KT 90 said:

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AgBQ-00 said:

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That was a shot!!

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Yeah, Duran crushed that one. They said 438 ft I think?

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WestTexasAg said:

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Semien 2B
Seager SS
Lowe 1B
Garcia RF
Jung 3B
Heim C
Duran LF
Garver DH
Taveras CF

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Rangers LF Josh Smith exited today's game at Oakland in the 6th inning with left foot soreness resulting from his plate appearance in the 5th inning (HBP). Initial X-rays are negative and he will continue to be evaluated.

— Texas Rangers PR (@TXRangersPR) May 13, 2023

AgBQ-00 said:

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Get Seager back and I think Duran slides to left.

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rbtexan said:

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* Dave Raymond is the one who needs a ban. He mentioned that Gray was throwing a no hitter on-air right before he gave up the hit.

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KT 90 said:

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MrCoachEricTaylor said:

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And what did those two numbnuts Astro fans say?? Sad I missed it lol

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Well the second one was trying to run some Odor - Altuve smack, so you know they are getting desperate

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The Rangers' Quietly Excellent Catcher

By Steve Adams | May 11, 2023 at 8:25pm CDT

A five-player trade between the A's and Rangers in February of 2021 grabbed immediate headlines due to the recognizable names at the top of the deal. Texas sent stalwart shortstop Elvis Andrus to the division-rival A's in a swap that brought baseball's most consistent .247-hitting, 40-homer slugging designated hitter, Khris Davis, to Arlington. It was an exchange of players who'd become lineup fixtures but also had seen their respective contract extensions turn sour for their organizations. The Rangers kicked in $13.5MM to make the trade happen. They also sent backup catcher Aramis Garcia to the A's and received minor league righty Dane Acker and a catching prospect of their own.

Fast forward two years, and that prospect, Jonah Heim, has become a centerpiece of the Rangers' roster.
Heim's development certainly wasn't immediate. A fourth-round pick by the Orioles back in 2013, the now-27-year-old backstop was traded twice first for Steve Pearce, and second for Joey Wendle before making his debut seven years later, during the shortened 2020 season. Heim hit .211/.268/.211 in 41 plate appearances as a rookie and was ranked between eighth and fifteenth in Oakland's system at the time he was traded to Texas.

That shaky age-25 debut could certainly be attributed to a small sample and the general strangeness of the 2020 campaign, but Heim received a heftier 285 plate appearances with the Rangers in 2021 and turned in a dismal .196/.239/.358 batting line. He managed to swat 10 home runs, but Heim rarely walked and even though he struck out at a better-than-average 20.4% clip, he rarely made great contact (87.1 mph average exit velocity, 37.3% hard-hit rate). Defensively, he was excellent, but Heim's lack of offense made him look like a backup or part-time option behind the dish.

The Rangers seemed to agree, as they entered the 2021-22 offseason in search of catching upgrades and, just after the lockout ended, swung a deal to acquire slugging catcher Mitch Garver from the Twins. Heim started 12 of the Rangers' first 28 games behind the plate, but an injury to Garver opened up the door for a larger role. Even when Garver returned relatively quickly from a flexor strain, the Rangers kept him at designated hitter. Prospect Sam Huff came up from Triple-A and saw some of the workload at catcher, but Heim's early performance at the plate and his excellent defense earned him the larger portion of playing time.

From May 9 through season's end, Heim started 70% of the Rangers' games behind the plate. He didn't sustain the torrid .342/.457/.658 line he'd compiled through his first 12 games, of course, but he finished out the year with a .227/.298/.399 batting line and 16 home runs. His walk rate jumped from 5.3% to 9.1%, and he cut his strikeout rate by a percentage point (19.3%). Heim also upped his average exit velocity by more than two miles per hour and increased his hard-hit rate by two percentage points. It was a series of small gains, but when paired with Heim's defense, it resulted in a highly valuable all-around player. Heim trailed only the Yankees' Jose Trevino in pitch-framing value, per Statcast, and Defensive Runs Saved (which doesn't include framing) credited him with a plus-8 mark. Baseball-Reference pegged him at 2.5 wins above replacement. FanGraphs had him at 2.8 WAR.

That's enough to consider Heim a starting-caliber catcher in and of itself, but the switch-hitter is in the midst of an offensive breakout that's further elevating his profile in 2023. Through his first 123 trips to the plate, Heim has turned in a ridiculous .318/.382/.555 batting line with six home runs already 37.5% of the way to his 2022 total despite having accumulated just 27% as many plate appearances.

Heim has undoubtedly benefited from a .354 average on balls in play, but there's more than just good fortune at play. Heim has upped his contact on pitches in the strike zone from 88% to 90.1%. His average exit velocity has jumped another 2.2 miles per hour, and he's seemingly made a more concerted effort to elevate the ball. After posting a 40% grounder rate in 2021 and a 39.1% rate in 2022, he's hitting the ball on the ground in just 29.5% of his plate appearances this season. Heim has improved his launch angle in each of his big league seasons, and he's nearly doubled last year's barrel rate. Statcast ranks him in the 94th percentile or better in "expected" batting average, slugging percentage and wOBA.

