Sixth cents.

My two cents — trebled! — on where the Rangers are, and where this newsletter is, one-sixth into the season.

The Rangers are 14-13, half a game in back of the Mariners atop the limping AL West. Those 27 games represent the one-sixth pole of the season, and because it also represents a pretty good sample of what we’ve been rolling out here at the refurb’d Newberg Report, I wanted to check in with you guys on some things.

First, six thoughts on where the team is in its first-ever World Series championship defense. Playing .500 ball for what is now basically a month is hardly inspiring, but all things considered, things could be much worse — and should get much better.

One.

This offense was built to repeat as one of the league’s best, returning just about everybody and replacing Mitch Garver with Wyatt Langford.

Alas, the offense has not been very good. It’s just outside the top 10 in the league in runs per game and OPS, after finishing third in both categories in 2023. It’s in the bottom third in average exit velocity and hard hit rate, metrics in which they were second and third last year.

Josh Jung and Nathaniel Lowe getting hurt in camp wasn’t ideal, but (1) Josh Smith’s early-season breakout has certainly softened that blow and (2) let’s not forget that the team was running roughshod on the league last year even when missing Corey Seager for five weeks.

The good news is it’s almost unquestionable that Seager will be much better over the final five-sixths of the season; he just hasn’t found his rhythm, and missing spring training is likely a factor there. That Lowe’s return and, eventually, Jung’s will help bring those numbers up. That while Adolis Garcia probably won’t maintain a .900 OPS all year, the fact is that everyone else who finished the year as a regular in 2023 and has been that so far in 2024 is not only down in OPS, but in most cases significantly down:

• Seager: 372 points down

• Evan Carter (though the 2023 sample was obviously short): 259 points

• Leody Taveras: 154 points

• Jonah Heim: 55 points

• even Marcus Semien: 49 points

Add in that Langford is 245 points behind Garver. That type of gap won’t last.

These aren’t guys on the tail ends of their career. The production, up and down the lineup, is almost certainly going to get better, and possibly by a ton.

Two.

The rotation, thin as it was coming into the season, has held things together so far. Rangers starters are slightly above league average in ERA (3.96) and WHIP (1.263), and it might surprise you to believe they are third best in baseball, behind only the Phillies and Red Sox, in opponents’ batting average (.217) and fourth in strikeouts (146 in 143 ⅓ innings).

Nathan Eovaldi, Andrew Heaney, and Dane Dunning haven’t been as reliable yet as they were for most of 2023. Jon Gray seems to be rounding back into form. While Cody Bradford remains sidelined after a brilliant three starts (it’s now diagnosed as a small stress fracture in his 12th rib, not just a lower back strain), Michael Lorenzen has been fantastic.

And it looks like Max Scherzer will be back in the next couple weeks.

Three.

The bullpen, especially of late, has been nails. The unit is on a roll of 16 consecutive scoreless innings, and extending it back over 18 innings — which adds one run though it was unearned — Rangers relievers have punched out 20 and walked three and, shockingly, scattered just five hits.

Are Kirby Yates and David Robertson capable of keeping this up? No telling, but the odds are far better than they were a year ago with Will Smith given the level of Yates’s and Robertson’s stuff.

(Photo by Mike Mulholland/Getty Images)

Is Jose Leclerc back? Still a bumpy ride, but like the offense, the track record is there for him to better than he has been. Josh Sborz, Leclerc’s right-handed sidekick in last October’s title run, has looked great so far.

The back end of the pen feels far more put-together than it was last spring.

Four.

We shouldn’t leave Jacob Latz and Cole Winn out of this, and won’t. Latz has been really good more often than not, while Winn — hat tip to reader Jason Shure for this — is joining select company by throwing six hitless innings to start his big-league career. Austin Cox set the record at 11 ⅔ innings with the Royals last year; before that, no pitcher had ever reached 10.

Winn’s conviction going after hitters — even more so than his stuff — has been extremely encouraging. What a great development.

Jonathan Hernandez looked fantastic in his season debut on Wednesday. Same as with Winn, what jumped out was the confidence and aggressiveness he showed. The stuff has never been in question; the issue with Hernandez has always been his own belief in it.

Five.

Can the farm system provide even more as we approach the middle third of the schedule?

Jack Leiter’s debut last week had its ups and downs — two of the four innings he started were scoreless, and a third one should have been — but just as encouraging to me was how he picked up right where he left off in Triple-A once he was returned to Round Rock. On Thursday: six shutout innings, one single, three walks, eight strikeouts — and as Scott Lucas points out, 19 swinging strikes out of Salt Lake’s 40 swings (nine on his fastball and eight on his slider). Leiter is now up to 36 strikeouts and nine walks in 24 Round Rock innings this season.

(I’m toying with the idea of clipping a portion of Field Coordinator Kenny Holmberg’s fascinating comments about Leiter’s development in the Zoom we had yesterday for our Founding Member subscribers and sharing it with you all. Let me think about that.)

Sam Huff and Blaine Crim are hitting and Dustin Harris is coming on. At Frisco, Abi Ortiz is justifying the aggressive development track. His teammate Dane Acker has jumped out to an extremely impressive start in the RoughRiders rotation.

It’s possible, if not likely, that none of them are needed in 2024 for any meaningful time. But aside from Huff and possibly Crim, tack the rest onto a number of the system’s prospects at the lower levels, and the Rangers should be poised once again to make noise at the trade deadline — which doesn’t even take into consideration that Tyler Mahle and Jacob deGrom should arrive in the second half as pseudo-deadline-boosts.

Six.

The middling work of the entire division is obviously important here. Getting into the tournament is the key mission; the Rangers limped in a year ago in a final-weekend relegation to the Wild Card Round before getting insanely hot at the perfect time.

Can the Astros turn this around? They don’t have a lot of tradeable impact players aside from half a year of Alex Bregman or Justin Verlander (unless they want to market Kyle Tucker, which an Astros friend of mine thinks is not out of the question). There’s surely no way they’d move Jose Altuve or Yordan Alvarez. But all that said, is there a point in June or July at which Houston decides to sell in order to replenish a depleted farm system? This will be fascinating to watch — the Astros don’t play Texas again until July 12, which is an oddly notable fact: Houston is 4-3 against the Rangers . . . and 3-16 against everyone else.

Yes, Seattle is a problem with that starting pitching. The A’s are going to be the A’s and I trust the Angels will be themselves, too. But again, while winning division is certainly the goal, it’s not the only way to play past 162.

And I still think — based on much of the above — that the Rangers, now neck-and-neck with the Mariners, will find their groove, particularly on offense, and will win this division for the first time since 2016.

Your turn!

OK, I’m asking you all for a favor, and this shouldn’t take you more than three minutes.

If you’ll click the survey below, I’d like to take your pulse on which types of stories you’re enjoying the most — and least. We’re all in this together; I know what I like working up and writing, but that’s not nearly as important as where you guys fall on all of that. You’re the reason I’ve set this newsletter up.

In the survey, I break down these two months of the Newberg Report Substack catalog into a few categories and all I’m asking for is a number from you (ranging from 1 = it sucks . . . to 10 = let's gooooooo), on each story type. Seriously, it won’t take more than a few minutes. And hopefully (at least this is the idea) it will help me streamline things going forward by sticking more to what you guys like the most, and going to the well less often on the things that aren’t landing so much.

Thanks for making these first couple months of this revived venture an absolute blast.

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