Evan Carter Is Back. Can the Rangers Follow His Lead?

Whoever ends up introducing Bruce Bochy at his Cooperstown induction ceremony is sure to talk about the manager’s feel for understanding baseball players. Motivating them. Sensing when to back off. Setting a no-panic tone. Moving lineup pieces and bullpen roles around, often with results as eye-opening as the announcements themselves. 

The story of the 2025 Rangers isn’t even half-written. But already we have seen Bochy, who has seen everything, take unusual measures—likely in lockstep with President of Baseball Operations Chris Young, a former player himself—to get certain Rangers players and the team’s season back on track.

Knowing when it’s time to sit a player because of a tight hamstring or a barking shoulder takes some judgment, but there is all kinds of objective data to plug a situation into before making that decision. There are no MRIs or predictive models, however, to help a manager or front office determine that a player needs a mental break.

But Bochy, Young, and their staffs have successfully navigated a number of those situations so far this year. Dropping Marcus Semien from the very top of the lineup to the very bottom. Optioning veteran Jake Burger. Giving Adolis Garcia a mental reset that lasted nearly a week, and now employing a similar strategy with Josh Jung.

The decision to send Evan Carter to Triple-A to start the year is looking pretty good, too.

It had to be a call the Rangers didn’t want to make after the 22-year-old endured a tough 2024 that saw him forced out of action in late May and shut down for good in August with a back strain that didn’t respond to rehab. The eventual diagnosis was a stress reaction with an unspecified autoimmune component. By February, though, Carter pronounced himself good to go. 

However true that might have been, spring training didn’t go particularly well. Stats in Surprise are rarely meaningful, but in Carter’s case, they were revealing. He struck out seven times in 10 hitless plate appearances against lefthanders—a career-long trouble spot—and he wasn’t making up for it against righties, going 6 for 29 (.207, four singles, two doubles) with eight strikeouts in 32 trips and not much hard contact. 

Meanwhile, Leody Taveras had a solid camp from the left side of the plate, and camp signee Kevin Pillar looked like he could still contribute from the right side. That gave the Rangers a luxury, if you want to call it that, of optioning Carter to Round Rock, where he’d last spent a few days late in 2023 before an injury to Garcia had accelerated his now-legendary arrival in the big leagues.

Bochy explained the thinking in March:

“As much as anything, to get to where he needs to be, [Evan] needs to get his confidence going. He’s missed so much time with the injuries, it’s not that easy to hit Major League pitching. And I think he needs reps. I don’t care who you are, you miss that much time, you’re gonna have some rust there, particularly at his age.”

Meanwhile, Carter added, “At the end of the day, I’ve just got to prove that I can help the team win. I’ve got to get back to playing good baseball. I know I can do it. I’ve proven to myself and everybody else that I can do it, and I did it on the highest stage. I know that it’s in there, and I’ve just got to get right back to feeling confident. I think that this is going to be the best opportunity for me to do that.”

Both spoke of confidence. Given what had transpired in 2023 in the two months after he’d turned 21, that was probably low on the list of concerns going forward. Carter hit .306 with an OPS of 1.058 in 23 regular-season-ending games as Texas held on to a Wild Card spot that year. He then hit .300 with a .917 OPS in the postseason, setting an MLB record with nine doubles while making game-changing plays on defense.  

The back injury then decimated Carter’s 2024 season. His year was over after just 45 games, lowlighted by him going hitless in his final 21 plate appearances and seeing his average dip to .188.

But here’s the thing about Evan Carter, whose plate discipline, speed, defense, and capacity for the occasional slug are easy to quantify. Though he’s been the youngest piece of the Texas puzzle the entire time he’s been a big leaguer, there’s something about him that makes the team cook, even when he’s not at his best.

In 2023, the Rangers were in a 4-15 skid before Carter, who was still in Double-A for more than half of that freefall, showed up. They went 14-9 after he arrived. And then 13-4 in the postseason with him often occupying the No. 3 spot in the order.

In 2024, Texas went 23-22 when Carter played, 55-62 when he didn’t.

The 2025 Rangers are 13-9 in Carter games, and 23-27 otherwise.   

Whether there is analytical support for the correlation, or just a comfort level with the facts, Carter’s impact had to make the decision to start the season without him an even tougher one to settle on.

Early on, the assignment to the Pacific Coast League wasn’t looking like an antidote for Carter’s play or his confidence. He was hitting .158 with a .596 OPS through his first 48 plate appearances, with a .192 BABIP (batting average on balls in play), which sometimes suggests hitting into bad luck but other times indicates a lack of hard contact. And, by carefully orchestrated design, he was not playing every day. Carter was regularly starting three games in each six-game series, despite no reports of any physical issues holding him back from the others. 

Then Carter started picking things up, playing a little more regularly and hitting .282 (.360 BABIP) with an .897 OPS over his next 42 trips. Texas placed Taveras on outright waivers on May 4, and Carter was up and in the lineup for the club’s next game two days later. He struggled initially, hitting .182 over 11 games before a strained quad landed him on the injured list. 

But since coming back from that, he’s been on a tear—and so has his team. Since his return, Carter’s a .273/.360/.500 (.860 OPS) hitter. While the Rangers are just 7-6 in that span, all seven wins have come in their last nine games.

Carter’s offensive metrics are telling. This was his major-league Statcast data in 2023—the more red, the better (the colors are muted because he lacked the number of at-bats to qualify for MLB leaderboards):

Here’s 2024:

And 2025:

Put simply, Carter is once again looking like the debut version at the plate.

Both the eye test and the deep data suggest that Carter’s play in center field has been an instrumental factor as well. In just 23 games, Carter has a DRS (Defensive Runs Saved) rating of plus-3, which on a per-game basis is ninth among all MLB center fielders. By comparison, in 58 games between Texas and Seattle, Taveras has a negative-3 rating.  

Carter picked up a wrist injury on Friday—while making a highlight-reel diving catch—that was first thought to be troublesome enough to force him out of the lineup through the weekend. Instead, he was back in the lineup on Sunday, when among other things he smoked a 107.4-mph ground-rule double down the right-field line in a 2-1 win that completed a sweep of the White Sox. 

Carter appears to be in the form he was in two years ago, when “The Little Savior” helped lead Texas’ two-month march to a parade. Whether the team is back in that sort of form is no sure thing, but the early returns are solid. And that’s been a confidence-builder for more than just the center fielder. 

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