What went wrong with the Rangers? From World Series champions to threatening a losing record in one season

Unless they win 10 of their final 12 games, the Texas Rangers will become the first defending World Series champion to finish the season with a losing record since the 2014 Boston Red Sox went 71-91. It has been a slog of a season for the Rangers, one in which their offense failed them (surprisingly) and the pitching plan never came together (less surprisingly).

“It’s been talked about so much, how difficult it is to repeat,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said over the weekend (via MLB.com). “There’s been a number of reasons why we’re not where we want to be. Every season is different, it takes a life of its own, whether guys aren’t having their normal years or injuries. Our goal is to finish strong here.”

It is indeed difficult to repeat — the 1998-2000 New York Yankees are MLB’s last repeat champion — and the Rangers weren’t the best team in baseball last season, right? They’re the champions, no one is taking that away, but they had an up and down regular season and didn’t clinch a postseason berth until Game 161. The 2023 Rangers were the epitome of a “get in and get hot” team.

Back in February, our R.J. Anderson identified the Rangers as a 2023 postseason team likely to miss the playoffs in 2024. SportsLine gave Texas a 63% chance to make the postseason. FanGraphs was much less enthusiastic at 38%. The defending champs they are, but the Rangers had a roster with some obvious pitfalls, and bottom came out this summer.

Here’s a look at what went wrong for the defending World Series champions this year, and a preview of what could come next.

The master pitching plan never came together

Last Friday, two-time Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom made his season debut following his second Tommy John surgery, and he looked like, well, Jacob deGrom. Overpowering, precise, unwavering. Like the best pitcher in the world, basically. And therein lies the problem: deGrom did not make his season debut until Sept. 13. The Rangers might — might — get 15 innings out of him in 2024.

it was no secret deGrom would not return until the second half of 2024 at the earliest. The Rangers also knew Max Scherzer would miss the first few weeks of the regular season after having back surgery in December. Despite that, they leaned further into the second-half reinforcements plan by signing Tyler Mahle a few days after Scherzer’s surgery. Mahle had Tommy John surgery last May and wasn’t expected to get back on a big-league mound until the middle of this season sometime.

“I think before the surgery, Tyler was really coming into his own, and a couple years ago he had a tremendous season,” Rangers GM Chris Young said after the Mahle signing (via MLB.com). “… We’re excited about where he is in his career with his age, the recovery he’s going to make, and the ability to hopefully help our team in the second half of this season and certainly in 2025 as a mid-rotation starter and with upside potential there.”

The Rangers were built to hang around the race in the first half, then make a run at the division title (or at least a wild-card spot) when deGrom, Mahle, and Scherzer were at full health. That never happened. Scherzer made his season debut on June 23, made eight starts, then landed back on the injured list with a shoulder issue in late July. Mahle made his season debut on Aug. 6 and lasted three starts before his shoulder acted up. deGrom has made just the one start so far.

deGrom, Mahle, and Scherzer have been effective when they’ve pitched, for the most part. They just haven’t pitch often enough, or at least as often as the Rangers hoped. Add in Cody Bradford missing more than three months with a back injury, Nathan Eovaldi close to a month with a groin strain, and Jon Gray visiting the injured list three separate times with groin and foot injuries, and the Rangers simply did not have enough quality starters to stay in the postseason race.

Counting on healthy pitchers to stay healthy is dicey enough. Counting on injured pitchers to get healthy and then stay healthy and perform is about as risky a gamble as you can take in this sport, and Rangers lost that bet. They tried it with some very high-upside pitchers — imagine if they were in the race and just now getting deGrom back — but, at the end of the day, the starting rotation was inadequate. The cavalry never came.

Too many underperformers on offense

A year ago, the Rangers scored 5.44 runs per game, third most in baseball behind the Atlanta Braves (5.85) and Los Angeles Dodgers (5.59). This year, they’re all the way down to 4.15 runs per game, 23rd in baseball. Their team OPS+ went from 116 (i.e. 16% above average) last year to 92 (8% below average) this year. Only the Braves and Tampa Bay Rays have larger year-to-year declines in runs per game and OPS+.

Texas went from a powerhouse offense a year ago to one of the game’s more feeble attacks this season, and that takes a total team effort. It’s not one or two players dragging the Rangers down. A total of 276 players had at least 400 plate appearances in both 2023 and 2024, and five of the 20 largest year-to-year declines in weighted runs created plus (wRC+, or a more finely tuned version of OPS+) belong to Rangers. This is how you sap an offense:

Perhaps it’s unfair to include Seager, who went from MVP caliber in 2023 to “only” All-Star level in 2024, but that is part of the reason the Rangers are going to miss the postseason, right? Seager isn’t performing as well as he did a year ago. Heim, García, and Taveras have been abject disasters. Semien has at least provided league average-ish offense in his down year.

There’s also the DH spot. A year ago, the Rangers received a .220/.315/.388 line and 26 homers from their designated hitters, which is not great by any means, but it looks like Barry Bonds compared to the .200/.263/.309 line and 13 homers the Rangers have gotten from their DHs in 2024. Defense-first fourth outfielder Travis Jankowski is fourth on the team in DH starts this year, which tells you how things are going for Texas offensively.

