Texas Rangers Face Rival Astros Needing Offensive Boost Without Corey Seager

The Texas Rangers need several players to step into the offensive void left by Corey Seager's hamstring injury.

Leave it to Texas Rangers catcher Jonah Heim to state the obvious in the wake of the injury to Corey Seager.

“We know it’s gonna take a village to win a World Series,” Heim said.

No, Heim isn’t predicting the Rangers will win a World Series. The point is that no team is a one-man show in baseball.

It will take everyone for the Rangers to figure out how to get along without Seager. The 10-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday shouldn’t lead to an over-reaction.

But it should also signal to the Rangers that they can’t get too far down the road without Seager and not find offense from other players.

“This whole lineup, you’ve seen it — we’ve scored some big runs this week,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said. “We just have to do a better job of spreading this out.”

With Seager, the runs came in bunches — but not consistently. The Rangers have 8.7 runs in their seven wins. The five losses? Just 1.2 runs per game.

The Rangers have won just one low-scoring game, a 2-1 victory over Philadelphia on April 2. The Rangers have been shut out twice. The most runs the Rangers have scored in a loss is three runs.

When the offense is on, it’s ON. When it’s not, well, you know the rest.

Second baseman Marcus Semien focused on the Rangers’ 8-5, 10-inning victory over Kansas City on Tuesday. The Rangers had a lead, lost it in the ninth inning and rallied on Heim’s walk-off home run.

The Rangers are going to have find ways to win games like that more often.

“Last year I felt like, with our bats, we had to put up a lot of runs sometimes,” Semien said. “That game was a comeback win and each side of the ball was picking the other up. We’ve had a couple of nights where we didn’t hit it at all and the pitching did its thing.”

The bats will have to pick it up. Seager was the only regular batting better than .300. The next closest is rookie Josh Jung, who is hitting .286.

Semien is part of a trio of regulars the Rangers could use help from. Semien is off to another slow start, though not quite as slow as last season, when he didn’t hit his first home run until mid-May. He’s batting .212 with a home run and seven RBI.

He doesn’t feel the pressure to produce, he said. But he knows it’s necessary with Seager out.

“A lot of the bats, myself included, need to be playing at a higher level,” Semien said.

Adolis García is another who can provide a boost. He’s batting .213 with two home runs and a team-high 11 RBI. He's batted .247 in two seasons with the Rangers.

Robbie Grossman is a another option. Given the left field job out of Spring Training, Grossman started the season in right field as a result of Leody Taveras’ injury. Taveras is back in center, which means Grossman can return to left and get his bat turned around. His average of .143 is worst among Rangers everyday players.

No one in the Rangers’ clubhouse wants to overreact to a two-week sample. The Rangers are better than .500, are off to their best start in a decade, are plus-five in wins over last season’s start and have been atop the American League West nearly every day this season.

There are plenty of positives heading into a series with Houston. But the defending World Series champion Astros have the Rangers’ number in Houston, going 29-5 there since 2019.

The Rangers have no choice but to find a way to maintain the momentum without Seager. Bochy has tread these waters plenty of times before.

“Every year you go into your season and you’re hoping you don’t have to deal with it,” Bochy said. “You know it’s probably going to happen and players need to know that and I think they do.

“What I’ve seen and what we try to do when this does happen is hunker down and just come together, you know, and pick up the slack any way we can and I’ve seen some really good things happen.”

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You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard

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