Zero walks made the Texas Rangers’ final afternoon look easy to diagnose. Three home runs, six hits, four runs: plenty of power in a room with too few guests. Minnesota won 6-4 at Target Field, and Texas finished 80-82.
Then the season totals complicate the explanation. Only four American League clubs finished with a higher on-base percentage than the Rangers’ .317. Tampa Bay led that comparison at .326; the Chicago White Sox and Detroit finished at .320, and Boston at .319. Texas nevertheless scored 673 runs, twelfth in the league.
Minnesota, the opponent that spent Sunday giving its hitters baserunners to drive home, also finished at .317. The Twins scored 739 runs. That is a 66-run difference between teams with the same displayed on-base percentage, enough to make “get on base more” an incomplete prescription for everything that went wrong in Texas.
It was a perfectly reasonable prescription for Sunday. Dean Kremer worked seven innings, allowed three hits and walked nobody. Danny Jansen’s third-inning homer was Texas’s only run against him. Wyatt Langford’s first-inning single disappeared in Corey Seager’s double play. Nicky Lopez’s sixth-inning single ended with Lopez stranded at third after a sacrifice and two groundouts.
Elias Díaz homered to begin the eighth, but the next three hitters made outs. In the ninth, Brandon Nimmo singled, Langford popped out and Seager hit a two-run homer. That was the Rangers’ only scoring swing with a teammate already on base. Jake Burger and Ezequiel Duran then made the final two outs.
The afternoon needed more traffic. The full season needs a closer look at what Texas did with the traffic it had.
The Rangers drew 525 walks, slightly fewer than Houston’s 530 and more than Minnesota’s 507. They had 1,296 hits and hit 183 homers. Those figures do not describe an offense that spent the entire year repeating Sunday’s six-hit, zero-walk performance. The last box score was a bad example of reaching base, rather than a complete explanation of the season’s scoring.
Houston offers another revealing comparison. The Astros finished with the same .242 batting average as Texas and a slightly lower .315 on-base percentage. They scored 734 runs. Their 226 home runs and .417 slugging percentage provided considerably more power than the Rangers’ 183 homers and .396 slugging mark. An extra base has value after someone reaches first, too.
Minnesota’s advantage was less easily reduced to home runs. The Twins hit 187, only four more than Texas. They also collected 1,337 hits and 256 doubles, compared with the Rangers’ 1,296 hits and 235 doubles. Those additional hits and extra bases supplied more material from which to build innings, even though the clubs finished with matching on-base rates.
None of those comparisons establishes how Texas performed in every scoring situation. They do show why one percentage cannot carry the entire assessment. On-base percentage measures how often a hitter reaches; it does not tell whether the next batter doubles, homers or grounds into two outs. Sunday supplied examples of all the complications around that next event.
