Is it time to blame Ron Washington?

The Texas Rangers and Ron Washington started the season with a lot of expectations this season.    Many had picked the Rangers to reach the playoffs and some even picked them to advance to the World Series.

Halfway point: With the All-star break just over 2 weeks away, which is considered the halfway point of the season, the Rangers don’t appear to even be contenders.

The Rangers started to look like they’ll be able to stay afloat, but after an 8-game losing streak and another losing streak starting it doesn’t appear that they’ll make playoff run this year.

Right now they have 80 games remaining in the season.   The Texas Rangers are 14.0 games behind in the division and 7.5 games behind in the Wild Card race.   Though the halfway point (81 games) the Rangers had a record of 37-44.  Which is the fewest wins they have had over 81 games since 2007 (34-47).

Just blame Ron: Is it time now to start blaming Ron Washington?  If so, what should happen to him?  Should the Rangers fire him mid-season and promote an intern manager?

In my opinion, you can’t blame Ron Washington with how the team is doing right now.  He’s done a great job at developing the players they have now and for a long time has kept the team competitive in the American League.  The Texas Rangers have used 42 different players, 23 different pitchers, used the disabled list 20 times and used 11 different rookies.

Any team would struggle when they have been forced to use that many players and suffered that many injuries.  It hasn’t helped they have lost key players such as Prince Fielder, Matt Harrison, Martin Perez and Derek Holland.

If they Rangers didn’t have an issue with injuries and the club was still performing poorly, then it would be time to blame Ron Washington, but now is not the time.  He’s doing the best with the players he has at his disposal.

Consider this, he’s basically using his 5th player at first base, Carlos Pena.  He was last with the Rangers back in 2001.

Things couldn’t have gone worse for the Rangers this season.  Hopefully the second half will be better.  On a positive note they will start to get back several players soon, but the damage is already done and it’s tough to say if they’ll recover now.