What’s with Globe Life Field’s weird effect on fly balls? Rangers only have theories

Some things will apparently remain unsolved mysteries for the ages, like Bigfoot, whether that 13-mile object zipping through our solar system recently was a comet or a Starship cruiser, why Nico Harrison ever made that trade …

And, apparently, what it is that happens to a baseball upon contact at Globe Life Field.

The Rangers have spent a lot of time studying the Globe Life Field Triangle — or whatever you’d like to call the strange power-sapping effect the stadium has had on fly balls the last two years — and they still don’t have any definitive explanations. More like concepts of theories, at best.

“I mean, we have some thoughts, some hypotheses in terms of what’s going on or what potentially could be contributing, but nothing concrete or substantial that we feel we could really sink our teeth into,” GM Ross Fenstermaker said during the GM meetings this week in Las Vegas. “We don’t want to overcorrect or overreact to the trend line. Obviously, it is a multi-year trend at this point, but we don’t have the underlying explanation as to what’s going on, so we’re going to tread carefully in that regard and continue investigating.”

Rangers

In other words, the Rangers aren’t going to change the dimensions of the park. Which would create another set of headaches, since the dimensions are all tied to significant moments or players in team history. It’s 407 feet to dead center, with the seven being in honor of Ivan Rodríguez; it’s 372 to the left field power alley to honor the first year the team played in Arlington. Changing those numbers would create some explaining.

Anyway, President of Baseball Operations Chris Young said there have been no discussions about bringing in the fences.

The multi-year trend to which Fenstermaker referred is two seasons. The park played just fine in 2023. Since then, offense is down. The question, of course, is whether to blame the park or the hitters.

Consider this: Five everyday players — Josh Jung, Jake Burger, Adolis García, Marcus Semien and Jonah Heim — had OPS numbers below .700 for the season. With the exception of García, all did have better OPS numbers on the road than at home, and the differences weren’t insignificant. Then again, with the exception of Jung (.756), none of them had OPS numbers of .720 (league average) on the road. To best sum up, they were dreadful at home, merely subpar on the road.

So, rather than brick-and-mortar changes to the park, it may be more efficient to change personnel or philosophy. They didn’t do the things necessary to create or optimize run-scoring opportunities. The Rangers didn’t walk anywhere last year; their 8% walk rate ranked 23rd in the majors. They saw the seventh fewest pitches in the big leagues. They hit the fifth most pop-ups. And they had the second-fewest number of productive outs in the majors.

To whatever extent the Rangers can tweak the position player portion of the roster, all of those aspects will become more of a focus than the slugger ethos that dominated last year.

“We need to be better about on-base percentage,” Young said. “We need to find guys that can work counts, do situational hitting, and we can’t just have an all-or-nothing approach. Some of that is philosophical and some of it is personnel. It’s a combination of both.

“I think aligning the hitting department with Skip [Schumaker] at the top and then Justin Viele and the staff, integrating a philosophy and then holding players accountable to that philosophy to create a collective effort. We need to support them in any way with the resources and tools we have and we need them to buy into the philosophy and execute the philosophy in a way that we feel is necessary, independent of the ballpark. Personnel is a part, but it’s also a philosophical commitment.”

It doesn’t mean there aren’t some real factors beyond their own control that did accentuate the offensive decline. According to data supplied by MLB, drag on the baseball was at a 10-year high in 2025, though the league maintained through the season that there was no significant change to the baseball. Drag was also up in 2024. That’s real.

At the same time, there were some real advantages to whatever was going on. Overall, the Rangers led the majors in ERA at 3.47, a .11 edge over the next closest staff. At home, though, they posted a 2.82 ERA, more than three-tenths of a run better than anybody else. And, most importantly, the Rangers were winners at home. Their .593 winning percentage at Globe Life Field was the 11th best in the majors. It was essentially top tier.

The Rangers don’t want to disregard those elements as they build for the future. They’ve spent more than 50 years trying to build a top-tier pitching staff. Now, they have one. They also know it will be difficult to duplicate the numbers they put up a year ago.

“We had a pitching advantage last year, and we underperformed offensively,” Young said. “We’ve got to find a way to score more runs. There’s no doubt about it. I can’t expect that we’re going to pitch at the level we did last year. That was a one-of-a-kind season in some ways, for the Texas Rangers. And I do think we’re going to have a very good pitching staff, but to expect that we’ll lead baseball and runs prevented is probably lofty expectations. So we need to build a complete team, and we need to be able to build a team that can score runs and support the pitching staff and take some of the pressure off the pitchers.”

Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant

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