What a frustrating season.

They had the lowest team batting average in baseball, at .225. Scored the third fewest runs of any team, only dreadful Colorado and Pittsburgh scored fewer. They had the fewest hits and the second-lowest OPS.

No, it’s not the Texas Rangers. It’s the Cleveland Guardians. A team with worse offense than the Ranger is heading to the playoffs and on the verge of authoring the biggest comeback in major league history, just one win away from winning the A.L. West and erasing a fifteen-and-a-half game deficit.

So as the obituary on the Rangers 2025 season is written, it’s not the lack of offense that did them in—that certainly didn’t hurt Cleveland. It was the lack of productive offense. 

Swing for the fences every time. Never shorten up with two-strikes. Never move runners over with productive outs. Never bunt runners into scoring position. Never go the other way. Just grip and rip.  After the futility of 2023, when the Rangerputting together a roster that could hit the four-season fastball. Their batting average this year agains the four-seam fastball? You guessed it, .224. Makes you wonder if Chris Young, as a former pitcher, understands the nuances of building an offense.

There’s good bad offense, which the Cleveland Guardians possess. And there’s bad bad offense. That’s the Texas Rangers.

So, as these two offensively challenged teams wrap up the regular season today, one moves on, one goes home to try to fine players who can hit. You can’t help but wonder what would have transpired had the Rangers traded for some kind of offense and a real closer at the deadline.

In the famous words of Corey Seager, “I guess we’ll never know.”

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