Texas Ranger Rotation Showing A Complete Turnaround After Disastrous Season

The Texas Rangers have never really been considered among the top echelon of teams that could be deemed as pitching factories.

You know the ones? The Tampa Bay Rays and their plethora of top pitching prospects, the Atlanta Braves and their ability to turn no-named pitching prospects into aces, and the Houston Astros and their ability to fix broken starting pitchers and make them viable at the Major League level again.

While those three teams have been pumping out arms for quite some time now, it is a new endeavor for the Rangers.

Yes, Nathan Eovaldi has aged like wine, and it certainly helps to have Jacob deGrom in the rotation (and healthy), but none of that may have been possible outside of Texas.

Texas Rangers Rotation Vastly Better Than Last Year

It has been a night and day difference in the performance from the Rangers' rotation from 2024, and through the first quarter of this season. To be fair, the construction of the unit itself looks vastly different, as well.

While Jack Leiter, Kumar Rocker, Tyler Mahle and deGrom all made starts last year, the four pitchers combined for only 70 2/3 innings. In fact, only one pitcher from last year threw more than 100 innings and still remains in the rotation in 2025, Eovaldi, who also happens to be the only pitcher to qualify for the ERA title.

Those four alone have already doubled their combined workload in 2025 with 141 innings pitched, and have fared much better in the process. The rotation ended last season with a 4.35 ERA, ranking 21st in MLB. This year, the unit boasts an ERA of 3.00, the third-best mark in the sport behind only the Kansas City Royals and New York Mets.

That includes Rocker posting an 8.10 ERA across 20 innings, and Leiter having a 4.34 mark in that metric across 29 innings. None of this is even to mention that Patrick Corbin is now a member of the team and in the rotation, and has an ERA of 3.35 across his first seven starts after pitching to a 5.62 mark across the last five years, in which he failed to qualify for the ERA title only once.

Pitching coach Mike Maddux has done a phenomenal job in his third year in the role for the team, and is leading the unit to one of its best performances this decade.