The retirement of Adrian Beltre is the least of the Rangers worries this winter. Jurickson Profar stepped into the third base position this year and gave Texas a fine performance at the plate. Unfortunately, the rest of the team positions, with the exception of rightfield, needs a lot of work. None of the other infield positions, including catcher, provided much in the way of getting on base, although first base produced good power. Leftfield and centerfield were black holes of offense. They drew a decent number of walks, but high strikeout rates led to very low batting averages, and very low OBPs. The two positions simply did not put the bat on the ball enough.
While those two positions were the worst offenders, the whole team was slanted this way. The Rangers drew the fourth most walks in the AL, while striking out second most. That would be fine if it resulted in a high-power offense, but their isolated power (Slug-BA) was league average.
With the good walk rates, one would think the Rangers had good strike zone recognition, but it wasn’t so. They were league average at swinging at pitchers outside of the strike zone, but had the lowest percentage of swings in the zone. On top of that, they were near the bottom of the AL in making contact on pitches in the zone. So they were taking tons of strikes, and missing relatively often when they did swing.
If the hitting philosophy was, “Wait for a pitch you can launch and launch it,” it didn’t work. That’s fine for Joey Gallo, but the others need to work on meeting the ball before they start trying to drive home runs. We’ll see how that philosophy changes with new field management.
from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2Bvj82Q
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