Rangers are between a rock and a hard place with Corey Seager

The Texas Rangers have a Corey Seager problem. As in - what do we do with the two-time World Series MVP who is clearly not 100% due to a irritating hamstring?

In the midst of a stretch where the Rangers play 26 games in 27 days, Bruce Bochy kept the slugger out of two straight games this week to give Seager rest as he deals with lingering discomfort from the injury that caused him to miss a week and a half.

Rangers can't sit Corey Seager for long, but he's not fully healthy

Seager returned to the batting order on May 3 as the team's designated hitter and the next day played shortstop for the first time since coming off the injured list, despite still not being at full strength.

Ideally, the club would have kept him on injured list, but they need his bat in the order to give the offense more pop. The Rangers have dropped 8 of their last 12 games and have gone from first place in the AL West to 5 games back of the Seattle Mariners.

Chris Young and Bruce Bochy have to be aware that they are playing with fire, not letting Seager recover when he is at risk of making the hamstring injury worse. It reeks of desperation as the team needs all the bullets in the gun to get things back on track offensively. Only he knows just how hurt he is, and all that Young and Bochy can do is listen to him.

It'd certainly be easy to say to go ahead and play it safe and rest him but Seager makes it tough not to play him if he says he's good enough to go. Case in point in his first at-bat on Saturday, he took Jack Flaherty deep to give Jacob deGrom an early 2-0 lead.

Then in the 5th, Seager laced a double to center and everyone was relieved that he was able to gently trudge into second base. He later jogged in to score on a sac fly from Adolis Garcia and even the Rangers' announcers were well aware of Seager needing to take it easy. He followed that up with a solo home run in the seventh inning, his second of the game to give Texas an 8-2 lead at the time.

It's a risk-reward scenario and Saturday night it was all about the rewards, but it doesn't appear the risk to the Texas Rangers is going away any time soon.