With the 2024 regular season over, it is time for us to go back and take a look at the players who appeared for the Texas Rangers this season.
Today, we look at outfielder Leody Taveras.
Ah, Leody. There’s someone we haven’t talked much about, huh?
2023 saw things click for Leody, saw him slash .266/.312/.421 and put up a 2.9 bWAR/2.4 fWAR as the team’s regular centerfielder. It seemed like he had turned a corner.
2024 saw him do a U-turn. .229/.289/.325, plus some gaffes in the outfield that were especially exasperating. A 0.5 bWAR and a 1.1 fWAR, with an ugly -10 DRS (though a +5 FRV, one of those vexing big splits in defensive stats that makes them so maddening).
Leody went from a .316 wOBA/.319 xwOBA in 2023 to .282/.295 in 2024. The delta between his expected and actual wOBA provides a faint glimmer of hope, a suggestion he wasn’t quite as bad as the raw numbers indicated — a wRC+ about 10 points higher than his actual wRC+ — but even taking that into account there was a problematic drop.
Early in his career a lot of Leody’s offensive issues stemmed from striking out too much, but that wasn’t the case in 2024. He had a 21.2% K rate last year, right about league average, and right in line with the 21.1% K rate he had in 2023. His walk rate actually improved, going from 6.3% to 7.9%, which, again, had him right around league average.
What Leody didn’t do as well in 2024 is hit the ball hard. He had a 43.1% hard hit rate in 2023 — the best of his career, and a rate that put him in the 63rd percentile, per Statcast. That dropped to 35.5% in 2024, in the 24th percentile.
Not hitting the ball as hard means fewer hits and less power, which is reflected in Leody’s numbers year over year. After a .318 BABIP and .270 xBA in 2023, Leody dropped to a .272 and .240 xBA in 2024. A 155 ISO and .407 xSLG in 2023 became a .123 ISO and .368 xSLG in 2024.
And I sit here and think to myself, really? Is it as simple as that? He stopped hitting the ball as hard — or, I guess I should say, hit the ball hard less frequently — and that explains the offensive drop?
And if so, why? What caused that? Statcast now has Bat Speed Tracking, so I checked that out to see if maybe he wasn’t swinging the bat as hard. His average bat speed was 71.3 mph in both 2023 and 2024. So that isn’t it.
Ah…but wait! His average bat speed from the left side increased slightly, from 71.0 mph to 71.5 mph, while from the right side his bat speed dropped from 72.0 mph to 70.2 mph…maybe that’s it! Maybe this is a righthanded hitting problem!
Except…apparently not. Taveras was significantly better from the left side than the right side in both 2023 and 2024, with a higher ISO and BABIP from the left side each year, but his BABIP and ISO from each side dropped from 2023 to 2024. So that isn’t it.
It is baffling. And that could describe Leody Taveras’s career arc and overall performance, as well. 2023 saw him performing at a level that was beyond what he had done previously in the majors, but which it always seemed like he was capable of doing. The hope was that he would take another step forward in 2024, establish himself as a solid above-average center fielder.
If I may digress for a moment…I am a sucker for a quality, all-around center fielder. I coveted Mike Cameron in the early aughts. I dreamed of the Rangers developing a player like pre-injury Grady Sizemore. Carlos Beltran always seemed like the platonic ideal of a center fielder for me…except for, you know, the trash can banging.
A really good defensive center fielder who gets on base at a nice clip, hits for some power, can run some…if I’m building a team from scratch, that’s the sort of player I would want to prioritize, to make a cornerstone for my team. And it is an archetype that the Rangers have basically never had in their 50-plus years of existence.
It is weird how certain teams have certain positions that they are particularly strong at, over decades, and others they can never seem to figure out. The Rangers, for example, have been one of the best teams in the majors at third base during their existence. They have had a Hall of Famer in Adrian Beltre and a should-be-in-the-Hall-of-Famer in Buddy Bell for a combined 15 years. When they haven’t had a Hall of Fame caliber player there, they still had good to very good players manning the hot corner, guys like Toby Harrah and Steve Buechele and Dean Palmer and Michael Young and, for a couple of seasons, Hank Blalock. The Rangers have gotten a 5.5 bWAR season out of their regular third baseman 12 times, a 3+ bWAR season out of their regular third baseman 22 times. That’s impressive.
Center field, on the other hand? The best season by a Ranger with at least 50% of his playing time in center field was Josh Hamilton in 2008, at 5.5 bWAR. After him, Gary Matthews had a 5.2 bWAR season in 2006. The other only 4+ bWAR seasons are from Leonys Martin (4.4) in 2014 and Josh Hamilton (4.0) in 2012. #6 and #7 on the list are both 3.5 bWAR seasons, and both from 2013, with Craig Gentry and Leonys Martin, each of whom played at least half their games in center field (though Gentry had just 287 plate appearances).
The Rangers’ list of the best center field seasons is filled with randos and one-offs. You see Al Oliver and Juan Benquez and George Wright and David Hulse and Oddibe McDowell and Joey Freaking Gallo, of all people. And a bunch of these are not so much center fielders as corner outfielders who are asked to play a lot of center field because there isn’t a better center field option regularly available, which we can see when we up the minimum threshold to 75% of games played being in center, which gives us just nine seasons for the Rangers with at least a 3.0 bWAR.
And #17 on the list 50%+ list, #10 on the 75%+ list, is Leody Taveras’s 2023 season, between 1998 Tom Goodwin and 1992 Juan Gonzalez. The fact that Leody’s 2023 season ranks so high on the list speaks volumes about the organization’s historical lack of performance from its center fielders.
At this point, I have no idea what to expect from Leody Taveras going forward. I remind myself that he is still relatively young — among those who appeared for the Rangers last year, he’s younger than Joshes Jung and Smith, younger than Sam Huff, less than a year older than Ezequiel Duran and Dustin Harris and Justin Foscue — and is just now entering what should be his best seasons. I remind myself he has the tools, he’s performed in the past. I look at his “Similar Batters through 25” on B-R and see Carlos Gomez and Byron Buxton, which is odd and encouraging, along with Dylan Carlson and Victor Robles and Cameron Maybin and the guy that I have tended to invoke as a comparison, Manny Margot, which is less encouraging.
Leody could rebound and play well and have a lengthy career as a solid major league center fielder. Or he could struggle again and end up bouncing around in one year contract as a backup land for the next several years, or even worse, in NRI land.
He’s unpredictable.
Previously: