With the Rangers’ offense off to an awful start, offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker would appear to be under pressure
Here you go, the post that so many of you have been waiting for me to write.
I am starting the Donnie Ecker Watch.
To be clear, I am not calling for Donnie Ecker to be fired. I am not saying that I think Donnie Ecker should be fired, or that he is to blame for the Texas Rangers’ offensive woes. As I have said before, I am agnostic on coaches, because I do not think we have nearly enough information to meaningfully evaluate their job performance. They are a black box — we see the inputs (the players who they have to work with) and the outputs (the offensive results), but we have no clue what is happening inside that black box, what the coaches or coaching staff are doing, to what extent the coaches are helping or not helping or whathaveyou.
I am also skeptical as to how much difference coaches really make, based on the fact that they are not compensated as if they make much difference. Recall that three years ago, pitching coach Wes Johnson left the Minnesota Twins mid-season to take the pitching coach job at LSU. The motivation for the sudden move was reportedly a big pay raise. That big raise was to $750,000 per year, compared to the $350,000 he was making with the Twins.
When coaches at the highest level of baseball, working for big market teams, are making less than the league minimum for a player, that seems to indicate that organizations do not believe these guys move the needle much. I do not know what Ecker is making, though my (wild ass) guess is that it would be in the $750K-$1 million range.
So coaches don’t seem to matter much, which means that firing a coach is something I generally don’t think is going to make much difference or solve anything. However, that also means that there’s not much incentive to keep a particular coach if things aren’t working. If one coach isn’t much different than the other, and if you aren’t getting the results you want, replacing a coach is a way to make a change that could, theoretically, kickstart things without there being a big downside.
Ecker was hired, along with Tim Hyers (poached from the Boston Red Sox), to handle the hitting coaching duties for the Rangers prior to the 2022 season. 2022 was a disappointing year across the board for the Rangers, with both the offense and pitching underperforming, and resulting in the mid-season firing of manager Chris Woodward and the (performative, given his contract was up at the end of the year) firing of president of baseball operations Jon Daniels in mid-August.
Enter Bruce Bochy, hired after the 2022 season, and enter a 2023 season that saw the Texas Rangers sport one of the best offenses in baseball. The 11 hitters with the most plate appearances for Texas that season all had a Rbat+* of at least 100. Several hitters had career years. Corey Seager and Marcus Semien finished second and third, respectively, in the MVP voting. Five position players started the All Star Game. The Rangers won the World Series. There was joy in Dalworthington.
* Rbat+ is a new stat rolled out by B-R that is like OPS+, but factors in all offensive inputs, including stolen bases and baserunning.
That will earn you a grace period.
I will note as an aside that I’ve seen it argued that the Rangers weren’t really a good offensive team all year, that they were great in the first half of the season but not good offensively in the second half of 2024. This is incorrect. The Rangers were certainly better in the first half of the season, when they slashed .274/.341/.460, but they also slashed .248/.332/.442 in the second half. They weren’t kicking down doors and scoring double digits three times a week like they were early in the season, but they were certainly performing like a comfortably above-average offense in the second half, despite having Josh Jung and Jonah Heim 1) spend time on the injured list and 2) not be the same upon their return.
We all know what happened in 2024. The Rangers’ offense disappointed. Almost everyone regressed. And while, given the number of career years that were had in 2023, it is understandable that there was regression, and while Josh Jung and Evan Carter had lost years due to injury, you saw some really big, seemingly inexplicable drops in production from guys like Adolis Garcia, Jonah Heim, Leody Taveras, and Ezequiel Duran. It was bad, and the story of 2024 was that the title team failed to even make the playoffs due to the bats laying an egg. Yes, that wasn’t the only reason — the rotation was, shall we say, problematic all year, and injuries were a big issue — but at the end of the day, if the bats had come close to the level they had performed at the year before, the Rangers are likely a playoff team.
Making the Rangers offense great again was the theme of the offseason, and while there was a general sense that improvements from guys already in place would result in organic improvement, moves were also made. Everyone’s favorite whipping boy, Nathaniel Lowe, was shipped out, partially in service of rebuilding a bullpen that was being re-made from scratch (he brought back Robert Garcia), but partially because the Rangers wanted more power and more fastball pounding from first base than they were getting from Lowe, who was replaced by power-hitting and fastball-pounding Jake Burger. Joc Pederson, platoon DH extraordinaire, professional fastball pounder, and all-around positive vibes guy, was brought in. Kyle Higashioka, coming off a career offensive season, and Kevin Pillar were added to improve the catcher and center field positions, which were quite unproductive in 2024.
There was also some change off the field, though. Tim Hyers* left to become the hitting coach for the Atlanta Braves, a move that was explained as being an opportunity for Hyers, as a Georgia native, to be closer to home, though one has to think that if the Rangers felt that Hyers was instrumental to the offense’s success, they’d have moneywhipped him to keep him around.**
* For reasons I cannot explain, I keep typing “Hynes” instead of “Hyers.”
