Texas Rangers Pitching Staff Among Best in Baseball in These Key Areas

The season is young. The Texas Rangers had played just eight games going into Saturday’s contest with the Tampa Bay Rays.

But there is already one clear trend emerging — the pitching is pretty good.

The Rangers (6-2) have a rotation that has kept them in every ball game this season and a bullpen that has proven to be as good as president of baseball operations Chris Young hoped they would be after spending the whole offseason retooling the unit.

While the Rangers have given up just two runs in their last three games — and those two runs both scored via wild pitches by the bullpen on Friday — there is one area where the entire staff is dominating baseball.

After eight games the Rangers had 79 strikeouts, which was tied for most in baseball with American League West Division rival the Athletics, who now play in Sacramento while they wait for their new stadium to be built in Las Vegas.

That works out to nearly 10 strikeouts per game, 9.875 per game to be exact. Per inning that’s a rate of 1.10.

That’s a rate any manager will take, according to Rangers skipper Bruce Bochy.

“It’s how well they’re hitting their spots and commanding the ball,” he said on Saturday. “it started with (Nathan Eovaldi) Evo in Cincinnati. He had four pitches going and Jack (Leiter) did the same thing. That was really impressive. But then the bullpen comes in and they’ve been attacking hitters. The last thing we want to do is beat ourselves. We don’t want to be putting guys on (base) and they’ve been doing a terrific job.”

The bullpen is also doing impressive things. Through eight games the bullpen had five saves and 13 holds, both of which lead MLB. Luke Jackson had four of those saves, with Chris Martin claiming the other.

Jackson leads baseball in saves and Robert Garcia is tied for the lead in baseball with four holds. Jackson, Garcia and Martin have become the bellwethers in the bullpen, as each has pitched in five of the Rangers’ first eight games.

This bullpen may be new to the Rangers, but most of the relievers are veterans and know how to handle big moments.

“I think it’s just a sense of calmness,” Bochy said. “These guys have been around, and they can handle, really, any role you put them in.”