An Early Season Test: Mariners at Rangers Series Preview
The Mariners head to Texas for an early season battle for the division lead.
Banking five wins last week to get back to .500 on the season was exactly what the doctor ordered for the Mariners. It was even more important that they took care of business against the likes of the Reds and Rockies because Seattle’s schedule is about to get a lot harder over the next couple of weeks. They’ve got this series on the road against the Rangers, then host the Diamondbacks and Braves before starting off the month of May with a trip to Houston. If the Mariners have truly turned a corner after their sluggish start, these will be the games that prove it.
The Rangers were awfully quiet during the offseason following their first World Series championship in franchise history. They had spent lavishly during the previous couple of years but the uncertain future surrounding their television rights put a halt to that outgoing cash flow. They were also put in an awkward position thanks to the injuries to Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Tyler Mahle. All three of those starters are slated to come off the IL later this season, so they entered the season hoping to stick around in the playoff picture until the reinforcements arrived. Things have mostly gone according to plan — the Astros slow start has benefitted both the Rangers and the M’s — and they find themselves a half game ahead of Seattle in the standings entering this early season battle for the division lead.
The reason why the Rangers were so confident in their ability to weather injuries to three of their starters was because of their high-powered offense. They led the American League in run scoring last year and had two highly regarded rookies set to provide production over a full season this year. Unfortunately, Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford have both gotten off to pretty slow starts this year to go along with an uncharacteristically powerless Corey Seager. Josh Jung is currently sidelined with a fractured wrist and Nathaniel Lowe was just activated off the IL last weekend. Marcus Semien and Adolis García are essentially the two guys carrying the lineup right now, and despite all those issues and woes, Texas is third in the AL in run scoring. That speaks to how deep and potent this lineup is even when it’s not at full strength.
Probable Pitchers
Dane Dunning enjoyed the most successful season of his career last year, throwing more than 170 innings with an ERA under four. His FIP was a half a run higher than that and his Statcast expected ERA another quarter of a run higher. Some good contact management and a healthy bit of good luck when batters put his pitches in play accounts for most of the discrepancy between his actual results and his peripherals. With a repertoire geared towards pitching to contact, he’ll always be at the mercy of the batted ball gods.
Jon Gray had an up-and-down season last year; he was great during the first half of the season but fell apart afterward and eventually succumbed to a forearm injury in September. Early in the year, he moved away from a sweeper back to his more traditional gyro slider; and that turned out to be his best pitch through the rest of the season. His biggest problem was that he essentially turned himself into a two-pitch pitcher with his curveball and changeup making up less than 15% of his pitch mix. When his fastball or slider loses effectiveness — it was his heater that lost some velocity during the second half last year — his whole pitch arsenal is affected.
Andrew Heaney’s success has always ebbed and flowed with his ability to keep the ball inside the yard. He’s always posted excellent strikeout rates and has good enough command of his three-pitch repertoire that he can be very effective when he’s not allowing a ton of hard contact. That blueprint goes out the window as soon as balls start flying over fences. Back in 2022, he took a pretty significant step forward with the Dodgers and the hope was that newfound ability to strikeout more than a third of the batters he faced would give him a much higher ceiling. That wasn’t the case when he joined the Rangers last year; his strikeout rate fell back to his career norms and his walk rate jumped up three points to make matters worse.
The Big Picture:
The Astros still have not turned the corner. After getting swept by the Braves early last week, they lost a three-game series to the lowly Nationals over the weekend and were shut out by a rookie making his second major league start on Sunday. They head to Chicago to face the Cubs this week. The Angels have now lost five straight after getting swept by the Reds last weekend and then losing the opening game of their series against the Orioles last night.