Texas Rangers Receive Hopeful Prediction in American League West Race

The American League West division has run through the Houston Astros for nearly a full decade now, but 2025 could finally be the year in which the balance of power shifts and the Texas Rangers unseat them as division champions.

Even in 2023 when the Rangers won the World Series championship, they had to do it from a wild card spot, as the Astros took the AL West crown on a tiebreaker.

Houston won it again in 2024 as Texas slumped on a season-long World Series hangover, but the time is now for Texas after a productive offseason in Arlington and a tumultuous one in Houston.

The Astros saw their lineup depleted with the departures of Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman, while the Rangers are poised to get bounce back seasons from core pieces like Adolis Garcia and Marcus Semien while benefitting from savvy additions like Joc Pederson and Jake Burger.

Texas is a trendy pick to click in 2025, and MLB.com writer Will Leitch added to the chorus of Rangers praise by picking the club to emerge from the season as division champions.

"The young players who struggled or were hurt last year look likely to take a step toward establishing themselves as big league regulars -- or more," Leitch wrote. "Jacob deGrom is back and looking healthy. The bullpen has been overhauled... Meanwhile, this division doesn’t look all that daunting. You can make an argument that the Astros, the Rangers’ rivals who have ruled this division for years now, look weaker than they have in a decade."

Statistical predictive models favor the Rangers over the Astros and Seattle Mariners as well.

PECOTA projections from Baseball Prospectus have the Rangers earning an average of 90.3 simulated wins in 2025, with the Astros at 87.8 and Mariners at 85.8.

That results in a 50.3% chance for Texas to win the division, and if the group can pull it off, it would be the franchise's first division title since 2016.

In every full season since that year, the Astros have won the AL West, though the Athletics did have the group's best record in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.

There is no question that the Rangers have the talent to get the job done, but a lot is riding on the health of players like deGrom and young outfielder Evan Carter, while emerging pitchers like Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker could raise the team's ceiling in a big way with breakout efforts.