The Rangers had a process to win their first World Series title.
We typically think of “process” in baseball as being a normal, static thing where you accumulate contributing players at the right $/WAR amount at the right time. That creates a contention cycle for a period, and then the playoffs are a crapshoot and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. The best processes improve your player development and scouting and get your ability to dig up bargains to a level so good that you don’t truly ever need to rebuild. For the less fortunate, it means after your contention cycle you go into periods in the wilderness where you get cheaper and younger and make a bunch of high picks. But it’s all very defined, very segmented, looking for Zach Eflins in free agency and developing enough relievers that you never have to pay for them.
But market value acquisition of stars is a process too. It’s a tougher one to easily define, but if you look at what the Rangers have actually done since they got out of the kiddie pool and started making moves in November 2021, you can find two very clear buckets: importing up-the-middle position players who make great swing decisions and loading up on high-ceiling starting pitchers.
It’s hard to remember after his 2023 tour de force, but once and present World Series MVP Corey Seager did not always seem like the world’s most obvious $325 million free agent signing. Qualitatively, we liked the signing at the time, but quantitatively, he’d established himself as a 3-4 WARP player—in words Fred Wilpon once used about David Wright, a very good player, not a superstar.
Yet lurking underneath were major signs that Seager had this in him. Seager has always had elite bat speed and swung away at a very high amount of strikes, but since 2020 he’s run at the top of the league for in-zone swing percentage. He’s done this without developing a chase rate problem—his outside-of-zone swing percentages have remained around league-average—and he’s not just making weak contact; his exit velocities and launch angles have been ticking up as he’s swung more, not down. Basically, he’s attacking pitches he can destroy and destroying them as well as any hitter in the league.
Until this season, his topline numbers had been depressed by factors having less to do with his ability at the plate than things happening around him: the shift, injuries, and just some weird old luck. But Texas correctly identified him as a player with a unique ability to identify the right pitches to go after who was still making gains, and since he’s become a Ranger he’s turned into a high fastball crusher too. He’s not just a superstar now, he’s an Ohtani signing with the Dodgers or Mets away from becoming the best player in the American League. He’s pure joy to watch at his craft.
Texas chose to pair Seager with Marcus Semien on his own eight-year deal, essentially discarding his poor 2020 as a pandemic baseball anomaly and choosing to believe in his stellar 2019 and 2021 instead. Semien doesn’t swing away as much as Seager in general, but he doesn’t chase much and has a high in-zone attack rate for a mere mortal who doesn’t chase much. A durable lineup staple and overqualified defensive second baseman, he was the perfect choice of safe performance to pair with a booming Seager, and after a weak start to the postseason, he came alive in the World Series.
When you have shortstop and second base locked down so securely with star players, you can take some calculated risks. Texas has spent a lot of money and prospect talent on their rotation in the past calendar year, allowing themselves to form a huge risk pool and riding the positive variance waves all the way to a ring.
Think of it this way: if Chris Young had signed Jacob deGrom and Jacob deGrom alone to solve his pitching problem, he’d have been totally borked when a second Tommy John surgery came for deGrom. Given deGrom’s recent medical track record, that would’ve been reckless. But he didn’t just sign deGrom. He brought in additional health and performance risks in Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney as well, a year after signing Jon Gray. There was a lot of upside there, and as it turned out, Eovaldi had a regular season and playoff run maybe 75% as good as you might’ve projected deGrom for. On aggregate, they got just enough out of the top of the rotation.
Young was further willing to deal three potential Top 101 prospects at the deadline for Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery as reinforcements to cover deGrom’s injury and Heaney’s partial regression. While Scherzer got hurt, Montgomery has been a perfectly credible no. 2 starter for this run.
And so we ended up here for Game 5, with the Rangers process working: Big Game Nate once again on the mound with a chance to clinch and Seager dominating in October again. Eovaldi has time and time again come up huge in big spots in October and November; his exploits in 2018 are the stuff of legend in New England. Coming off a rough Game 1, he frankly didn’t throw the ball all that well in Game 5, walking as many batters as he’d done in any game in a decade and completely unable to hit his spots. Yet he kept posting zeroes, somehow, some way.
His opposite number Zac Gallen, meanwhile, threw one of the best back-to-the-wall games in World Series history, becoming the first pitcher ever to carry a no-hitter into the seventh inning when facing elimination in a World Series game. Texas just could not touch him the first two times through the order.
Meanwhile, Arizona had shot after shot after shot after shot at a staggering Eovaldi. One, they passed up themselves; Gabriel Moreno’s two on, none out sacrifice in the third inning was like a bad acid trip back to a prior era of baseball. The Snakes cobbled together a handful of walks and singles, but without much extra-base power, they stood powerless on the bases, waiting for the base knock that never came. Instead, Eovaldi made the perfect pitch at the right time…or at least perfect enough for someone to smash it at one of the guys in blue jerseys.
After a postseason of bullpen games and short hooks, we finally got Texas’s endgame here: Following Eovaldi’s magic act to avoid runs, Seager fought through a tough at-bat to lead off the seventh and cue shot a ball through the left side, finally recording Texas’s first hit. He scored the golden run two batters later, the product of three neatly sequenced hits, like a fencer’s flourish. They piled on four more in the eighth against Paul Sewald, capped by a Semien home run, but it was all denouement. That first run was all they needed, as the Diamondbacks fell before the looping curve balls and upsetting facial hair of Josh Sborz. Just as they drew it up.
The process is complete. The Texas Rangers have won the World Series.
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