Adolis Garcia is an RBI machine. He doesn’t hit for average but he hits when he needs to. More accurately, he hits when the Rangers need him to.

His five RBIs yesterday give him twenty-three for the season, the most of any Ranger. His ninety RBIs last year led the Rangers as well. 

Yes, he is leading the team in striking out. But he’s a productive hitter in those at-bats when he is not walking back to the dugout with bat in hand.

Texas has had far too many high strikeout guys who added very little offensively. Adolis Garcia has a knack for rising to the occasion. 

If you look at a lot of his raw numbers, they aren’t that impressive. His OPS+ last season was 100, meaning he was exactly an average major league hitter. But he seems to do his damage when it really counts.

Yesterday, it counted because the Rangers had lost the first two games of the three-game series to the Red Sox in embarrassing fashion. They needed the offense to show up.

Garcia’s three-run homer in the sixth put the Rangers up 4-1, their first lead of the series. He put the whole contest to bed with a two-run shot in the eighth, powering the Rangers to a 7-1 victory.

Marcus Semien broke his 0-for-27 streak. Kole Calhoun hit two balls in the almost identical spot, left center and over the wall. 

Maybe the offense is starting to come back. Hopefully, so. The Rangers host the first-place Angels for three. They are going to have to keep up with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and Anthony Rendon and the come-from-nowhere Taylor Ward, who is batting only .385 with an OPS of just 1.247.

Garcia rises to the occasion against Los Angeles. He has hit the second-most home runs, six, against the Angels (eight against Houston) and driven in the second-most runs againt them as well with fifteen (twenty-two against the Astros).

As yesterday’s game proved, you don’t need all nine guys in the lineup hitting. That’s unreasonable to expect. But two or three hot batters can carry a team.

When Adolis Garcia is hot, he can do it single-handedly. 

*****