The 10 greatest outfield arms in Texas Rangers history

The Texas Rangers have a knack for developing quality outfielders with great arm strength, but some of their top arms may surprise you.

The Texas Rangers have always had an assortment of outfielders with quality arms roaming the outfield grass.

Data analysts and sabermetric gurus throughout baseball use ARM and rARM to determine how useful an outfielder’s cannon really is.

FanGraphs explains ARM like this:

"“Outfielder’s get credit (plus or minus) depending on what the runners do on a hit or a fly ball out. A runner can stay put, advance, or get thrown out. A fielder will get credit not only if he throws out more than his share of runners, but also if he keeps more than his share of runners from advancing extra bases.”"

Based on this statistic, you can measure and determine the greatest outfield arms across the league.

For the Texas Rangers, we’re looking at outfielders from the 1972 inaugural team all the way to the 2020 roster, with a minimum of 1,000 innings played in the outfield.

So based on ARM, here are the best outfield arms in Texas Rangers history, beginning with the outliers.

Texas Rangers outfield arms: The Outliers

Some of these players were considered to have the best throwing arms on the Texas Rangers, but statistically, they failed to crack the top 10.

Some of the most surprising to avoid the top 10 were Nelson Cruz (13) and Shin-Soo Choo (21), as well as Juan Gonzalez.

Cruz, in particular, caught me off guard because of his arm strength, but he did allow -1.9 runners to advance.

Gonzalez just missed the innings threshold (986.2), but had a 7.0 ARM rating.

These players caught my attention because of how insanely talented they all were, but rated poorly when it came to stopping advancing baserunners or missing the innings requirement.