ARLINGTON — There are flaws. They’ve been evident. Occasionally, painfully.
And, yet, as April concluded with a 3-0 win over the New York Yankees Wednesday, it’s hard to imagine that the season’s challenging first month could have been more productive when viewed via a long-term lens.
How’s that old saying go? April survival brings later thrival? OK, we’re not exactly Kacey Musgraves as a lyricist. But the point is the Rangers aren’t stuck in the middle of nowhere after the season’s first month, even if several of their hitters are going through a dry spell. Wednesday’s game was a pretty Instagram-worthy snapshot of what bodes well the rest of the way.
“I think we match up as good as anybody in the league,” manager Skip Schumaker said after the win pushed the Rangers back to 15-16 heading into May. “We have faced the best teams, according to every projection and we’re in every single game, even the ones we didn’t end up winning.
“It shows a lot about who’s in that clubhouse even though we haven’t had Wyatt [Langford] for much of the month and Corey [Seager] isn’t off to the best start and [Nathan Eovaldi] didn’t have the start he wanted. Could we have a better record? Of course. I think any team would tell you that right now, but you know how we’ve matched up and how our bullpen has been pitching and what we’ve done late in games shows you the kind of team that we have, and that part’s exciting.”
About the exciting part, so much of it was on display in Wednesday’s win. Stuff like:
The remaking of Josh Jung: Jung’s newly discovered ability to restrain from chasing pitches has given the Rangers the best version of him. The Rangers went into the season needing to take a serious step forward and not just for a week. They needed more predictability and dependability in the lineup.
Right man for the moment. #AllForTX pic.twitter.com/0Kc5YuRiRE
It was Jung’s fifth-inning single Wednesday that broke a scoreless tie and drove home a pair of runs. It extended his hitting streak to all nine games of the homestand. Since starting the season 0 for 17, he’s batted .381 since April 1. You don’t even need other slash numbers to know how good that is. It’s been the best month of his career, rookie season included. A week is merely a hot streak, but a month suggests a changed player. Going into the season, if April yielded nothing more than an improved Jung, the month would have been a success.
“I think this month was just a reminder for him that he’s a really good player,” Schumaker said. “He has to keep believing that for the next five, six months.”
Said Jung, echoing the manager: “I feel like I’m in a good spot and my goal is to stay there, not try to do too much. Just keep my focus right where it is.”
Finding usable back-of-the-bullpen pieces: Jacob Latz pitched the final two innings of the game to earn his second save of the season. It’s pretty clear now that Latz is the Rangers’ desired ninth-inning option, addressing another need going into the season. The Rangers had no idea who would close games out for them. And it only got muddier when Chris Martin and Robert Garcia flunked in late-inning roles, then ended up injured.
Latz, who lost the fifth starter’s job mostly because of how versatile he could be in the bullpen, did not mope over being told “we just need you more in the bullpen,” began the year without allowing a hit to any of the first 30 hitters he faced and has put together a 0.42 WHIP in 16 ⅔ innings this season. It ranks second-best among all relievers. Schumaker even hinted afterward that Latz “may even [be] becoming the ninth-inning guy,” then stuttered a second before adding “depending on what lane we’ve got.”
“He didn’t sulk,” Schumaker said. “He just took advantage of his opportunity. He wanted to know what role he’d pitch in and he wanted to pitch in leverage situations. I told him we’d give him leverage, but I didn’t know it would be this quick into the eighth and ninth innings. Guys will tell you who they are during the regular season, and he’s showing that he’s ready for the highest leverage situations against obviously one of the best offenses in the league.”
Beyond that, the Rangers have found Jakob Junis to pitch in lanes that are full of right-handers and they’ve gotten good results from two spring training surprises: hard-throwing Gavin Collyer and changeup artist Peyton Gray. The Rangers were going to need some surprises to pop up in the bullpen. Collyer and Gray have thus far combined for 9 ⅔ scoreless innings.
Gotten by without much from their franchise players: Langford has missed a third of the team’s games and Seager, who went 0 for 3 Wednesday to drop his batting average to .207 and OPS to .722, slogged through perhaps the worst opening month of his career.
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His career track record, however, is an .868 OPS. While nobody is asking him to post that number for the year, if he turns April into the aberration and simply performs at his career norms the rest of the way, his season OPS may be down, but an .860 OPS over the next five months adds a different gear to the struggling offense.
Survived the toughest stretch of their schedule: The first 40 games were going to be a gauntlet for the Rangers and .500 was a realistic goal. The Rangers have played four of the six division leaders and will play No. 5 on Friday in Detroit. The arduous stretch is not yet over, with series at Detroit, the Yankees and at home against the Cubs before the opponents seem to soften some.
The upshot of all this: Even with those nine games still ahead of them, Tankathon, a site that calculates draft odds and strength of schedule, had the Rangers with the easiest remaining schedule in baseball over the final five months with opponents holding a composite .472 winning percentage.