We all know the top-level summary for the 2025 Texas Rangers season: the pitching was great, and the offense let the team down. If the offense had just been average, the Rangers would have won the American League West.

The numbers, after all, speak for themselves. The Rangers were 26th in the majors in batting average. They were 26th in the majors in OBP. They were 26th in the majors in slugging. In OPS, the Rangers were — you guessed it — 26th.

In runs scored, the Rangers were 22nd in the majors with 684 runs, though they were right in the middle of a clutch of eight teams that scored anywhere from 673 to 689 runs, spanning 18th to 25th in the majors. The Rangers’ ordinal improvement in runs scored compared to OPS would appear to be due to a combination of the team being an above-average baserunning team (8th in the majors, per Fangraphs) and performing better with runners in scoring position than overall.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, the Rangers allowed the fewest runs in baseball — just 605. That’s the fewest runs allowed by a team since 2022. Its the fewest runs allowed by the Rangers in a non-shortened season since the team moved to Arlington, edging out the 1983 Rangers, who allowed 609 runs (though in 163 games). Amazingly, the Rangers allowed almost 100 fewer runs in 162 games in 2025 than the 1994 Rangers allowed in 114 games.

The pitching and defense — and the defense does get a lot of credit, let’s be clear, finishing 5th in the majors in FRV and 1st in DRS — came through. The offense — expected to be the strength of the team — failed them.

That’s the narrative, the post-mortem of a failed 2025 season that has been trumpeted from all quarters.

The thing is, though…I don’t think that’s quite accurate.

I do agree that the run prevention side of things for the Rangers was better than the run scoring side in 2025. I agree that the Rangers’ offense — expected to be an above-average offense in 2025, a top-third caliber offense — did not meet expectations.

But, in context, the Rangers offense wasn’t bad — it was more or less league-average.

If we look at Baseball-Reference, they have the Rangers’ OPS+ — the team OPS, adjusted for park effects — at 100, which is exactly average. B-R has the team’s Rbat+, which factors in all offensive contributions, is at 103, a shade above league average. Texas was 14th in the majors in OPS+ and 13th in Rbat+.

How do we square that circle, reconcile the team scoring the fewest runs in the league with B-R’s measurements have them as league average?

Through park effects, of course. And specifically, how the Shed played as the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball in 2025.

Don’t believe me? Think the Shed was only perceived as being pitcher-friendly because the Rangers’ pitching was so awesome and the offense so bad? Let’s take a look at the home/road slash line splits for the Rangers in 2025:

2025 Texas Rangers hitters:

Home: .225/.297/.363, 30th in MLB in OPS

Away: .242/.307/.399, 17th in MLB in OPS

2025 Texas Rangers pitchers:

Home: .219/.285/.345, 1st in MLB in OPS allowed

Away: .241/.306/.405, 10th in MLB in OPS allowed

That is dramatic, to say the least.

That is reflected in Statcast’s one year park factor analysis for 2025. The Shed is, in ranking parks in regards to how hitter-friendly they were in 2025, tied for last with T-Mobile Park in Seattle. There were 17% fewer runs scored at the Shed in 2025 than average. And again, I want to emphasize, this is relative to performance by both the Rangers and their opponents in games away from the Shed — it isn’t something that can be explained away by a great Rangers pitching staff and bad Rangers offense.

And this discrepancy is almost entirely based on the ball not carrying this year in Arlington.

In 2025, the xwOBA on contact — balls put into play, not Ks or walks or HBPs or the like — was 99% of league average. Hitters were making basically the same quality of contact — exit velocities and launch angles — as they were most other parks.

The actual wOBA on contact, though, was 90% of league average — a huge discrepancy, the lowest in MLB. Seattle was 29th, at 93%. Only Colorado, at 115% wOBA on contact, had a bigger percentage spread between xwOBA and actual wOBA on contact.

To put this into context, the last time a park had, in a full season, a wOBA on contact percentage as low as 90% was 2021, with Busch Stadium. In 2018, the Marlins’ home park was at 89%. In 2016, the Oakland Colosseum was 90%.

So in the last decade, only once has there been a team whose home park depressed, in that give year, offense on balls in play more than the Shed did in 2025. Only two other times did it even match what happened in Arlington in 2025.