** Of course, I don’t think teams see any particular coach as being instrumental to the team’s success, as noted in my comments above about teams not paying coaches much.
In addition, in an announcement that maybe we should have read a little more into than we did (or maybe not) (the maybe not is both because maybe there wasn’t actually anything more to read into it, and because some folks probably did read more into it, or what is retrospectively the right amount into it, at the time), when the Rangers announced their 2025 coaching staff, Donnie Ecker had lost his “bench coach” title, with Evan Grant writing at the time that Ecker would “focus solely on the offense.”
I think we kind of thought of Will Venable as the bench coach in 2023 and 2024, since he was seen as Bruce Bochy’s right hand guy and potential successor, but his title was “associate manager.” Maybe that was a title inflation deal, with Ecker getting the “bench coach” title to entice him to leave San Francisco (or facilitate his being able to leave for what on paper was a promotion from just being hitting coach) but Venable actually functioning as the bench coach.
Regardless, in 2025, Luis Urueta is the bench coach, Donnie Ecker is focusing solely on the offense, and there is no associate manager. And I’m wondering if the change in titles for Ecker would have happened if 2024 were not such a disappointment offensively, if a more productive offensive season would have meant there was no need to eliminate some of Ecker’s responsibilities so that he could “focus solely on the offense.”
It seems like this season has been going on forever, but spring training ended barely over a month ago. And hard as it may be to believe, coming out of spring training, there was a lot of optimism about the offense. The Rangers bats were alive in the desert. The vibe about the offense was positive. The concerns centered around a starting rotation that had lost 40% of its anticipated Opening Day members, and a bullpen largely put together by digging around in the discount bin at Dollar General. The big question a month ago was whether the pitching would hold together enough to allow the bats to carry the team.
And here we are, on April 29, and the Rangers pitchers have exceeded all expectations, allowing the fifth fewest runs per game in MLB. And we are all miserable and unhappy and pissy because the Rangers’ hitters are averaging the fewest runs per game in baseball.
Now, one can say that some of that is just bad luck, that the Rangers’ 89 OPS+ is bad but still better than five other teams and tied with the Houston Astros, that their xwOBA is bottom third but not the absolute bottom, that the underlying metrics indicate that they should be scoring more runs than they have been. Of course, that then leads one to ask why the Rangers are underperforming their underlying metrics, and whether that gets back to problems with approach or mental state or other such issues that could theoretically be laid at the feet of the coaching staff.
One of the things that you consistently hear Bruce Bochy get praised for is his steadiness. He’s been around the game forever, he’s seen just about everything, he’s not going to get rattled or panic. He’s going to be patient, because he knows there’s a lot of ups and a lot of downs, and getting too high or too low at any given time doesn’t make sense over a season that starts in early February when pitchers and catchers report and ends, hopefully, nine and a half months later.
But at a certain point, patience is supplanted by a sense of urgency, especially when you have a team with championship aspirations. A team that was expected to be a good offensive team, that offseason cold-blooded and unemotional algorithmic projections saw as one of the better offense teams in baseball, can’t continue to be at the bottom of the league in runs scored without there being changes, efforts made to turn things around.
We are already seeing signs of that. Bochy used a wacky lineup last night. There was a hitters meeting before yesterday’s game. Donnie Ecker talked to the team about being more patient and not chasing pitches on the edges, big factors in the team being last in walks while also hitting for a low average. We seem to have shifted from “things will improve” to “things have to improve.”
And if they don’t? If the team continues to flounder offensively into May, into June, continues to underperform and fail to come close to meeting expectations?
If that happens, well, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a change, if Donnie Ecker and/or assistant hitting coach Justin Viele aren’t sacked and a new voice brought in to try to break through. I can’t see the Rangers going all season with a bottom five offense without a shake up, not on the heels of the lamentable 2024 performance.
Sometimes a new person, a new voice, can help — even if that new voice had grown old with its audience at a previous stop. The reason that Tim Hyers was hired by the Braves this past offseason was because, like the 2023-24 Texas Rangers, the Braves went from a world-beating offense in 2023 to a middling offense in 2024, but unlike the Rangers, the Braves decided to make a change in their hitting coach position. The Braves opted not to bring back hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, who had been their hitting coach since the 2015 season, replacing him with Hyers. The move hasn’t really paid off thusfar, with Braves only hitting slightly better this year than last, though the season is still early.
However…Seitzer was hired this past offseason by the Seattle Mariners to be their hitting coach, with the Mariners having fired manager Scott Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart last August. And so far this season, the Mariners are sixth in the majors in runs scored per game and second in OPS+. They are in first place in the A.L. West despite their vaunted rotation woefully underperforming, due to the bats being great so far this year.
Its early, of course. But baseball is a strange game.