The Texas Rangers' Experiment Is Working, In Spite Of Itself
The Texas Rangers' Experiment Is Working, In Spite Of Itself
Though not everything is going according to plan, Texas has been one of baseball's best teams in 2023.
Sabermetrics tells us that the safest and most efficient way to build an MLB contender is to do it methodically. Scout and draft well, create a talent pipeline to the majors that constantly turns out great young prospects, help players use data to improve their weaknesses, and eventually leverage all of this into a self-perpetuating player-development machine that vies for the World Series every year.
But that takes a lot of time and effort to build up. Conversely, you could spend a ton of money and take bold chances on big-name stars who might get hurt, but who have the potential to deliver huge value if they stay healthy. Though it’s not the safe or cost-effective option, it has worked before — and could again.
The Texas Rangers have chosen the latter path. In fact, few teams have remade their rosters more dramatically over the past several seasons than Texas, and no team spent more to do it. But it came packaged with a lot of risk, as detailed by this thorough SportStorm video summarizing the pros and cons of the Rangers’ strategy:
So far, though, it is working. Or at least, something is working.
As of Monday morning, Texas led the AL West by 2 games over the defending-champion Houston Astros, and the team’s underlying stats were legit. According to BaseRuns, which predicts how a team “should” be doing based on the offensive events it produces and allows, the Rangers have been MLB’s second-best team so far, trailing only the history-chasing Tampa Bay Rays. As is often the case, Wins Above Replacement backs this up as well; Texas is second to Tampa in that department, too.
If success follows investment, then none of this should be especially surprising. According to Spotrac, Texas spent more dollars in free agency — $828.2 million, to be exact — over the 2021-22 and 2022-23 offseasons than any other team, outpacing the second-ranked New York Mets by $145.8 million. The Rangers also added the fourth-most net WAR over those offseasons, in terms of previous value from players added minus value lost from departing players.
It would be easy enough, then, to draw a tidy throughline between Texas’ talent splurge and its early success in 2023. But what’s fascinating about the Rangers is that their risky plan of picking up oft-injured veterans has hardly gone off without a hitch. The team is just winning anyway.
Among those offseason hauls, the crown jewels were Marcus Semien and Corey Seager in 2021-22 and Jacob deGrom in 2022-23, with Jon Gray, Mitch Garver, Nathan Eovaldi, Martín Pérez and Jake Odorizzi also expected to play important roles. But last season, Gray and Garver combined to spend 172 days on the injured list, costing Texas $7,210,798 in salary during that time. And so far this season, Seager, deGrom, Odorizzi and Garver have already piled up 157 days on the IL (costing $15,175,792) as the Rangers rank third in money spent on IL players.
This was always seemingly going to be the downside risk of Texas’ experiment: A deGrom injury here, a Seager injury there, and suddenly this team would turn from a young, relatively cheap loser into a loser with a bloated payroll and numerous untradeable contracts. At least the former is easy to pivot out of, if one were so inclined.
But the Rangers have shrugged off those worst-case scenarios. In part, that’s because some of their bets have paid big dividends; Semien ranks second in all of MLB so far with 9.5 WAR per 162 team games, a number that leads division-rival Shohei Ohtani’s combined batting+pitching output (9.3) and trails only Atlanta’s Ronald Acuna Jr. (9.8) overall. And when their big-ticket stars have been healthy, they’ve produced. deGrom might have missed time with right forearm tightness, for example, but he sports a stunning-even-by-deGrom-standards 1.58 FIP when he has taken the mound this season.
But most important of all have been the unsung signings, trade pickups and homegrown players who fill the gaps in Texas’ team-building tactic. This is no stars-and-scrubs roster; the “scrubs” are also playing like borderline stars.
Aside from Semien, Seager, deGrom and Gray, nine other members of the Rangers are on pace for 2.0 or more WAR, with seven on pace for 3.0+ (we’ll round Leody Taveras’ 2.99 up) and six on pace for 4.0+. All told, Texas has the most players performing at a 3-WAR pace of any MLB team this year, and it is tied for the most playing at a 4-WAR pace as well.
Again, the fact that Semien leads the Rangers’ potential 4-WAR club is no shock. He had 7.6 WAR during his 2019 breakout with the Oakland A’s, and posted 6.7 WAR during his lone season as a Toronto Blue Jay in 2021. But Eovaldi, Jonah Heim, Adolis García, Nathaniel Lowe, Ezequiel Duran and Dane Dunning were on nobody’s shortlist of All-Star candidates for this team. Yet without them, the Rangers would be floundering below .500 for the seventh consecutive season, most likely.
(Of course, if they do make the postseason — and on Monday morning they had a 69% chance, according to an average of the odds found at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference — it sure will be nice to be able to throw talent like deGrom at the opponent in a playoff series. This might be the biggest advantage of loading up on all that star-power.)
So has Texas’ grand, risky experiment in accelerated World Series investment been a success so far? While you can’t argue with the results, it’s clear that the Rangers’ free-spending strategy explains only a portion of the team’s turnaround. The rest of the credit belongs to players that flew under the radar, even as a star-studded core was being assembled.
Filed under: Baseball