Predicting the 2022 Texas Rangers Opening Day Lineup

Some things to add:

Injuries suck

While many fans were looking forward to seeing Josh Jung break into the lineup, as he is the Texas Rangers’ No. 2 prospect, and MLB’s 47th ranked prospect overall, he unfortunately was injured during the offseason and is out for quite sometime, and if he is to return this season it will be very late into the season and as a primarily DH role, so sadly Rangers fans will have to wait to see the young phenom for quite a while. While that puts a bit of a damper on things, that is not to take anything away from Andy Ibañez. In his 76 games played in 2021 he hit .271, had an OBP of .321, and had an OPS of .756. With those numbers stretched over a full season he would’ve ranked within the top 14 3rd basemen in the league in terms of OPS according to MLB.com, which certainly isn’t a bad showing for a players first major league action.

Where the new guys will bat:

Another interesting thing to point out is with how the spring training lineups have been taking shape, it seems there is a major focus of having Semien, Seager, and Garver next to each other in the order, either batting 1, 2, 3 or 2, 3, 4. However, we’ve seen already through this short spring Semien bat leadoff multiple times, which leads one to believe that is where he’s going to open the season in the order.

While Semien is a phenomenal talent, this positioning worries me a bit. His splits as a batter leading off an inning were very good in 88 games last year with a slash of .260/.325/.521, he did much better in a much smaller sample size in the 3 hole with a slash of .310/.351/.606, not to mention he hit 45 home runs in total last year. I am not the biggest fan of isolating that much power and potential RBIs to the leadoff position. With that being said, as long as Marcus Semien is in the lineup, I will not be complaining.