s still lacking both top-end arms and depth. Asked to bail out every non-Montgomery starter seemingly every day, the unit has been unable to answer the bell. Things have gotten really ugly. The bullpen ERA in this span is an unsightly 6.41, and this isn’t some batted ball luck issue; their 5.97 FIP is equally shocking.

ERA is a particularly silly way to think about relievers in short stints, but the headline number still astounds: 10 relievers have appeared in this stretch, and six of them have an ERA above six. Six of them have a FIP above six. It’s not just home run luck, either; only two relievers have an xFIP below 4.00 in that span. Chapman and José Leclerc are trudging along; everyone else has been getting crushed into orbit.

What’s amazing to me about this slump is that it perfectly matches the questions that analysts and prognosticators had about the team’s chances coming into 2023. No one doubted their infield, and the starting rotation looked dominant if everyone stayed healthy. But the outfield and the bullpen were question marks, and of course health is never a given, particularly when it comes to starters.

Those weaknesses haven’t doomed the team to a failed season; they’re 74-57 despite these exact spots being question marks all year. But they’ve turned the route to the playoffs from a downhill glide into an uphill march. No team in the American League has seen their playoff odds shrink more over this stretch than Texas’ 29.3 percentage point decrease (the Blue Jays are second, naturally). What looked like an automatic playoff berth is now a 2-in-3 chance.

If Rangers fans feel like they’ve gotten a raw deal, I sympathize with them. Sure, the team came into the year with some clear weak points, but the strong points have more than covered for them in aggregate. We’re not talking about some team skating by thanks to an unsustainable string of one-run victories; they have the third-best run differential in the majors, and their underlying component stats are even better than that. Only the Braves have a better BaseRuns record, which is calculated by looking at individual outcomes on a per-PA basis rather than at how many runs have actually scored. These are no paper champions; they’ve been performing like a top team all season.

That’s how baseball works, though. Those games are all water under the bridge, their outcomes set in stone. The Rangers have gotten to the end of August in playoff position, but only barely; they’re tied with the Astros, and the two of them occupy the second and third Wild Card spots. The Blue Jays lurk 2.5 games behind. Of the four playoff hopefuls jockeying for three spots (Texas, Houston, Seattle, and Toronto), the Rangers have the toughest remaining schedule.

Luckily, they also have one of the best teams in the American League. Bullpen holes notwithstanding, weak outfield taken into account, our Depth Charts projections think the Rangers are the sixth-best AL team going forward, and the 10th-best team overall. They’re within a margin of error of the other teams they’re contending with on that front; we’re talking a handful of games over an entire season, little enough difference as to feel negligible over a single month.

That should be the biggest takeaway of the past few weeks for the Rangers: At the end of the day, none of this might matter. A few weeks ago, they were locked in a tight race for the AL West title, one that a series or two might determine. Today, the same thing is true. A few weeks ago, they had a team that was among the top teams in the AL, a bona fide World Series contender. Today, the same thing is true. Injuries haven’t derailed them. Their superstars haven’t turned to dust. Eovaldi and Jung are still slated to return before season’s end. Things might not be great, but they’re far from horrible.

That’s wonderful. Too many of these “this team crashed” stories end with no hope. The Cardinals, Mets, Padres, and Yankees have slumped their way out of relevance this year. A few rough weeks in Cleveland have buried the Guardians. But the Rangers are too good, and they’ve played too well, to fall victim to that fate.

Could their bullpen betray them further, keeping them out of the playoffs after all? Most definitely. Could the offense grind to a halt? Of course. But in a season most notable for would-be contenders and their fatal flaws, the Rangers don’t quite fit the bill. They’re still a playoff-caliber team regardless of their recent form. The last month of the season promises to be tremendously exciting. Don’t count the Rangers out of it just because they picked a bad few weeks for a slump.