Midway through spring training and your mind starts playing tricks. You just want it to be over and the season to start, so you start thinking about things.

Things like, what if Evan Carter doesn’t make the opening day roster and Alejandro Osuna does? Yes, it’s said often and emphatically that spring training stats don’t matter. But occasionally they do. Look at Wyatt Langford last year. He lead all of baseball in home runs and hit the ball hard every time.

He forced himself onto the opening day roster, just as Alejandro Osuna is doing this spring. He doubled yesterday in his only at-bat. His numbers are absurd, meaning it’s spring training. Even so, he’s hitting .435 with an OPS of 1.133. That’s hard to overlook. In fact, Bruce Bochy has been raving about him all spring.

Carter, on the other hand, isn’t hitting. That shouldn’t matter, because neither are Marcus Semien and Corey Seager. But Carter has shown, he cannot hit lefties and isn’t disproving that theory this spring. And, with an on-base percentage of .190, he’s not drawing walks, either. If this was coming off his magical 2023 season, it wouldn’t matter as much. But it’s coming off his 2024 season in which, before being lost for the year in May, he was hitting just .188 with an OBP of just .272. The prevailing thought is he was struggling with his back. But, was he?

It wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world for him to start at Triple-A and get right again, bat against lefties as much as possible, and see if he can draw walks like he did in 2023.

Or maybe, just maybe, he can’t. Maybe, must maybe, 2023 was, indeed, magical and Rangers fans should just be happy it happened.

Maybe, just maybe, Osuna is the Rangers opening day left fielder, not Carter.

Or, maybe, just maybe, these are just the mid-spring training ramblings of a madman.

*****

NO CACTUS LEAGUE GAME TODAY.