Team Offense, Texas Rangers

The 2023 series on team offense continues with the Texas Rangers. The Rangers finished twelfth in the majors and fifth in the American League in 2022 with 4.36 runs scored per game.

This season I am using FanGraphs Roster Resource Depth Charts* as the source of default lineups. That Bruce Bochy batting order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.58
Probable lineup: 4.48
Worst lineup: 4.29
Regressed lineup: 4.26

The Rangers do a decent job of grouping their best players together, putting three good OBPs in front of the power of clean-up hitter Adolis Garcia. The LAT puts Garcia in the fourth slot in many of the top orders, and also likes Corey Seager second. The LAT regression would lead off with Nathaniel Lowe, but he bats third in the default order.

Robbie Grossman seems wrong in the sixth slot, however. He owns one of the better OBPs on the team, with little power to go with it. I’d rather seem him at the top of the order, or batting ninth to set up the top of the order. At sixth, he is surrounded by a low OBP players, so it’s not likely he’ll be driven in much.

The caveat here is that there are a number of hitters at the bottom of the order with limited MLB experience. Their projects need to be taken with a grain of salt as they are highly regressed. That’s especially true for Josh Jung and Bubba Thompson. Jung hit extremely well at AAA, and Thompson wasn’t bad. If those two blossom in 2023, the Rangers are going to look a lot stronger. We’ll wait and see.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in this series:

*This is the best version of this&nbsp;information I’ve seen, with everything you might want to know on one page.

March 10, 2023

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