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8/29 - 09/04

This week started well enough. Last Friday the Rangers played the second of a four game series with the Astros and won by a score of 13-6. They've lost every game since. Most were close losses, but last night Robbie Ross couldn't get out of the second inning and the Rangers were blown out by eight runs.

The stupid Angels are still leading the AL West, and that's probably one reason I'm nauseous this morning. Here's how the division's landscape has changed over the last seven days:

Now that Texas is without a doubt not in the playoff race and is, in fact, one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball, let us look at the reverse standings. This is obviously pretty important. The worse the Rangers are, the better draft position they'll have. Also they will be allowed to spend more on draft picks and foreign players.

As you can see, over the last 30 games the Rangers have the worst record in baseball. Barely, but they do.

Transactions:

Games:

We had a situation this week in which the team found themselves at both ends of blowouts, and that skews those runs per game numbers. Removing those two games:

So after removing those outliers the Rangers were outscored by two runs per game which is awful, but I think 3-1 captures the "spirit" of the kind of baseball the team has been playing lately. The pitching has been a lot better and they are totally inept offensively.

Team Hitting and Pitching:

At first glance I was surprised the hitters didn't post a negative WAR for the week. They came as close as they could, but the real problem this time around was not driving in the runners they did manage to get on base. Situational stats don't show up in WAR. Really the offense was almost exactly the same last week (.286 wOBA) as it was this week (.287) and that's not a good thing. Well unless you want that #1 overall pick.

They pitching wasn't great this week, but it was pretty good. Not as good as last week in terms of ERA, but much better in terms of FIP.

Individual Hitting (10 PA Min):

Choice had a strange week in limited time. No walks and a lot of strikeouts but an ISO of .235. It's production. It's progress. It's good to see. Roogie Odor emerged from the abyss this week. He did walk a little, didn't strike out much, showed great power, but hit a very low number of line drives, which is a little odd considering his .412 BABIP. Adrian Beltre, much the same. Low line drive rate, high BABIP, good production. Small samples can be weird.

Alex Rios wasn't exactly good but this was his best week in a long, long time. He was nearly average. Andrus's numbers were okay for a short stop and a big improvement on what he did the previous week. Dan Robertson fell off quite a bit.

Leonys is probably the most disappointing player in the table. He was on a good run there for a while but crashed this week, though some of it appears to be bad luck. He had a great line drive rate with a very low BABIP. It will be interesting to see what he does over the next few days.

Even though he hasn't hit so far, it's good to see Wash going with Telis over Arencibia while Chirinos's neck is messed up.

Starting Rotation:

The biggest news here is the return of Derek Holland, and man what a return it was. He looked really sharp. Nick Martinez also had a good start, as did Baker and Tepesch if you look at ERA and WHIP. Lewis probably pitched better than his numbers indicate. There was only one bad outing by a starting pitcher during the last seven games, and that of course was last night's short outing by Robbie Ross. Everyone but Ross got the Rangers at least to the sixth inning and four times they pitched at least into the seventh. Much better.

Bullpen:

The bullpen was not very good this week but here were some positives, for sure. Spencer Patton had an excellent debut. Bonilla allowed a homer that dinged up his line but he was effective. Claudio got hit, but also struck out five in 2.1 innings. So some good things happened but on the whole too many walks, a little bad luck, and too much solid contact.

Conclusions:

They've lost six in a row, mostly due to not scoring any runs. The pitching wasn't bad. I think I said the same thing last week, and I'll probably say the same thing next week. Focusing on the positive: Odor and Holland. Thank you for reading.