With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.
Today we are looking at Jake Burger.
Jake Burger’s 2025 season was kind of a mess. Brought in to replace Nathaniel Lowe at first base as part of an overall organizational plan to improve the team’s power, Burger never really put things together. He got off to such a bad start that the Rangers sent him to AAA for a week and a half in early May for a reset. Burger then had three separate stints on the injured list for three separate injuries — an oblique strain, a quad strain, and a wrist sprain.
And when he was on the field, Burger wasn’t terribly productive. Offensively, he seemed to be a photo-negative of the guy he replaced — Lowe was a lefty hitter who worked the count, drew walks, but didn’t hit for enough power for a first baseman, while Burger gave the Rangers a righty who swung at everything, never walked, but did hit for power. His .236/.269/.419 slash line on the year equated to a 99 OPS+ and 89 wRC+.
Had the Shed played like it did in 2023, Burger would probably have had a better time of things in his first season as a Ranger. He’s a guy who hits the ball in the air, hard, a lot, and in a park where the ball carries, the power would have shown up in the stat line a lot more. Instead, in the dead air of the 2025 Shed, Burger suffered — his .216/.266/.386 slash line at home was much worse than his .254/.271/.449 slash line.
Compounding the problem was that Burger wasn’t drawing walks. I mean, he isn’t someone who historically drew many walks — he was in the bottom 20% in walk rate in both 2023 and 2024 — but his walk rate cratered in 2025, to 3.2%. That put him in the very bottom 1% in MLB. Out of 277 major league hitters with at least 300 plate appearances in 2025, only Javy Baez and Michael Harris II had lower walk rates than Burger did.
Combine not walking with a .272 BABIP and a high K rate, and you end up with the 6th lowest OBP of the 277 hitters referenced above. Exacerbating the problem for the Rangers is that Adolis Garcia and Jonah Heim were also in the bottom 10. That’s not conducive to sustained rallies.
Of course, you get what you pay for, and the Rangers gave up three unremarkable prospects for the right to pay Burger the league minimum in 2025. The package of Brayan Mendoza, Echedry Vargas and Maximo Acosta appeared fairly underwhelming when the Rangers made the deal for Burger 11 months ago, and looks even more underwhelming now, with all three of the new Marlins having bad 2025 seasons.
In acquiring Burger, the Rangers were thinking they were getting a second-division starter who filled a particular lineup need they were seeking to address, and who maybe had some upside. He was the 11th overall pick in the draft once upon a time, after all, and while, yes, that was 2017, and that was a long time ago — Bubba Thompson and Chris Seise and Hans Crouse were the Rangers’ top three picks in that draft, that’s how long ago it was — he didn’t play for three straight seasons, from 2018-20, due to injuries and then the pandemic. Maybe he’s a late bloomer.
Burger will be 30 at the start of the 2026 season, though, and after two unimpressive seasons in a row, the late bloomer wishcasting can probably be set aside. That said, there’s enough there that one wouldn’t expect the Rangers to simply cast him aside. He has excellent barrel and hard hit rates, and his .333 xwOBA in 2025 was much higher than his .295 wOBA. He slashed .254/.285/.453 after being recalled from AAA, and his walk rates increased somewhat as the season went on, which one can, if one is an optimist, view as him not pressing as much.
Burger has three years of team control remaining and, though arbitration eligible this offseason, isn’t going to be making much. I tend to think that the Rangers view him as a cheap option who, reunited with his Marlins manager, Skip Schumaker, and with the air conditioning not blowing in in 2026 and hopefully a healthy season, could be a viable regular first baseman, and at a minimum, provides them with the short-side of the platoon at 1B or DH.
Of course, as noted above, Burger has previously missed two full seasons due to injuries, and spent time on the injured list every year from 2021-24, and the problem with injury-prone guys is that they tend to get injured a lot.
You’d probably prefer to go into 2026 with Burger as a righthanded platoon DH and bench bat rather than your regular first baseman, but I’m not sure how much in the way of resources the Rangers will be inclined to allocate towards an upgrade at the position, so Burger may end up the regular first baseman by default. The team should probably have a Plan B readily available, though.
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