FanPost

Mitch Moreland: Six Years a Ranger

Ray Carlin-USA TODAY Sports

With Mitch Moreland fresh off of a two-home run night and on a very welcome recent power surge, it's worth remembering that today marks the sixth anniversary of his major league debut. As it happens, I was at the Ballpark that night. I had gotten married the day before. My wife is also a huge Rangers fan, so a few days before our wedding I had gotten in touch with a season ticket-holder I met at the 2009 Newberg Report release party and bought a couple of tickets from him for seats about 26 rows behind home plate for the game on the day following our wedding. July 29, 2010 turned out to be our first in-person look at Mitch Moreland.

Batting 8th in the lineup and playing first base, Moreland singled in his first major league at-bat in the bottom of the 2nd inning, then was promptly erased as the first out of a double-play off the bat of Taylor Teagarden. He grounded out and flied out in his next two ABs, then singled in his fourth and final AB of the night in the 8th inning, but was ultimately stranded. The Rangers beat Oakland 7-4 that night to push their lead in the Al West to 8.5 games ahead of the 2nd place A's.

While driving back to our hotel after the game and listening to the postgame show on the radio, we learned that the Rangers had acquired veteran 1B Jorge Cantu that day. He would make 21 starts at 1B over the season's last two months, with almost all of them coming on days when the opposing starter was a left-hander. This didn't result in any more production than the Rangers had been getting at the position. Cantu had hit a career-high 29 HRs just two years earlier in 2008, but much of that power was gone by 2010, and the right-handed hitting Cantu, still just 28 at the time, had a .409 slugging percentage when the Marlins traded him to Texas. Far from being a lefty-killer, as a Ranger Cantu hit far worse against LHP (.196) than against RHP (.277). He produced just one HR and 2 RBI in 30 games played with Texas.

Then, as now, the team hoped Moreland could provide quality play at a position plagued by inconsistency and unfulfilled promise. Now in his seventh major league season and just over five weeks shy of his 31st birthday, Moreland has hit for a career slash line of .256/.317/.443. He's an easy player to like and root for, and has shown off some impressive power with the occasional tape-measure shot into the home run porch in right field, but he has also been one of the most frustratingly streaky hitters on the team over the past six years.

He has provided a measure of stability in the lineup that the 1B position had lacked for a few seasons before he was called up, but that hasn't been matched by stable and consistent production at the plate. And similar to fan favorite David Murphy three years ago, he's in a contract year on the wrong side of age 30 and so far blowing any chance he had at locking down his position with a long-term deal after this season. With three HRs in his last eight ABs, he has raised his slugging percentage for the season from .419 to .453, but a mere three days ago he woke up as the owner of a .229/.297/.419 slash line.

It's worth remembering what the situation at 1B was when Moreland was called up. Chris Davis (then 24) was given the first crack at winning the 1B job in 2010, and he started there in 12 of the team's first 15 games but was optioned to AAA after compiling a dreadful .188/.264/.292 slash line, at which point he was 9-for-48 with zero HRs and just one RBI.

Taking Davis's place was highly-touted 23-year-old Justin Smoak, who had been the 11th overall pick in the 2008 MLB draft and had hit .300/.470/.540 in 15 games at AAA Oklahoma City that month. Smoak made his major league debut on April 23, 2010 and started at 1B in 66 of the team's next 70 games, He performed better than Davis had at the plate, but there was nowhere to go but up from where his production had been, and when Smoak was sent to Seattle in the Cliff Lee trade on July 9, he was seen as a key part of the deal, though he was hitting a mere .209/.316/.353 at the time. Smoak is still a major league first baseman and Toronto owes him $8.25 million for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, but he'll be 30 in December, has never even hit .240 over a full season, is a switch-hitter who's poor versus lefties and not much better against righties, and boasts a career BA of .225.

[Fun fact: As of this morning, Justin Smoak and Mitch Moreland both have 104 career home runs, although Moreland hit his in 238 fewer plate appearances.]

