The 2014 season was, in no uncertain terms, a disaster for the Texas Rangers. Injuries destroyed a promising club and left it in the basement of the American League West with a 67-95 record. The Rangers lost more games than even the lowly Houston Astros.
As easy as it might be to write off 2014 to injuries, the Rangers as currently constructed don't appear much better than the club that limped to those 95 losses. With 2015 just around the corner, the biggest move of their offseason so far was the one to acquire left-hander Ross Detwiler from the Washington Nationals and decline their contract option on outfielder Alex Rios, making him a free agent.
The Rangers' front office believes the team can improve with the some better health and the absence of "cursed by a coven of witches" bad luck. Their two huge acquisitions ahead of 2014 -- outfielder Shin-Soo Choo and first baseman Prince Fielder -- were both known for their durability and production before coming to Texas. Both players ended up vastly underperforming and managed just over 700 plate appearances combined, hitting a meager .243/.345/.370 with 16 home runs -- replacement-level production from two superstars paid $38 million for their troubles.
Both players can't help but improve on their 2014 seasons, but what does that net the Rangers? Three more wins? Maybe four? They used 40 different pitchers (including three different position players) as the wide-ranging injuries pushed green players into positions they were not prepared to fill. They won't have Martin Perez back from Tommy John surgery until late this season (if at all), but the team as constituted looks like Darvish and Holland and pray for rain.
This is still a bad team, one with holes in its lineup and all manner of hope pinned to very young players acclimating to the big leagues quickly. It's a significant risk to bet so heavily on young players seamlessly transitioning to big league life and big league challenges, as 2014 demonstrated. The Rangers' bad luck clustered in a big way and now the franchise is at a crossroads.
Where do the Rangers see themselves on their success cycle? Is their window open, or is 2015 a platform year for the future?
Right now, they forecast to be a decidedly below-average team. Adrian Beltre is a Hall of Famer still producing at very high levels, but Elvis Andrus' resume features more and more bad years and it is starting to reflect on his projections. Some teams would love to see a 2-3 WAR player at shortstop, but those teams might balk when Andrus enters the first year of an eight-year contract extension paying him more than $120 million.
Their rotation behind Yu Darvish is incredibly thin, with only Derek Holland offering anything close to a body to work supporting his 2 WAR projection. The bullpen needs work, with Neftali Feliz's underlying stats (low strikeout rate, impossibly high strand rate coupled with a very low in-play average) pointing toward real trouble at the back of an anonymous bullpen.
This isn't a good team as currently constructed, which surely can't be news to the braintrust in Arlington. Texas forecasts to allow more runs than it scores with big question marks behind the plate, in right field and at the DH spot.
The team knows where it sits, relative to the rest of its division and the wild-card race as a whole. A lot of work remains for this team to compete for a playoff spot in 2015. Perhaps we should take the Rangers' inactivity during the Hot Stove season and their devotion to their youth movement as a sign Texas is building for 2016 and beyond, not making an ill-fated run into the middle of a crowded playoff push.
A more generous man than I might look at the Rangers' approach to the upcoming season and see a "high variance" strategy, one banking on all the underperformers regaining their footing simultaneously. Simply piling high-floor talent around the diamond gets expensive in a hurry, so a few well-placed lottery tickets can go a long way. If Rougned Odor gets it in his second trip around the league and Andrus starts squaring the ball up again and somebody hands Michael Choice a compass and a road map to the plate, the Rangers might surprise.
The 2014 season was the low ebb, the worst kind of variance. Regression can buoy the Rangers in 2015 just as it and injuries, of course, dragged them down last year. Then again, one serious issue the Rangers must overcome is not the high variance players they bet little on but the known commodities who bottomed out. Without Choo and Fielder returning to past glories, the Rangers have the bulk of their payroll tied up in older players with their best years presumably behind them. The Rangers are flush with cash but both Choo's and Fielder's contracts run through the 2020 season; it will be some time before they're small enough to sweep under the rug.
Texas has piles of prospect capital it could deal for a superstar corner outfielder or another major piece. The problem, for this winter anyway, is quickly becoming one of availability -- Texas is running out of dance partners. Former Rangers staffer and current San Diego Padres GM A.J. Preller won the Justin Upton sweepstakes, long a target of fans in Arlington. With so many teams "going for it" or at least entertaining the idea of a playoff push, the market for cornerstone type players like Upton or Matt Kemp dried up quickly.
If the Rangers want to force the issue and address their unspectacular outfield (their right-field situation currently projects as one of the worst in baseball), perhaps they will line up with the Boston Red Sox or even the familiar face in the Padres' front office for one of their extraneous outfielders. Texas still has enviable middle-infield depth, where Andrus could be traded to upgrade any number of positions, provided the Rangers pay some of his freight on the way out of town. Jurickson Profar, Odor or Luis Sardinas are sure to attract attention on the trade market, to say nothing of potentially dealing Beltre if it all goes south once again.
The next wave of positional talent is on its way to Texas. The Rangers added some real talent at the trade deadline, and the Joey Gallo coronation grows ever closer, with Jorge Alfaro and a whole bunch of pitchers hot on his tail. The future in Texas appears quite bright. But more and more, the present appears like a bridge to those better days. Daniels and his staff can pull the trigger to make their team instantly better, but the better bet looks like one set to pay off a little further down the road.
