2025 Texas Rangers Offseason For Casuals

While it is possible many of us haven't been locked in all winter, Jamey Newberg has been all over it.

It’s mid February, the NFL season has ended, the NHL is in the midst of an international break and the Mavericks are, well, you know what they did last week.

Which means it’s a perfect time to talk baseball at #SturmStack. The Texas Rangers open spring training this week, pitchers and catchers report on Wednesday, and what better time to bring in my resident baseball expert Jamey Newberg to get everyone caught up on what’s going on for Rangers.

Bob: First, Jamey, as you know as far as you and I go back, that I am easily distracted by F1, the NFL Draft, the UFC and Liverpool. I do have a massive place in my heart for the Rangers, but I also can go a few weeks without staring at my ceiling trying to figure out who the closer is going to be. So, thanks for doing this. I am very proud of the many times we have worked together and I am relieved that we have brought the Newberg Report back to life given that I had a role in killing it.

Let’s get down to business. I want to give a shallow-depth view of things here, because I know the deepest of deep dives are happening at your place and you will give me 5,000 words on each position on the diamond (because I read it!) as you have all winter long.

I want to start with the recaps that all our favorite shows do when they start a new season. Would you offer at any depth you choose a reasonable recap of where things left off? For instance, what went wrong in 2024 and why did that season not ever really meet expectations? Remind us of where we left off and the priorities in your head of what the winter should be about as you turned to 2025. Give us a good show recap to get the ball rolling before we hit play on the new season.

Jamey: First off – nonsense on the homicide confession. I followed you to The Athletic and will be forever grateful for those six years. I followed you to Substack and will be forever grateful, full stop. This platform and this format are perfect.

More so than the Rangers were in 2024. Following a World Series championship with a losing record is (sorry) not great, Bob. As for how I felt when a three-game win streak against the hapless Angels lifted the final Texas mark to 78-84, I looked back at my season requiem, in which I wrote this:

And 2024, unsatisfying as it’s been, hasn’t dampened my excitement for 2025. This was like Season 3 of “The Bear” — a clear disappointment based on the expectations that had been set by the last season, but in no way robbing me of my enthusiasm and anticipation for the season to come. I’m excited to see what a full year of Kumar Rocker looks like, not to mention a full year of Evan Carter. Wyatt Langford is ours. I trust Josh Jung and Marcus Semien (who has his own Bochy-esque every-other-year thing going) will be closer to their 2023 versions next year than what they provided in 2024.

Plus, I have full faith that, because the Rangers are not the Cowboys, the offseason won't be an exercise of sitting on their hands when it comes to digging hard to find ways to improve the roster.

And, thankfully but not surprisingly, it wasn’t an offseason of inertia. First things first, they got Nathan Eovaldi to turn away widespread interest around the league and decide he wanted to stay. After Texas re-upped him for three years and $75 million, it occurred to me that he might be the only frontline free agent the Rangers have been able to keep around in the last 20 years, as shocking as that might sound. Josh Hamilton left. So did C.J. Wilson and Mike Napoli. Adrian Beltre, Michael Young, and Elvis Andrus all signed extensions, but those happened before they ever hit free agency. Eovaldi deciding he wanted a second commitment here was huge. Loyalty never fades away (until, we were reminded a week or so ago, it does).

Where things went wrong last season can be traced back, with some degree of hindsight but maybe also predictably, to the offseason leading up to it. Very few players on the World Series club had ever had so much as a meaningful postseason, so we start with a longer year of baseball than almost all of them had ever experienced. And of course, that final month of 2023 was chock full of more unrelenting sports-intensity than almost all of them had ever experienced. What followed was a winter of rest, recovery, and preparation shortened by a month; by more than that, actually, because you know every player had a hometown parade after the big one in Arlington, plus I’m sure most were pulled in new directions (parties, appearances, team functions) and far more often than ever before. Then Bruce Bochy decided, I think properly, to slow-play spring training for certain veterans.