The Rangers are still paying the price for the Jon Daniels era. It’s going to take Chris Young a while to populate a farm system that was left unable to produce sustainable pitching vegetation.

Yesterday, they sent Jack Leiter back down to the minor leagues after his third unacceptable start as a major leaguer. Seven earned runs in 3.2 innings, followed by four earned runs in 4.0 innings, then six earned runs in 1.2 innings on Tuesday. He takes a 16.39 ERA with him.

Leiter was sent down two days after Owen White, another product of the genius of Jon Daniels pitching evaluation, who put up a 54.00 ERA over two games. To put that in perspective, if the Rangers are averaging two runs per game, it would take them twenty-seven games to score enough runs to neutralize Owen White.

As the Rangers try to dig out of their staggering pitching injury dilemma, what’s obvious is they aren’t going to be able to find solutions from within.

On the positive side, the Rangers are getting incredible performances from their non-Daniels-drafted pitching options.

Jon Gray continued his brilliant season with 6.1 innings of shutout baseball last night, lowering his ERA to a sparkling 2.08. Micheal Lorenzen has been mostly brilliant this year, with four quality starts and two not so good. Jose Ureña has been great since joining the rotation, as well, with a 2.31 ERA in his starts. Even Andrew Heaney is capable of streaks of brilliance, having put up four quality starts in his last five outings.

The sad truth is, the Jack Leiter/Owen White experiment showed that the Rangers have only four viable starting pitchers left in the entire system. They are currently on the Rangers roster. They don’t have an answer for a fifth starter anywhere internally.

That pantry was left bare.

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