Arguably the biggest surprise in baseball thus far in the 2025 MLB regular season has been the performance of the Texas Rangers offense.
What was believed to be arguably the best 1-through-9 in the sport has fallen woefully short of expectations.
Injuries have plagued the team again, with shortstop Corey Seager constantly battling a nagging hamstring. Emerging star left fielder Wyatt Langford also spent some time on the injured list already this year.
All but four players, Adolis Garcia, Marcus Semien, Josh Smith and Josh Jung, have sat out double-digit games already.
That amount of lineup overturn leads to a drop in continuity and production, but some of the regulars just aren’t performing up to their accustomed level.
One of the players who would fall into that group is Semien, who is in a battle against Father Time.
In many ways, it looks like he is losing.
The veteran second baseman has a woeful .176/.264/.228 slash line with only three home runs and one double. His power outage is shocking, riding a four-year streak of hitting at least 23 home runs and 27 doubles.
His lack of production is one of the many reasons the team’s offense is not up to snuff, but there is some hope that a turnaround could be coming in the near future.
“If there's a silver lining, it's that Semien has some encouraging underlying metrics, which indicate that he's been one of the unluckiest hitters in the league; he has the fifth-highest differential between SLG and xSLG among qualified hitters. Any sort of upturn in production from Semien would help Texas close ground in an AL West that looks wide open,” wrote Jared Greenspan of MLB.com in a piece highlighting struggling players who need to improve to help get their teams on track.
For every piece of silver lining, there are other underlying metrics that insinuate Semien may just be succumbing to Father Time at 34 years old.
He currently has a Batting Run Value of -16, which is in the first percentile. His bat speed of 68.4 mph is in the ninth percentile, making it incredibly difficult to consistently generate hard contact and do damage at the plate.
Semien remains a positive when it comes to his fielding, but if he doesn’t start to show signs of life at the plate, some changes are going to have to be made.
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