The Rangers tried to jolt a flatlining lineup by parachuting a former Seattle Mariner into the hitting cage. In early May of 2025, Texas plucked Bret Boone off the airwaves of his podcast and dropped him into an MLB dugout for the first time, hoping pedigree and edge could shake an offense scraping the bottom of the league.
For a minute, it looked like a spark: the run environment perked up, the nightly grind felt less suffocating, and a club that spent April and early May at or near the bottom in OBP, OPS, and runs finally showed signs of life. But as the months stacked up, the bigger picture didn’t budge enough. Boone’s one-year audition is over, and Texas is moving on.
Former Mariner Bret Boone out as Rangers promote Justin Viele to lead hitting coach
The Nov. 2 reporting made it plain: Boone won’t be back in 2026, and the Rangers are resetting the room with Skip Schumaker now running the show. Justin Viele, who had split duties with Boone, will be promoted to lead hitting coach, with former Astros instructor Alex Cíntron under consideration as his No. 2. That’s a pretty clear signal about where Texas thinks the long-term answers are going to come from — process continuity, not star wattage — and it closes the book on one of the stranger midseason experiments of 2025.
The timeline matters. When Boone arrived on May 5, Texas had just dismissed offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker and ranked bottom-five by most measures, such as 25th in wRC+, 28th in OBP and 29th in runs.
Schumaker was hired in October on a four-year deal, and within weeks the staff carousel kept spinning, Mike Maddux exited to the Angels, Tony Beasley moved on, and now Boone, leaving Schumaker to architect a new offensive identity with Viele up front.
Even with the changes during the season, reviews kept hammering the same theme: the Rangers’ offense never climbed out of the league’s lower third often enough to change the season’s trajectory. Texas finished 81-81, more “streaky survival” than “turnaround.”
About those changes: the before/after story wasn’t imaginary, as run scoring ticked up after Boone joined and the OPS climbed from the mid-.600s to the upper-.600s, with stretches where the approach looked better.
MLB.com even noted a quick-hit jolt two weeks in, while local coverage through the summer framed it as “marginally better” rather than transformational. The best summaries said it out loud: this group’s improvement had as much to do with getting core bats back healthy as it did with a new voice, and the floor Texas had created for itself by May was simply too low to clear with incremental gains.
Where does that leave 2026? Viele gets the keys with essentially the same cast, and Schumaker gets to set the tone from Day 1 instead of inheriting a mess in progress. Maybe that’s enough, baseball history is littered with examples of “same roster, different results” when the message sharpens.
In the end, Boone’s cameo was less a revolution than a diagnostic. Texas learned that a different tone can nudge results, but not rescue a season. The Rangers now pivot to a more conventional setup, Schumaker’s voice on top, Viele’s process in the cage, and likely a fresh assistant, to see if a full winter of clarity can do what a mid-May Band-Aid couldn’t. From the AL West vantage point, that’s a lot less theatrical than hiring a former Mariners star… and probably a lot smarter.
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