Whether Heim can sustain that pace is up for debate. He had similarly encouraging batted-ball metrics during last year's hot start to the season, though that came in a smaller sample of plate appearances by virtue of the fact that he was playing less often. By the time Heim had reached his current number of plate appearances, he was sitting on roughly average exit velocity and hard-hit rates. At the very least, he's maintained a high-caliber batted-ball profile over nearly double the sample of his hot start in '22 and he's done so while again grading out as a premier defender at his position.

Dating back to the 2021 season, Heim is now a .246/.312/.426 hitter about 12% better than league-average by measure of wRC+. The league-average catcher hit .226/.295/.367 in 2022 (89 wRC+) and is hitting .242/.314/.389 (94 wRC+) so far in 2023. Heim is comfortably ahead of that pace even if he reverts to a mirror image of his 2022 production for the remainder of the season, and if he can sustain any of his new flyball-oriented approach and hard-contact gains, he'll cement himself as one of the best catchers in the league.

Heim isn't even eligible for arbitration yet that'll come this offseason and the Rangers control him all the way through the 2026 season. Three different organizations have felt comfortable trading him to this point in his career, and never in exchange for a marquee player. Heim never ranked among the game's top 100 prospects and never climbed higher than 13th on any of his four organizations' top-30 rankings at Baseball America.

Despite that lack of fanfare in the minors, Heim has emerged as an everyday option on an ascendent Rangers club and improbably looks like one of baseball's best all-around catchers. Texas doesn't have a catcher in its top-30 prospects at Baseball America or MLB.com right now. They control Heim for another four years, so there's hardly any urgency to explore an extension, but if he's willing to sign on for a team-friendly deal right now, it'd be worth looking into the possibility of securing a core piece whose affordable salaries could help balance out the huge sums they've paid to their recent free-agent signings.

On that note, critics of the Rangers often like to scoff at the team's efforts to buy a championship. They spent more than half a billion dollars in the 2021-22 offseason when they signed Corey Seager, Marcus Semien and Jon Gray. They followed up with nearly a quarter-billion more this past offseason when adding Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney in addition to re-signing Martin Perez (among other, smaller-scale moves).

There's little denying that a large portion of the team's core has been acquired via free agency, but that's only been a piece of the puzzle. They hit the jackpot in simultaneously acquiring Heim and shedding some of the Andrus contract, and they've done well to land both breakout slugger Nathaniel Lowe and Brock Burke in separate trades with the Rays over the past four years. The Rangers haven't drafted well Josh Jung's excellent start to the 2023 season notwithstanding. Perhaps that played a role in the team moving on from longtime president of baseball operations Jon Daniels, but several of Daniels' trade acquisitions have panned out, and Heim's breakout has been a large part of that.

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This is complete bull****

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Those swings from Abreu were just so disgusting. He's completely washed

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I am in disbelief how bad this dude is. Swung at a ball about to hit him.

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Abreu spiraling towards a sub-.500 OPS. I wonder if there's a single everyday player in the majors the past 5 years that could claim that shameful statistic

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right on cue...lead double

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Sign a fat contract - suck ass next year (Montero & Abreu)

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Putting Montero in the game is basically waiving the white flag at this point

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EVERY SINGLE MOVE WE MADE this offseason shot ourselves in the dick. Every single one.

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Oh, he's not close to done - he's going to make sure we can't come back in the 9th either

M*****F*****!

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Just saw the CWS were 13-27. .... holy ****

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throw in 74 million for Altuve, LMj, and Bregman...

and that's a mind-blowing $116 MM in salary not playing or underachieving

wow

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Dusty manages this team like we have a 10 game lead in the division, which is fine WHEN WE ACTUALLY HAVE A TEN GAME LEAD IN THE DIVISION. I've said it before, I'll say it again: we win in spite of his management. He should take some serious heat for this game.

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Unless Dusty wakes the **** up and realizes the division isn't a gimme this year i'm starting to get concerned.

Also Bagwell should never have input in personnel decisions again. I hated it when that started to pop up

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Tough loss.

We have the worst manager in baseball and now a lineup that can't produce runs because it's full of struggling veterans and AAA guys. Add in the LMJ, Urquidy, Garcia, Altuve and Brantley injuries and it's actually amazing we're still above .500

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See y'all n the morning after the bleeding and whining is over. For f's sake y'all are insufferable

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Other than saying we need to get healthy what can we do to stop playing .500 ball? and looks like we have no clue when uncle mike is getting back. Is jose going to fix everything? That is the only bat we have a line of sight that can help

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What a funk this team is in. Cease has barely been a viable starter over his last six starts.

.500. Baseball has to be the most frustrating thing to watch. Roller coaster every night

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and while much attention is focused on Abreu...

the Astros only have 3 players on the active roster with an OPS above .690 ---- Yordan, Tucker, and Pena

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MrCoachEricTaylor said:

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rbtexan said:

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* Dave Raymond is the one who needs a ban. He mentioned that Gray was throwing a no hitter on-air right before he gave up the hit.

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It's mind boggling how often he does that for us..

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