What do the Rangers need to see from Jack Leiter to start the season?

Jack Leiter finds himself at a crucial crossroads entering the 2025 season despite only nine MLB games under his belt.

The second overall pick by Texas back in 2021, the 24-year-old has had a few flashes of brilliance in his professional career but outside of that he's not really been able to maintain the success over an extended period of time.

Leiter's promising spring training has awarded him an incredible opportunity to start the season in the big league rotation. Now it's time for him to show why he belongs to stay there.

Why Jack Leiter might be nearing the end of his chances with the Rangers?

Now, you might be wondering why I am making such a definitive statement for a pitcher in his early-20s throwing 100 mph? The truth of the matter is that Major League Baseball is a brutal league and sometimes teams don't have enough time to wait for a player to come into his own.

While he has only thrown 35 2/3 innings in MLB, Leiter has also spent three seasons in professional baseball and has a career 4.81 ERA in 60 games. It's fair to point out that 2024 in Round Rock was the best season of his career and became a bit more efficient and fine tuned in his outings.

The reason why I believe he might be nearing the end of his opportunities, at least with Texas, is the state of the franchise. The Rangers are built to win now and be competitve for the next 4-5 years with deGrom, Eovaldi, Seager, Semien and a plethora of others. They can't be waiting forever on Leiter to figure it out because the time will come where they are on the edge of contention and need to make a championship level move to keep them in contention.

Therefore if Leiter wants to become a household name in franchise history, he needs to begin small and address these two main issues in his game.

What are the Rangers hoping to see from Leiter to start the year?

It's pretty simple, the Rangers are looking for two things to show he is not worth giving up on just yet.

First of those being his ability to go deeper into ballgames. Leiter's longest outing as a Ranger was six innings and that was his last spring start of 2025. Before that, Leiter had not been able to record a single out in the sixth inning of a major league game.

In several starts last season, the right-hander would get to the fourth or fifth inning nearing around 80-90 pitches and a severe loss of the little command he had. That is something the Rangers can't afford to have while they are suffering a lack of depth in starting pitching due to a handful of injuries.

The other thing is his command, something that has been pretty inconsistent and at times not even present in his outings. It did get a bit better this spring, which is why Texas decided to slot him into the rotation but it's still not where they want it to be.

Leiter has a terrific offspeed pitch but he fails to locate it for strikes and utilize it as a put away pitch. That then gets him in trouble because he's forced to try and put a hitter away with a fastball and that's never going to work to a big league hitter.

In 2024, Leiter's fastball was in the top 80% of the league in terms of speed but the pitch got knocked around and to make matters worse, while he didn't qualify due to lack of innings, he was in the bottom 10% of walk rate and average exit velocity.

If Leiter wants to show the organization he has what it takes he needs to take a giant step forward in solving those issues in the regular season. Not saying it has to be completley figured out during Friday's game but there does need to be positive momentum.