A slow start after a deep October run. An entire viable starting rotation on the injured list. Intermittent and inconsistent performance from an aging future Hall of Famer. That describes the way the summer set up for the Texas Rangers. Also for the Houston Astros. Their paths diverged from there.
The Rangers never kicked it into gear despite some individual bright spots, and they finished off their season on Sunday with a 78-84 record a year after winning the World Series. A down season will always feel a bit better with a fresh pennant hanging in the rafters, but the team down in Houston presents a stark juxtaposition of the alternative, of what champions can aspire to in the final days of their reign.
Despite failing to reach 90 wins for the first time in a full season since 2016, the Astros won the AL West for the seventh time in eight seasons, and they head into October looking for their eighth consecutive ALCS appearance.
With a ring on their fingers, the challenge for franchise leaders from Chris Young to Corey Seager is different now, and success looks something like the Astros: repeated cracks in the playoffs, even when you don’t get all the breaks. So how wide is the gap? And what can the Rangers do to close it?
There’s one obvious problem with trying to emulate the Astros. You can’t plan your way into Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Alex Bregman. Then again, five years ago that sentence also would have included Carlos Correa and George Springer. High-profile departures have not stopped or even particularly slowed the franchise’s momentum.
And that hints at the enormous iceberg beneath the surface of every major-league team. The front office efforts that unearth potential, make good players better, and keep great players great have only gotten more complex and more important.
On average, MLB teams in 2024 used 48 hitters and 28 pitchers, up from 44 hitters and 23 pitchers just a decade ago. Getting the most out of every one of those players requires staying ahead of the pack in scouting, player development, transactions, and major-league coaching. It’s a lot of moving parts, but in many cases the parts of the roster you can’t pencil in during spring training wind up being the margin between a postseason appearance and an extra month of golf.
If last year’s title-winning team was inspiring in part because it showed what motivated spending can do, then this year’s comedown is a reminder of what big-ticket free agent moves can’t solve. Sometimes hitters still working to establish themselves are going to have down years, as Jonah Heim did. Sometimes hitters in their 30s are going to have down years that might portend slippage, as evidenced by Marcus Semien and Adolis Garcia. That all three hitters dipped into below-average territory, by park-adjusted OPS+, is both bad timing and a reminder that a core is almost never as stable as it appears.
New waves of talent have to be on the way all the time. Wyatt Langford, Josh Jung, and Evan Carter were expected to pick up the slack in the lineup just fine, only for the trio to be hampered by injury and rookie struggles. The Rangers might have even floated along in the standings long enough for Langford’s September surge to prove climactic if the pitching staff had more answers.
If you’re looking for the widest chasm between the Astros’ perpetual playoff machine and the Rangers’ current posture, it’s on the mound. With a laundry list of injured pitchers missing most or all of the season—Luis Garcia, Jose Urquidy, Cristian Javier, and Lance McCullers Jr. among them—the Astros not only tapped into organizational depth, but also steadily improved it.
First, they struck gold with 31-year-old Ronel Blanco. Then they invested time and starts in Hunter Brown and Spencer Arrighetti, who each made significant tweaks to their approaches and thrived down the stretch. A rotation that labored to a middling 4.24 ERA in the first half blasted to a 3.22 ERA after the All-Star break, second in MLB. Brown posted a 2.26 ERA in his 12 second-half starts while Arrighetti logged a 3.30 ERA in his final 11 starts after reaching the break with a 5.63 mark.
No one wants to spend the summer running a starting pitcher fire drill, but the Rangers were among an increasing number of major-league teams all too familiar with that reality. Young’s 2023 trade deadline moves were instrumental in producing a World Series winner, but that can’t really be a recurring plan. If the Rangers are going to sustain an open competitive window, it will require talent to bubble up from the minors—something that has not been common for this team on the pitching side.
Those within the organization, riding high with the ascent of Kumar Rocker, are optimistic that is about to change.
”For 15 years, we haven’t been able to develop a homegrown staff,” assistant general manager Ross Fenstermaker told the Morning News earlier this month. “There have been some successes along the way, but I think we’re closer to it than ever before. I think we are on the cusp of accomplishing something.”
The Rangers deserve credit for pouncing on the opportunity to draft Rocker, an elite college arm, after his unconventional entry into the professional ranks. But real change on the player development front will have to be proven by others. Can this team help Jack Leiter adjust to the competition level in the majors? Can it turn guys like Cody Bradford and Dane Dunning into a stable of trusted options instead of emergency fill-ins? Can it help a pitcher or two tap into unforeseen potential, as Houston did with Blanco and Framber Valdez before him?
This is the project for the Rangers. While they have Seager and Jacob deGrom in tow, they have to build the sort of backup that replenishes itself to make more of the years that don’t go according to plan. For better or worse, they have gotten an up-close look at what such a baseball machine looks like. Now Texas must construct its own.
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