The Texas Rangers Got Their Money’s Worth—and a Whole Lot More

In the bottom of the first inning of a do-or-die World Series Game 5, the Arizona Diamondbacks were 90 feet away from their first lead since their Game 2 win. Star rookie Corbin Carroll had led off with a walk, stolen second, and advanced to third on a groundout. With two outs, Christian Walker had lived up to his surname, putting runners on first and third. That brought up Tommy Pham, who had homered off the Texas Rangers’ Game 5 starter, Nathan Eovaldi, in Game 1.

Pham fouled off Eovaldi’s first pitch. The second was a fastball on the black, low and in and hard enough to jam Pham, who pulled it on the ground. Rangers shortstop Corey Seager took a few steps toward third base, backhanded the ball, and slung it sidearm to second baseman Marcus Semien for the third out of the inning. The threat was defused, as several subsequent close calls would be: Carroll was the first of seven Arizona runners to reach scoring position in Game 5. None of them made it home, as the Rangers shut out the Diamondbacks 5-0 to claim the franchise’s first title, 62 years after forming as the second incarnation of the Washington Senators and 51 years after a rechristening and relocation to Arlington.

Seager, Semien, Eovaldi: The trio that combined to end the Diamondbacks’ first-inning rally on Wednesday in Phoenix also propelled the Rangers to their long-awaited win. Seager scored the Rangers’ first run, breaking the pitching-duel deadlock on a Mitch Garver single in the seventh. (Zac Gallen was great, holding Texas hitless through six, but as Joe Sheehan puts it, “Every pitcher is cruising until they’re not.”) Semien scored their last, plating himself on a two-run homer in the ninth. Eovaldi, who Houdinied his way through six scoreless frames, was credited with the victory—his fifth in a record, undefeated postseason, in which he put his post-injury problems behind him and looked like his first-half self. All were free-agent additions signed with this exact outcome in mind.

“This is the vision, right?” second-time World Series MVP Seager asked after the game.

The vision had become clear almost two years ago, on December 1, 2021. On the eve of the 2021-22 MLB lockout, the Rangers made three major moves. Out of the several star shortstops who led that offseason’s free-agent class, they landed two, Seager and Semien. They also signed starting pitcher Jon Gray. “We’ve been very transparent,” Rangers GM Chris Young said then of the organization’s pitch to high-priced players who had reason to be wary of joining a club that was coming off a 60-win season. “We were a 102-loss team. We haven’t run from that. But we have a vision and a plan, and this is how we’re going to accomplish it.”

Semien, who along with Seager represented a “pillar” of that plan, talked at the time about building “a winning culture and winning team. Yes, it hasn’t been like that for the past couple years, but let’s accelerate that process.” They accelerated it to such an extent that the Rangers went from last-place losers to champions with only one subpar season in between. The Rangers didn’t bottom out well below 60 wins, as the “tankbuilding” Astros and Orioles did. Once they started spending, their “process” wasn’t a several-seasons-long ordeal. Their process took two years. “It was a lot of trust,” Seager said after Game 5. “A lot of trust from them to me and me to them, and a lot of trust for Marcus to come, a lot of trust for Jon—all these guys that came here and had the same vision. It’s pretty cool to see it through.”

The Rangers, who’d endured five losing seasons since their last playoff appearance in 2016 and had plenty of payroll room, committed more than $550 million to free agents just before the lockout took effect, unprecedented spending for a single offseason. The next offseason, they spent hundreds of millions more to import an entire rotation, and incurred what was likely an “unprecedented cost” to lure three-time-World-Series-winning manager Bruce Bochy out of retirement. (Bochy earned $6 million in 2019, his last year with the Giants, more than his Rangers predecessor Chris Woodward made in his four seasons as skipper combined.) And when their expensive staff faltered after Opening Day, they summoned summer reinforcements via trade. This was Operation Warp Speed applied to baseball: a pricey program that accepted some failures as the worthwhile cost of accelerated success. Without aggressive upgrades, the Rangers wouldn’t have won.

Even if the Rangers were resigned to a few final stumbles on their decades-long path to a title, the immediate returns on their initial investments didn’t quite conform to the trajectory on their vision board. In 2022, the Rangers went 15-35 in one-run games, a run of fluky, terrible timing that may have hastened the firings of Woodward and president of baseball operations Jon Daniels, who were dismissed days apart last August. Texas finished fourth in the AL West, only eight wins better than in 2021, which seemed to vindicate the doubters who’d understandably wondered why the Rangers were breaking the bank when they were still too far from contention for stars like Seager and Semien to complete their roster.

