I promise that wasn’t a clickbait headline, because I don’t operate that way, plus you’re already here. Let’s runs some numbers.
Texas scored 4.22 runs per game compared to an AL average of 4.42. Globe Life, however, was historically pitcher-friendly in 2025. Here’s Texas’ Lowest Single-Year Park Factors For Runs (100 = neutral):
Single-year factors can be noisy, so using multi-year averages is better. How to weigh prior (and even subsequent) years is a judgment call, but when I give half credit to 2025 and half to the previous two years combined, I get a multi-year factor of 94.7.1 The AL average was 4.42 runs per game. Applying the multi-year park factor results in a league-average rate of 4.19 runs per game, the lowest for the Rangers in 44 years. I’d say this contributes strongly to the perception of the offense. The park-adjusted league average runs per game during The Ballpark In Arlington era (1994-2019) was 5.04. The difference between an average offensive season then and in 2025 is a whopping 137 runs.2
The Rangers scored 4.22 runs per game versus the park-adjusted average of 4.19, so by my accounting, they actually scored five more runs than average. If you think that sounds crazy, Baseball Reference has a multi-year park factor of just 89, which would place the offense firmly in above-average territory and on equal footing with the pitching! That factor is incredibly low and based on a methodology that troubles me.3 Fangraphs has a three-year park factor of 97, which appears to be a simple average of the previous three years. Regardless, the conclusion is that the Texas offense wasn’t that bad. It certainly was early in the season, but on the whole, it ended up more-or-less average.
This doesn’t make me feel any better about the season. Quite the opposite. It’s the sour cherry atop the Sundae of Frustration that was 2025.
The Rangers didn’t have so much a scoring problem as a distribution problem. Foremost, they were 21-29 in one-run games, exceptionally unlucky for a team that outscored its opponents. Also, when they scored seven or more runs, the opposition averaged only 3.35 runs per game. When they scored six or fewer, the opposition averaged 3.82, nearly half a run greater.
Compared to the rest of the league, the Rangers allowed an additional 0.64 runs per game when which they didn’t score as much. Only three teams (Athletics, White Sox, Astros) had a bigger margin. Note that this is just bad luck, not a flaw to be corrected. It’s not as though a team knows in advance how many runs in a season it will allow and can manipulate their apportionment to individual games. The Rangers had a .397 winning percentage when they scored six or fewer, actually a middle-of-the-pack rate, but all twelve playoff teams were better.
The Rangers were the only team in baseball without a win when the opposition scored at least seven runs. Honestly, winning the occasional slugfest pales in importance to how often a team allows that many runs in the first place. You’d much rather be 0-16 (Texas) than 2-51 (Athletics), but still, Texas is only one of two teams in the past five years without a single victory of this type in a season.
As you’d expect, Texas was shut out more than average, although not at a franchise-historic level.
Incidentally, Texas’s best seasons at avoiding shutouts were 2001 (1 shutout, 87% less than league average) and 2022 (4, 65% less). Both were losing seasons.
A big problem, especially from an emotional viewpoint, is that Texas genuinely did come out of the gate limping and spent most of the season playing catch-up. Here’s Texas’s worst in-season 54-game stretches (one-third of a season) in terms of runs scored versus the league average:
Texas didn’t reach a league-average level until Game 135, following a 20-3 banishment of the Angels.
The biggest problem is that hit-first additions Jake Burger and Joc Pederson were supposed to provide improvement over 2024, and instead they were very bad. Also bad: Jonah Heim, Adolis Garcia, Marcus Semien, Josh Jung, Zeke Duran, the expelled Leody Taveras. That’s a lot of bad.
As for the 81-81 record, the rotation was blameless. The bullpen was pretty good in the aggregate, less so in the specifics. There were 452 events in MLB last year that changed a team’s win probability by at least 33%. Of these, Texas’s bullpen had the second-most events and the third-worst cumulative win probability. Much of that is a function of opportunity. By virtue of so many low-scoring games, Texas’s bullpen faced more higher-leverage situations than most teams. It’s understandable that Texas wouldn’t rank well in negative events. Still, a few less instances of this sort would have translated directly into a few more wins.
And that’s where we’re at. Some better one-run luck, one or two fewer shutouts, one or two fewer bullpen meltdowns, a couple of crazy 10-8 wins, and voila, we’ve a playoff team.
In 2022, Texas was 68-94 despite being outscored by only 36 runs, courtesy of a 15-35 record in one-run games. That underperformance did result in the firings of the president and manager, but I did not enter the offseason thinking Texas would be trying to build on a 68-win season. Instead, the club felt much more like it had won 77, it’s most likely number based on run differential.
Not so in 2025. Despite all I’ve said, I’m not telling you to believe me and ignore your lying eyes. Despite park factors, distribution issues and bad luck bearing at least as much responsibility for Texas’s offensive malaise as the players themselves, the Rangers definitely did not feel to me like an 89-win team that was simply unlucky. 81 wins felt like an accurate account of the season and the state of the franchise at present. Put another way, how does “Texas’s offense was just unlucky, just stand pat and things should even out” sound? Terrible, right?
I haven’t delved deeper than runs scored because this is already too long, but Texas had a 95 OPS+ by my accounting. That’s a better starting point to me, and honestly, even that seems a bit generous. There’s work to do.
Footnotes:
1. In my personal stat analysis, I also give a little credit to the subsequent year, but for my 2025 multi-year factor I have to wait for 2026 to play out.
2. If you’re unfamiliar with park factors and think “well of course the park wasn’t hitter-friendly, because the offense was so terrible,” that’s understandable, but that’s not how they work. Factors don’t care about quality, they just measure the combined output from both teams in the home park versus output in all the road parks. And in fact, the Texas offense alone didn’t stray that far from neutral, scoring 327 runs at home versus 357 on the road. It was the pitching that created such a pronounced difference, with 250 runs allowed at home versus 355 on the road.
3. Baseball Reference excludes interleague games in their calculations for the stated reasons of no DH in the NL and absence of home-and-home series in interleague contests. The first reason is no longer valid. The second is still mostly valid (teams do have one interleague home-and-home each year; for example, Texas and Arizona in 2025), but I think the solution of ignoring those games is worse than the problem of keeping them. Interleague games are 30% of the schedule. 48 games are an awful lot to ignore. As I said, park factors are “noisy,” and limiting the calculations to 114 games exacerbates that problem. As it happened, the Rangers and their NL opponents tended to score much more in Texas’s park than on the road in 2025, so ignoring those games tilts the park factor even more toward pitcher-friendliness. That’s why BR’s factor is so low. Keeping interleague games in the mix, as I did, implies some assumptions about NL vs. AL parks that may not be wholly accurate, but I prefer the extra data. Note that park factors are already slightly askew because the calculations assume a balanced schedule, which isn’t the case.