Texas Rangers’ Brandon Nimmo reacts during the first inning of a baseball game against the Houston Astros, Tuesday, May 26, 2026, Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Jessica Tobias)
Jessica Tobias/AP Photo/Jessica Tobias
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Completely consistent with who he is, Brandon Nimmo has looked at this from every angle.
The best he can do for an explanation on the recent tanking of his results: “Things are evening out.”
Doesn’t mean he’s not frustrated. He is. Doesn’t mean he isn’t losing sleep.
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But the deepest of dives show that while his slash line has plummeted in the last 30 games, his expected numbers, based predominantly on hard-hit metrics, remain well above league average. On the raw numbers, Nimmo began the road trip with a .189/.278/.324/.602 slash line in the last 30 days. His expected OPS in that same time: .899, a disparity of nearly 300 points. For the year, among the 77 hitters to have seen at least 1,000 pitches this season, the difference between what’s expected and real is the largest gap in the majors.
It was a point manager Skip Schumaker and his staff have made to Nimmo recently, even though he’s just 8 for 53 in his last 15 games.
“You always want to find stuff to help motivate players and for them to understand that they’re not as far off as they think,” Schumaker said Tuesday afternoon. “They always want to find out if there’s something wrong or they need to do something different to get them going. In my opinion, Brandon Nimmo is hitting the ball as hard as anybody, and he has just had some really tough luck lately.
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“I know what the numbers are this month. I’m very aware of the last 15 games, but I’m telling you that if you look at the numbers, they suggest he is about to get really hot.”
READ MORE: Meet Brandon Nimmo, the meticulous member inside the Texas Rangers clubhouse
To Schumaker’s point, Nimmo is actually hitting the ball harder than he did at the beginning of the season. He took a .300 batting average into the games of May 6. Since then, as his batting average and results have continued to fall, he’s hitting the ball, on average at 92.8 mph, a full mile better than his overall season numbers. He has 12 “barrels” in that period, which MLB Statcast defines as leaving the bat harder than 98 mph and within an optimal launch angle range. It ranks in the top 20 of all hitters in baseball.
Nimmo has tried to accept that. It still isn’t easy. Over the last month, the Rangers also moved him out of the leadoff spot when they were struggling for run production and tried moving him to the middle of the order. That may have limited some opportunities for him to capitalize, too. He is hitting .385 on first-pitch fastballs, in the upper half of the league.
“When I get into one of these [stretches], the first thing I usually do is ask: ‘Is the approach right?’” Nimmo said. “If it’s not right, then I’m probably not going to have success most of the time anyway. If they are making pitches and I’m missing them, then I go to the mechanical. Am I missing it because of let’s call it ‘fat’ in my swing, some lag in the bat. It usually falls into one of those categories, so when I go through that if I hit the ball hard and I hit it at people, then we just try and chalk it up to that it’s baseball and eventually you hope it evens out. That’s where expected stats come in.”
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Which all sounds perfectly rational. Because it is. But it’s nearly impossible for a hitter to not eventually chase results, which Nimmo acknowledges is a habit he fights daily.
“I’ve learned to fight that thought, but I’m not sure you can ever control it,” he said. “You see the OPS going down, see the batting average going down, and you just feel like, OK, you’ve got to change something. But I’ve been around long enough to see and know that sometimes you do more harm than good by making that change and then you put yourself like another two weeks of trying to figure things out. You actually dig yourself a deeper hole.”
And the current one is hard enough to dig out from. So, he’d like to prevent it from going any further.