Requiem for the 2025 Texas Rangers

Well, guys, I think its over.

I mean yeah, sure, the Rangers haven’t been officially eliminated yet. Its possible for them to make the playoffs. Fangraphs has their playoff odds at 4.3% — roughly the same odds as Ezequiel Duran drawing a walk in any given plate appearance this season.

So not impossible. But pretty damn unlikely.

The Rangers are sitting at a 79-74 record right now. Frustratingly, they are significantly underperforming their expected won-loss record based on their run differential — with 653 runs scored and 566 runs allowed, they would be expected to have a record of 86-67, a seven game improvement over where they are currently. Were the Rangers’ record actually 86-67, they’d be up two games in the A.L. West, and tied with New York for the second best record in the American League.

We’d be making playoff plans, rather than wondering what if.

Texas won a lot of blowout games — they were 26-14 in games decided by 5 runs or more. They were 53-60 in all other games, including a 21-26 record in one run games.

Maddening.

The offense was bad for much of the early part of the season. How good or bad the team’s offense and pitching staff was depends on how much you emphasize 2025 in your park factors for the Shed — B-R has the team with a 102 OPS+ and a 106 ERA+, while Fangraphs puts the team wRC+ at 94 and ERA- at 86, an awfully large disagreement — but that’s a discussion for another day.

Where did things go sideways? When the Rangers beat the Astros at home on May 15 by a score of 1-0, they were at 24-21 on the season, a half game back of the Mariners in the A.L. West and a half game back of the Twins for WC3.

Texas then lost 14 of their next 19 games, dropping to 29-35 on the season, 6.5 games back in the West and 5.5 games back of WC3. The only American League teams with a worse record than the Rangers were the Orioles, the A’s and the White Sox.

That was the low-water mark in terms of record for the Rangers in 2025. Texas has gone 50-39 since then, even with this most recent four game losing streak — a 91 win pace over the course of a season. Hell, they started the year 14-9, and were two games up in the West at that point. Going 15-26 in between — which includes that 5-14 stretch — put them in an enormous hole.

An enormous hole that they didn’t even really begin to climb out of for another month. The farthest out in the division the Rangers have been this season was 11 games, after a 6-5 walkoff loss to the Angels on July 7. The team was 8.5 games back on August 16. They whittled that lead down to as little as two games last week.

It was a remarkable effort by a team that has been incredibly streaky this year. After that July 7 walkoff loss, the Rangers went on a 12-3 run that overlapped with the All Star break. After treading water for about a week, the team then lost 8 of 9 and 11 of 14, with the last of those losses coming in the August 22 game against the Royals where both Evan Carter and Marcus Semien were lost for the year. They were back under .500 at 63-66, seemingly out of the playoff race.

Then came the comeback, featuring the Little Rascals. A 16-4 tear, during a time when the team was missing Carter and Semien, lost Nathan Eovaldi and Corey Seager, saw Adolis Garcia land on the injured list. A team regularly running out what looked like an away game spring training lineup scrapped and fought and got back into the race.

Four days ago, the Rangers went to Houston for a three game series that we all knew was going to make or break the season. All three games were winnable. None of the three were won. And that was church.

The Rangers put themselves in a big hole with their poor stretch of play in May and early June. They had almost clawed their way out of it when they blew their nine game homestand in early August, losing six of the final seven games of the homestand, including a sweep at the hands of the Phillies.

That performance on that homestand hurt. Of the six losses, three were by one run and two were by two runs. One of those two run losses was the Phil Maton meltdown game against Arizona, the game where the Rangers were up 4-2 in the ninth with two outs, with Maton having struck out the three batters he’d faced to that point on nine pitches, before a HR-HBP-walk-HR sequence turned what seemed to be a sure 4-2 win into a devastating 6-4 loss.

That game still pains me to think about.

The three run homer was by Ketel Marte, who had homered off of Danny Coulombe in the ninth inning the day before for the winning run in a 3-2 loss.

The same Ketel Marte who had a game winning three run homer off of Hoby Milner just a couple of weeks later, turning a game that the Rangers had led most of the way into a defeat.

Stupid sexy Ketel Marte.

The sweep in Houston pretty much ended the Rangers’ season, but it isn’t what cost the Rangers’ the season. Going into a tailspin in May, and falling apart in a homestand in August, is what put the Rangers in a situation where the season could be destroyed by that sweep in Houston. That, along with the ridiculous spate of injuries the Rangers suffered in August, is what ultimately appears to have cost them a playoff berth in 2025.

Give credit to the Rangers for hanging in there. They never quit. They fought back time and again. They gave us meaningful baseball well into September.

It just wasn’t enough.

Requiem for the 2025 Texas Rangers

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