After trading Smoak, the Rangers gave Chris Davis (who had been raking in AAA) yet another shot to win the 1B job. He started 15 of the next 16 games, hitting .189/.267/.245 with three doubles, zero HRs and just two RBI, and his power was so non-existent that in that month he actually managed to drop his slugging percentage for the season from .292 to .267!

Enter Mitch Moreland, who was called up and made his first start on July 29, 2010. Chris Davis was banished back to Oklahoma City and only appeared in Arlington again in September after the conclusion of the AAA season. Davis hit his only homer of the 2010 season on September 20th against the Angels, which produced his fourth and final RBI of that year.

Moreland played in 47 of the team's last 60 games in 2010, getting the start at 1B in 37 of those games (all but two of his starts coming in games where the opposing starter was a righty). In his abbreviated first season in the majors he hit .255/.364/.469 with 9 HRs and 25 RBI (good for an OPS+ of 118). Chris Davis, Justin Smoak, and Jorge Cantu combined to start 117 games at first base for Texas in 2010, and in the games they started that trio collectively hit .202 with a .315 slugging percentage, producing a total of 23 doubles, 1 triple, 8 home runs, and 34 RBI. Compared with them, Mitch Moreland was Jimmie Foxx.

He was also a bright spot at the plate in the 2010 postseason, batting .348 across three playoff series and hitting one of the three homers the Rangers managed against the Giants in their 4-1 World Series loss.

Moreland began the 2011 season very well, starting at first base in 48 of the team's first 54 games and hitting .313/.384/.523 with 8 HRs and 19 RBI after the Rangers' finished a four-game sweep at Cleveland on June 5. But, in what would become typical Mitch Moreland fashion, he couldn't sustain that hot run, and from June 6th through the rest of the regular season (a period in which he played in 80 games and started 76) he would hit .226/..279/.347 with 8 HR and 32 RBI. Unlike in 2010, he didn't heat up in the postseason, as he hit just 3-for-29 in that year's playoffs, though two of his three hits left the yard, the biggest one being his solo shot in the 3rd inning of game 5 of the World Series that got the Rangers on the board and cut the Cardinals' lead to 2-1. The Rangers would come back to win that memorably bizarre game 4-2 and take a 3-2 series lead, before dropping the final two games in heartbreaking fashion.

In 2012 he had two extended runs of excellence but was otherwise inconsistent or injured. After a so-so first 2+ weeks of the season he had one of the best months of his career, hitting .392/.432/.757 with 7 HR and 15 RBI in 25 games (18 starts) between April 25 and May 26, but he hit just .188 over the next three weeks and a strained hamstring put him on the DL on June 22. He sat out over a month before returning to the lineup on July 30, and between that day and August 29 he went on another month-long hot streak, hitting .337/.371/.562 with 5 HR and 20 RBI in 29 games. But, because he's Mitch Moreland, he finished the season cold, hitting just .213 in the team's final 31 games and adding no HR and just 5 RBI to his season total after August 29.

In 2013 he started April off slowly (again) before heating up late in the month and hitting for a high average and slugging percentage for the next few weeks (again). Between April 25 and May 25, 2013, Moreland hit .360/.404/.690 with 7 HR, 17 RBI, 10 doubles, and 18 runs scored in 28 games played. Of course, it couldn't last. He cooled off late in May and into early June before another hamstring strain sent him to the DL on June 6. He returned to the lineup two weeks later on June 21, but over the rest of the season he batted a paltry .189/.272/.345. His 23 homers for the 2013 season were a career high and third-most on the team that year, but along with most of the Rangers not named Adrian Beltre he had a very poor 2nd half that led to a September fall in the standings and their season ending with a loss to Tampa Bay in a one-game playoff to decide the last AL wild card entrant. Perhaps his most notable stat from 2013 was the fact that his 129 starts at first base were the most by a Rangers 1B since 2006, in which Mark Teixeira - in his last full season with the team - started there 159 times.

2014 was a forgettable year for Moreland, as it was for most of the Rangers' players and the organization as a whole. He hit for a decently high average early, raising it as high as .308 following a three-hit game on May 8, but he lacked his usual power and knocked out only one HR in his first 28 games, and he then hit .191 over the next four weeks before getting put on the DL on June 10 for an ankle impingement, and he sat out the rest of what would be a dreadful Rangers season.