One of Branch Rickey’s famous tenets of team building states, “It is better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late.” The Rangers’ triumph suggests a corollary: It is better to sign a player (or players) a year too early than a year too late. The Rangers weren’t ready to go all the way in 2022, but if they hadn’t secured Seager and Semien prior to that season, they wouldn’t have had them in 2023, when the All-Star middle infielders finished seventh and sixth, respectively, among all major leaguers in FanGraphs WAR.

The Rangers needed almost all of their high-profile recruits and big-name midseason replacements to make it to October as the American League’s second wild-card team. Although they spent most of the season in first place in the West, they blew their lead and let their intrastate rivals, the Houston Astros, tie them at 90-72 and edge them out in the division based on Houston’s superior head-to-head record in the two teams’ season series. (The Rangers had a higher overall run differential, for whatever that’s worth.) Texas barely held off the division-rival Mariners, who finished only two games back, though an end-of-season tie between those two teams would’ve gone the Rangers’ way.

Along the way, the team’s vaunted rotation—projected before the season to be baseball’s third best—suffered from attrition. Jake Odorizzi, whom the Rangers acquired from Atlanta last November, hurt his shoulder and never threw a pitch for Texas. Jacob deGrom, the centerpiece of the team’s rebuilt rotation, hurt his elbow after six starts and underwent Tommy John surgery, relegating him to the status of overrated prankster. Eovaldi strained his forearm in late July, as did Gray in late September. At the trade deadline, Young dealt for Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery. Good thing they got both, because Scherzer was the next to go down. (Young also traded for Aroldis Chapman to shore up a weak bullpen, though that trade cost the Rangers lefty Cole Ragans, who went on to excel in Kansas City.)

Odorizzi aside, all of those hurlers helped Texas maintain its small wild-card margin. Even deGrom: Although he made only six starts, the Rangers won all of them. In the World Series, a diminished Scherzer contributed three scoreless innings; Gray gave Texas a crucial 4 2/3 scoreless frames in relief; and another free-agent arm, Andrew Heaney, allowed one run through 5 2/3. Not all of these pitchers paid off dollars-per-WAR-wise, but there’s no trophy for efficient spending.

None of this is to say that the Rangers were purely a product of throwing money around (not that there’s anything wrong with throwing money around). Yes, they outspent Arizona by almost $100 million, placing eighth in MLB payroll to the Diamondbacks’ 20th. But according to Roster Resource, the Rangers’ active roster ranks only tied for seventh in number of free agents, eighth in number of players added via trade, and 17th in number of homegrown players. The Rangers didn’t just purchase a championship-caliber roster off the rack; they also drafted and developed core contributors, which they’d struggled to do during the fallow period that followed their pennants and playoff appearances in the first half of the 2010s. Neither the Diamondbacks nor the Rangers was especially young overall, but both clubs boasted young stars who should ensure that this won’t be either team’s last trip to October.

Rangers rookies Josh Jung and Evan Carter, who were drafted in 2019 and 2020, respectively, were standouts during the regular season and postseason. Leody Taveras and José Leclerc were signed as amateur free agents. Ezequiel Duran went to Texas in the 2021 trade that sent Joey Gallo to New York, but Duran made his major league debut as a Ranger. Other players, including Nathaniel Lowe, Jonah Heim, and Josh Sborz, made their debuts for other teams but came into their own as Rangers.

No trade acquisition blossomed in Texas more dramatically than playoff hero Adolis García, the ALCS MVP who hit a walk-off homer in Game 1 before hurting his oblique in Game 3 and being removed from the roster. The two-time All-Star’s feats of power were made possible by improvements in plate discipline that Texas encouraged: Among all players who saw at least 1,000 pitches in 2022 and 2023, García made the fifth-largest improvement in swing-decision metric SwRV+ by maintaining his aggressiveness on hittable pitches (81st percentile in 2022, 82nd in ’23) while significantly curtailing his tendency to chase (9th percentile in ’22, 46th percentile in ’23). García, who hit .323/.382/.726 with eight home runs and a playoff-record 22 RBI, finished 17th all-time in single-postseason win probability added and 11th all-time in single-postseason RE24 (three spots behind Seager’s 2020 and one behind Seager’s 2023).