It certainly didn’t help that third baseman Josh Jung missed four months with a broken wrist after being hit by a pitch four games into the season. Jung’s had an unfortunate knack for fluke injuries. He missed most of 2022 after hurting his shoulder during an offseason workout. Last year, he missed roughly six weeks when a line drive broke his thumb. The thumb and the wrist were bad-luck injuries, but they happened, and they cost Jung a lot of time.

The Rangers will have to ask some hard questions this offseason. Where does García, last year’s ALCS MVP, fit long-term? What about Heim? Nathaniel Lowe is hitting .267/.362/.391 with 13 homers a year after hitting .262/.360/.414 with 17 homers a year ago. Can Texas can continue with a first baseman struggling to slug .400? It worked last season, so maybe, but when Young and his staff take a step back and evaluate the season, no paths to improvement should be dismissed.

The kids didn’t make an immediate impact

The Rangers won the World Series last year, then entered this season with two of the very best prospects in baseball in Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford. Our R.J. Anderson ranked them the third- and fourth-best prospects in the game. Carter, we saw what he could do last year. He made his MLB debut last Sept. 8, slashed .306/.413/.645 in 23 regular season games, then hit .300/.417/.500 in October. Carter hit third in nine of the team’s 17 postseason games.

Langford was the No. 4 pick in the 2023 draft — the Rangers moved up three spots in the lottery to get that No. 4 pick — and he was so good in the minors that Texas considered adding him to the World Series roster when García suffered an oblique injury in Game 3. Langford looked big league ready in spring training (.365/.423/.714) and earned a spot on the Opening Day roster. The third-highest scoring team in baseball was set to add two of the best prospects in the game to their lineup.

Alas and alack, Carter and Langford did not provide the immediate impact that so many expected, perhaps unfairly. It’s hard to be a rookie in this league (look at Jackson Holliday). Here is what Carter and Langford have done this season, and what the ZiPS projection system pegged as their true talent level entering 2024:

ZiPS is just one projection system, but for my money it’s the best out there, and it projected both Carter and Langford to be comfortably above-average hitters right out of the gate. Instead, Carter massively underperformed even the most modest expectations before a back injury ended his season in late May. Langford’s power has yet to arrive. He’s sitting on 11 homers through 150 team games, or one more than he hit in 44 minor-league games a year ago.

To be clear, I am not blaming Carter or Langford for the Rangers missing the postseason. I don’t think it’s fair to count on a rookie, even prospects as touted as these two, to come and immediately move the needle. What Carter did last season was special, not the norm. Give the Rangers a truth serum though, and I think they’d tell you they figured they’d get more out of Langford this year than he provided (and Carter, though his injury complicates things). Langford’s glove has been great. The bat only so-so.

What’s next?

The Rangers took care of an important piece of offseason business last week when they signed Young to a contract extension. It was a bit odd he came into the season as a lame duck after winning the World Series, but no matter, the extension got done, and now Young and his staff can get to work improving the 2025 Rangers. When you have deGrom, Seager, and Semien signed long-term and still in their prime (or close to their prime), next year is an all-in year. There will be no taking a step back and rebuilding.

Eovaldi, the team’s most reliable starter the last two years, needs a new contract assuming he doesn’t pick up his team friendly $20 million player option. Late-inning stalwarts Kirby Yates and David Robertson were so good this season …

… but they’re also 37 and 39, respectively. Can the Rangers bring them back and expect similar health and performance next year, realistically? And if not, how do they rebuild their bullpen, because it needs an awful lot of work. The perfectly cromulent Andrew Heaney will be a free agent as well, ditto José Leclerc and Scherzer. A lot of important pitchers are set to hit the market.

The Rangers also have to figure out what to do with García and Heim, the latter of whom has seen his defensive value tumble in addition to slipping with the bat. García put up a legendary performance last postseason, though his plate indiscipline has always left him vulnerable to prolonged slumps, and this season has felt like one long slump. Is Carter, Langford, and Josh Smith the long-term answer in the outfield? The infield is crowded and the Rangers have to get Smith in the lineup somewhere.

As much as anything, the Rangers have to figure out why so much of their lineup underperformed in 2024 after winning a World Series in 2023. Was it just a blip and a series of down years for various players? Is there an underlying approach/coaching issue? Carter, Jung, and Langford is one heck of a young core. Figure out how to keep Carter and Jung healthy, and help Carter and Langford level up, and that’s the kind of core that can win division titles, especially when paired with a player like Seager.

Also, where does Jack Leiter fit? It looks increasingly unlikely he will live up to the expectations associated with being the No. 2 pick in the draft, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be a productive big leaguer. Leiter and Kumar Rocker being positive contributors in 2025 is the kind of thing that can vault the Rangers back into contention. How much do they want to count on Rocker in his first full year after Tommy John surgery and on Leiter in general? I suppose we’ll find out in the coming months.

Young and his staff will have to rebuild pitching depth, first and foremost, because I’m not sure you can count on deGrom and Mahle to make 30 starts at this point in their careers. They also have to figure out how to get the 2025 offense to look more like the 2023 offense and less like the 2024 offense, and what personnel changes that might entail. The Rangers will miss the playoffs this year but they’re not far off from being postseason caliber. The roster is loaded upside. Raising the floor is imperative.