In 2015 it was a similar story: a decent April batting average with just one HR, a stint on the DL that ran from late April to early May, then an extended power surge in which he hit 13 HR (one per 11.6 ABs) and batted .318 in 38 games between May 17 and June 30. Following his usual pattern, he swooned in the 2nd half, though not as severely as in his previous seasons. From July through the end of the regular season he hit .256/.311/.415 with 9 HR and 42 RBI in 74 games played (65 starts). 2015 was his best statistical season at the plate, as he hit for a career high .278, tied his career high in HR with 23, and his 85 RBI bested his previous career high in that category by 25.

There's something to be said for the fact that he's basically been the team's everyday first baseman for three of the last four seasons. In every season from 1982 until 2006, a Ranger made at least 95 starts at first base, starting with Dave Hostetler (1982) and going through Pete O'Brien (1983-88), Rafael Palmeiro (1989-93 and 2000-2002), Will Clark (1994-1998), Lee Stevens (1999), and Mark Teixeira (2003-2006). Teixeira started 74 games at first before being traded to Atlanta in 2007, and the only Rangers who started as many as 90 games at first base in the following eight seasons were Chris Davis 2009 (92) and Moreland in 2013 (129) and 2015 (110). Unless Moreland is benched for most of August and September, he should get enough starts at first base to become the first Ranger in a decade to start over 95 games at the position in consecutive seasons.

He'll be a free agent after the 2016 season. How well has he set himself up for a good contract this year? Um, not well. He has smacked some majestic home runs, as he is wont to do, and has put together hit streaks of five games or longer five different times, but he has also had cold streaks just as long. Not since May 18 has his batting average been as high as .250. During an eight-game hit streak in early June he had four multi-hit games and four HR, but in 30 games played since then he has had just three multi-hit games and hit six HR (three of them coming in the last three days).

With the Rangers mired in a slump, Prince Fielder out for the rest of the season, and the team in need of some power and consistent hitting, Moreland can help both himself and the team if he can put together another stretch like his June 2015 or May 2013. No sooner had Joey Gallo been called up than Moreland went 4-for-8 with three HRs over a three-game stretch to raise his average by eight points and his slugging percentage by twenty-five points. At this point, continued mediocrity from Moreland can only result in him losing starts and at-bats to 26-year-old Ryan Rua (who has spent time at 1B, has more multi-hit games in 54 starts than Moreland has in 78 starts, and is hitting .342/.416/.513 against LHP, by far the best performance against lefties by any of the team's 1B options), or 23-year-old moonshot artist Joey Gallo (who is terrible vs. lefties but whose 2015 major league slash line vs. righties - .239/.357/.479 - was better than what Moreland has produced when facing righties in 2016).

There's also Jurickson Profar, whose 38 starts at multiple positions is less than half of the 78 starts Moreland has made at 1B, but who has managed to produce two more multi-hit games than Moreland has (15-13). Profar has made some highlight-reel plays during his few appearances at first base, but he's best as a middle infielder, and though he's a switch-hitter he's batting seventy-one points higher with a OPS 254 points higher versus righties than lefties. Also, Profar is hitting nearly 80 points better against righties than is Moreland.

With first base options (however imperfect) like Rua, Gallo, Profar, and Ronald Guzman down the road, Moreland's time in Texas will almost surely come to an end after this season. I like Moreland, I really do. I also liked David Murphy, but he picked the worst possible time to have the worst season of his career and left the team no choice but to move on from him after 2013. Moreland has had six seasons' worth of chances to seize the first baseman's job, and several times he's had great months that made him look like one of the team's best hitters, but they were almost always followed by injuries or protracted slumps.

As Moreland celebrates six years as a major leaguer, here's hoping he's got one more hot streak in him and can help solidify the Rangers' lineup during what should be a very tight pennant race. And if we never see him in a Rangers uniform again after this October (or November?), I'll cheer for him to do well wherever he ends up next.