That said: If not for the players who were making the big bucks, the Rangers wouldn’t have qualified for the playoffs, let alone swept the Rays and Orioles, edged out the Astros in a seven-game ALCS, and beaten the Diamondbacks (who outhit them 47 to 38 in the World Series and scored only four runs fewer over five games). Seager’s game-tying two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth of Game 1 was the biggest hit of the season, per championship win probability added; his homers in World Series Game 3, ALCS Game 7, and World Series Game 4 registered at sixth, 20th, and 33rd. Semien struggled for much of the postseason, but his run-scoring single in Game 3 and triple in Game 4—each of which immediately preceded a Seager dinger—ranked 41st and eighth, respectively, on the 2023 cWPA leaderboard. That duo didn’t come cheap, but Texas got more than its money’s worth.

In October 2015, before Theo Epstein snapped the second extended title drought of his executive career, the then-Cubs president of baseball operations said, “The only thing I know for sure is that whatever team wins the World Series, their particular style of play will be completely in vogue and trumpeted from the rooftops by the media all offseason—and in front offices—as the way to win.” The same could be said about the champion’s style of team construction. Rangers ownership isn’t a shining beacon of sports-franchise stewardship—Texas is the only MLB team not to host a Pride Night, and its spending is partly enabled by public ballpark funding—but it’s nice to think that teams like the O’s, Rays, Mariners, and Reds might try to put the finishing touches on their teams by emulating the way Rangers team owner Ray Davis splurged two offseasons ago and doubled down last winter.

As Epstein added in 2015, though, “This game is too nuanced and too complicated for there to be any one way [to win].” Rangers aside, this season sported one of the weakest connections ever between payroll and results. Spending suited Texas, but not so much the Mets, Yankees, or Padres. And if playoff randomness hadn’t swung the Rangers’ way, we wouldn’t be celebrating their season to the same extent. The Rangers were a wrecking ball in the postseason, averaging 5.7 runs per game against good pitching, playing their customary strong defense, and riding four pitchers (Eovaldi, Montgomery, Leclerc, and Sborz) for 60.2 percent of their innings, with a combined 2.70 ERA. They went 13-4, including an incredible 11-0 on the road, and they outscored their opponents by almost two runs per game. Still, it’s not hard to dream up alternate-history scenarios in which Arizona topped Texas, or an ill-timed slump stopped the Rangers before they reached the last round.

Plus, even if a front office’s spirit is willing, the free-agent flesh is sometimes weak. The best free-agent shortstop available this winter is, um, Amed Rosario? That’s all the more reason to pounce when elite talent is available, as the Rangers did. But even teams that have reaped the rewards of being big spenders don’t always stick to that course. (See the 2018 Red Sox.)

By historical standards, this was far from a riveting postseason, and not only in terms of World Series TV ratings. The great games—Game 2 of the Phillies-Braves NLDS, Game 4 of the NLCS, Game 5 of the ALCS, Game 1 of the World Series—were few and far between, and road teams went 26-15, which quieted crowds. Even with both championship series going seven for the fourth time ever, only 41 of 53 possible games were played—77.4 percent, below the divisional era average of 80 percent and the fourth-lowest rate of the wild-card era. The quality of the games was worse than the quantity. By average total per-game change in WPA, this was the least-exciting postseason since 1989, and the least-exciting ever among the 39 postseasons with more than 16 games played. By average championship leverage index—a metric that measures how tense a game feels, moment by moment—this World Series ranked 97th out of 119, and the lowest since 2012. This year also featured the least-tense wild-card round and divisional rounds ever, by average cLI. If not for the CS (which ranked 13th out of 54 seasons), October would’ve been bleak.

But not for fans of the victors, who are probably relieved that their team was taken to the brink only once. Rangers diehards have experienced a surfeit of hard luck, hardship, and heartbreak. They were overdue for a cakewalk. When this postseason started, the Rangers were one of six active MLB franchises not to have won a World Series. Now that list has been trimmed to five. “I’m tired of losing,” Young said last December. “Our organization is tired of losing.” For the first time ever, the Rangers’ season ended with a playoff win. Who cares what it cost? That’s priceless.

Thanks to Drew Haugen, Kenny Jackelen, and Michael Mountain for research assistance.