Not surprisingly, actual batting average on balls where contact was made was also dramatically lower in Arlington this year — 91% of what it was elsewhere. If the ball isn’t carrying, more balls are going to be caught.

Given this, it is no surprise that extra base hits were hard to come by in the Shed in 2025. Doubles were only down slightly, at 98%. Triples, however, were at 53% compared to everywhere else, and homers were at just 80%. Only Busch Stadium (78%) and PNC Park (66%) were lower in regards to home runs.

The Shed played pitcher-friendly in 2024 as well — however, the park factor was 95. That was 28th in MLB, though more in line with the normal range of pitcher-friendly parks you’d see.

What makes this so bizarre, however, is that in 2023, the park was one of the most hitter-friendly parks in baseball. Statcast has the park factor for 2023 at 106 — tied with Kansas City for third most hitter friendly, behind Coors (natch) and Fenway. The wOBA on contact was 107, 5 percentage points higher than the xwOBA on contact of 102 that year. And it was the most homer-friendly park in baseball, with players homering 33% more often at the Shed than elsewhere. The park was also particularly hitter-friendly in 2022, was mildly pitcher friendly in 2021, and played neutral in 2020.

This also helps explain why B-R has the Rangers’ offense at around league average, with park factors accounted for, while Fangraphs has the team wRC+ at 92, tied with the Reds and Angels for 24th in the majors.

So B-R’s park factor for the 2025 Rangers is based on how the park played in 2024 and 2025, two pitcher-friendly seasons (with 2025 being extremely pitcher-friendly). That is going to result in higher OPS+ figures for batters and lower ERA+ figures for pitchers because it is treating the Shed as extremely pitcher-friendly.

Fangraphs, on the other hand, uses five year park factors. Thus, while they show the Shed as tied with Seattle as the most pitcher-friendly park in 2025, they calculate wRC+, FIP-, etc. based on the past five years, which includes the extremely hitter-friendly 2023 season, as well as 2022 and 2021.

And the five year park factor Fangraphs is applying for the 2025 Texas Rangers treats the players as if they are in a more or less neutral home field environment. That means that for the 2025 Rangers, hitters are going to grade out lower, and pitchers higher, than B-R reflects.

The DMN had an article in June about the ball not carrying as well in Arlington this year, with Chris Young being quoted as saying that they were studying the issue. No definitive answer was provided in the piece to explain why this was happening.

However, I do have to think that the organization knows why this is. This isn’t an open-air stadium, where weather and wind patterns and the like can impact things year-to-year. The Rangers play in a climate-controlled stadium that is, for virtually every game, the same climate environment.

And I will take this a step further and say that I think this is a purposeful choice by the organization. I tend to think that they made the decision that a pitcher-friendly park would reduce stress on their pitchers, reduce the number of pitches that have to be thrown and the number of batters they have the face, allowing them to go deeper into games and allow them to use their best pitchers a greater percentage of the time. I think they took at step in that direction in 2024, with whatever they were doing to manage or alter the climate in the Shed, and took another step in 2025. I imagine that there will be a correction made in 2026, such that the park plays less pitcher-oriented and closer to neutral, compared to 2025.

And if I’m right, I really wish someone in the organization would leak something about what they were doing. Inquiring minds want to know.

Which brings us all the way back around to the original issue, the narrative that is out there, that if the Rangers just had an average offense in 2025, they would have won the division. As illustrated above, I do believe they had an average offense in 2025, considering their home park.

Does that mean it was the pitchers’ fault, that run prevention was to blame? No, I don’t think that, either. The Rangers’ ERA+ in 2025 was 105, tied for 10th in the majors, a little better than the 13th in the majors they finished with in Rbat+.

So if the hitting wasn’t to blame, and the pitching wasn’t to blame, what was to blame?

Bad luck, perhaps?

The Rangers scored 684 runs this season and allowed 605 runs. That would result in an expected won/loss record over 162 games of 90-72 — the same record that the Seattle Mariners won the division with, a record that would have tied for the third best record in the American League. The Rangers underperformed the record that their run differential would project them to end up with by 9 games, due in no small part to a 21-29 record in one run games.

This wasn’t a great team in 2025. But it was a better team — and in particular, a better offense — than anyone has given them credit for.