Rangers' fans searching for scapegoat as season spirals toward massive failure

The Texas Rangers are closing in on inept failure status and it's getting hard to convince anyone it's salvageable.

Entering a new week of the 2025 season, the Rangers went 1-5 on their recent roadtrip, getting swept out of the Bronx and were three outs away from being swept on the South Side of Chicago. It's more than that though because in that time the bullpen blew three leads, the defense committed costly errors and the offense continued to look as if they've never hit a baseball before.

As you can imagine, the fanbase is not taking too kindly to it. They've gone from blaming everyone from the players, coaching staff and front office; which is a fair reaction. But in my mind, they've been placing the blame on the wrong person and here's why.

Chris Young is not the man to blame for team's struggles

Seems to be that outside of the players on the field and the coaching staff (Bruce Bochy included), the next easiest target fans have found to hate on is President of Baseball Operations Chris Young.

It's not totally off base but I think fans are having a hard time understanding that there is zero way to tell if a free agent signing or trade will pay off. That's what makes a baseball executive's job hard, they base their moves off what that player has shown in the past.

When you look at that, Young is considered a genius with the money he was given. But since those moves haven't paid off, due to lack of production, he's one of the biggest enemies to the fanbase.

His biggest acquisitions over the winter: Jake Burger, Kyle Higashioka and Joc Pederson were all coming off seasons with an OPS over .700, where they also combined for 69 home runs and 185 RBIs. With that in mind, fans even praised Young relentless this winter for these exact three moves.

Now that the three of them are struggling, he's automatically in the doghouse and has put together a terrible roster in the eye's of the fans. Sure he's had some misses in the bullpen but more or less, his offseason was successful and expected to be highly productive by all measures. It's not Young's fault that the players went out and basically decided to not put up competitive at-bats.

Who's fault is it really then? If not Chris Young, then who?

Simply put, it's on the players. Plain and simple.

We talked about the additions of Burger, Higashioka and Pederson this offseason. Out of those three the best player has been Burger and that's only been in the last couple of weeks since he returned from his minor league demotion but even Burger is hitting .223 with a .658 OPS on the season.

To be fair, it doesn't end at just those three players. Adolis Garcia and Marcus Semien have arguably been two of the worst hitters in Major League Baseball--which is not a stretch for Semien. The second baseman has the worst slugging percentage (.230), third-worst average (.176) and second-worst OPS (.489) out of 166 qualified hitters this year.

It's getting so bad that it is even effecting those players that were actually producing to start the year. On April 25, Wyatt Langford was hitting .350 but thanks to a sub-.200 month of May thus far, his average is down to .244. Josh Smith as well is struggling, during the Astros series he was batting .305 and is now at .270 for the year.

It's tough to truly get anything going when you have a lineup failing to produce, either at all or at the same time. Early in the year it was Langford, Seager, Smith and Heim producing and now it's really just Burger and on occasion Josh Jung.