Despite entering Tuesday one game below .500, Texas Rangers’ fans are sick of this and the biggest blame lies in the owner’s suite.
After a few seasons over the luxury tax, this winter owner Ray Davis charged his front office with one thing. Cut spending.
Unfortunately, when you’re trying to build a World Series contender, you kinda need money in this age of the game.
Cutting salary = poor performance
This offseason it seemed the owner and his own front office executives were on different pages.
While President of Baseball Operations Chris Young and General Manager Ross Fenstermaker were looking to return to the postseason, all Davis cared about was saving every penny he could get his hands on.
As a result he directed his baseball ops team to find a way to lower salary closer to the $200 million mark (from $240 million in 2025). They were successful, entering Opening Day in Philadelphia with a payroll at $223 million.
The bad news is that the players they were able to secure were very much a result of less money. While they dumped some money by getting rid of Marcus Semien and acquiring Brandon Nimmo, that has been perhaps the only good signing from Texas this offseason.
Obviously, nothing will happen to the owner, but soon fans will not let him hear the end of their dissatisfaction and I hope it stings.
Young, Fenstermaker, players aren’t free of blame
Let’s not take this all out criticism of Davis as the sole reason the Rangers are still not performing that much beyond their previous two seasons.
The organization still thought there best opportunity to get better offensively was to pick up Danny Jansen, who has a .203 average to start the year; give Josh Smith everyday second base reps — he’s hitting .203 as well; and counted on bounce backs from guys like Joc Pederson and Josh Jung.
Jung has answered the call, as a 1-for-2 day on Monday raised his season average to .312, tied for 6th best in the American League.
Young leveraged their already depleted farm for maybe one-year of MacKenzie Gore and although it started off strong, he’s looked lost on the mound lately. In his last 3 games Gore has given up 10 runs in 14.2 innings of work. The end result from the team has been one win and two losses.
All in all the team isn’t playing up too par and we can see a direct result of a limited payroll is a limit on the talent pool a team can search through to find roster fillers.