This Texas-Sized Rookie Rivalry Isn’t Much of One... Yet
This Texas-Sized Rookie Rivalry Isn’t Much of One... Yet
In the much-ballyhooed Evan Carter/Wyatt Langford pairing, last year's postseason hero is further along right now.
One of the coolest parts of the 2023 Texas Rangers’ World Series run — and there were plenty to choose from — was the far-beyond-his-years play of rookie outfielder Evan Carter. Carter, who wasn’t even called up to the majors until the first week of September, proceeded to hit .306 with a 1.058 OPS down the stretch of the regular season as Texas pulled out of its late-summer tailspin and made the playoffs. Then Carter appeared in all 17 postseason games for the Rangers, hitting .300 with a .917 OPS as Texas marched to the championship.
Incredibly, after all of that, Carter was still eligible to win Rookie of the Year honors this season. (Rookie eligibility is based on regular-season at-bats and service time, so Carter’s postseason heroics didn’t affect his status.) But in spring training, the biggest threat to him winning the award looked like it could be a teammate — and one at the same position, no less: Wyatt Langford, a higher-ranked prospect in both the ESPN and FanGraphs rankings. When Langford out-OPS-ed Carter in spring training, 1.137 to .740, it represented an early edge in a rare rookie rivalry between stellar young players on the same squad.
But nearly a month into the 2024 season, Carter has clearly reclaimed his status as the superior freshman. Here’s the tale of the tape between Carter and Langford so far (as of Monday afternoon):
While Langford has driven in more runs and has the higher batting average, Carter has the superior numbers overall, sweeping Langford in isolated power, walk rate, strikeout rate, weighted runs created plus (wRC+) and Wins Above Replacement (WAR) per 162 team games.
(Also, umpire Angel Hernandez didn’t help Langford in this already infamous plate appearance a few weeks ago.)
The Rangers would have preferred it to be a more even matchup. At 12-11 on Monday, they were just a game over .500 and were already staring once again at coin-flip style playoff odds (53.3%) despite the poor play of the rival Houston Astros. If Langford was giving them more at designated hitter, a position where they rank 25th in WAR, they’d be better able to put more space between themselves and the rest of a division that has been highly mediocre so far.
But Langford’s numbers do contain signs of the touted prospect that had a World Series phenom taking a back seat in the spring. He ranks in the 88th percentile of batters in maximum exit velocity, showcasing the raw power that scouts gave a “70” on the 20-80 scale. He also ranks above the 70th percentile in avoiding whiffs and not chasing balls outside the zone — good building blocks of plate discipline for a 22-year-old. When he figures more things out, he could give the Rangers a Carter-style jolt later in the season.
And for all the talk of dueling rookies, the first guy in the clubhouse to cheer Langford on when that happens might be Carter.
Though the two hadn’t met until the Rangers gathered in Arizona this spring, it turns out that Carter and Langford have a lot in common beyond their baseball talent. (Both grew up in small towns, for instance, and played football in addition to baseball. Both are also married.)
“We hang out a bunch,” Carter told the Dallas Morning News during the spring. “He’s really nice, I enjoy being around him.”
“Hopefully we’re teammates for a long time here,” Langford said.
But despite Langford being born 288 days before Carter, the elder prospect does appear to require going through his own version of the maturation process that Carter had to figure out on the fly last year.
“I mean, he’s older than me,” Carter said in the spring. “Is he going to ask me questions? Probably not. ‘Hey man, you’re a year older than me, look to me.’ [I think] he’s going to do what I would do, look toward Corey [Seager] or Marcus [Semien] or Nate [Lowe].”
The wealth of both veteran and rookie talent on Texas — plus an experienced manager in Bruce Bochy — means Langford will get plenty of help to try to catch Carter in that Rookie of the Year race. And the Rangers will welcome that battle, whenever it happens in earnest.
Filed under: Baseball