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The 2024 season could not have gone any further from the plan for the Texas Rangers. Coming off a breakthrough 2023 season in which they won the World Series, the Rangers came crashing back down to Earth in 2024. They were ravaged by injuries and severe underperformance from key players, and in the end, they finished the season with a 78-84 record — a far cry from the World Series defense they had envisioned for themselves.
The talent base is certainly there for the Rangers to bounce back in 2025 and be the feared World Series contender many believed they would be for years to come. But there are a few areas that the Rangers will have to address to be the cream of the crop of the AL West once more.
With that said, here is the fatal flaw the Rangers must address heading into the 2025 season.
Can the Rangers' offense return to its 2023 level?
It's one thing for a team to suffer through underperformance from one of their key players. But for the Rangers, everything that could go wrong somehow went wrong and at the same time as well. The drop-off in the performances of Adolis Garcia, who was on a tear during the 2023 World Series, and Jonah Heim was so htfuge that it put the Rangers at such a difficult spot, with two spots in the batting order being black holes.
Garcia went all the way from being someone who put up a 4.6 WAR (per Fangraphs), courtesy of a 39-home run, 107-runs batted in season on a .245/.328/.508 slash line, to someone who put up a negative WAR season (-0.2) in 2024. It looked like Garcia was pressing all season long, desperate to return to his 2023 level, only for him to just make it worse as the season went on.
Garcia's underlying metrics are especially worrying; his speed, defense, and arm strength are all on the decline, and pitches he usually crushed made him suffer all 2024 long. Four-seamers and sliders were especially effective against him, and at 32 years old, he may already be on the wrong side of the aging curve.
Nonetheless, there is some hope for Garcia; he currently has a slash line of .306/.350/.556 in Spring Training, although that is too small of a sample size to be drawing any conclusions. But the Rangers will have to receive a bounce-back year from him on the plate, or else, he may not have a spot on the everyday lineup anymore if he keeps on being a black hole — putting Texas on the backfoot in the process.
Meanwhile, Heim had a similar drop-off in terms of WAR (4.0 in 2023, -0.1 in 2024). But the Rangers, at the very least, picked up an insurance policy at catcher in Kyle Higashioka; this should keep Heim fresher moving forward, and help insure the team in the event that the level he played at in 2024 is the norm, not the outlier.
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The Rangers ranked just 18th in runs scored in 2024, with 684, after ranking third in 2023 by scoring a total of 881 runs. With the way this roster is constructed, Texas will have to outscore opponents instead of relying on their pitchers to win duels, and bounce-back campaigns from Garcia and Heim would go a long way towards that goal of theirs.
There is also hope that Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter will blossom into the kind of superstar talent that the Rangers need to pry their championship window wide-open once more.
Will Texas have to scour the starting pitching market for an upgrade?
On paper, the Rangers did not have the most impressive of pitching staffs when they won the World Series in 2023. Their best starter during that playoff run was Nathan Eovaldi, who, to his credit, seems to always excel at the grand postseason stage.
But behind Eovaldi, the Rangers have plenty of question marks. Can Jacob deGrom somehow stay healthy after starting just nine games for the Rangers since signing that big money contract in 2023? Tyler Mahle also has some huge injury-related question marks after missing all but three games for Texas last season due to a shoulder injury.
Are Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker ready to handle the workload of a full-time starter? Cody Bradford has already been shut down for four weeks with an elbow injury. Will Jon Gray recover quickly from his unfortunate wrist injury? Or will the Rangers have to call upon Dane Dunning to start some games again after a brutal 2024 campaign?
This is why the Rangers' lineup will have to do the bulk of the heavy lifting, as Texas' starting rotation, despite having some depth, may not have the top-shelf talent that's needed to keep up with the big boys of the MLB.
