Can the Texas Rangers maintain their hot streak?

The Texas Rangers have started to look really good over their last nine games, posting a 7-2 record.

I think I may have written this earlier in the season, but the Texas Rangers are an extremely hit or miss team. You can clearly see this from their 10-10 record with the first 11 games being drastically different from their last nine.

The team has had trouble at times getting its offense going, and other times it has had trouble with the pitching staff. Over the last nine games, the team has had good luck with the offense doing enough to pick up wins for the club.

Six of the team’s seven wins during this stretch have been by three runs or less, which means that the pitching staff has been good enough, despite struggles from their starters, namely Mike Minor and Jordan Lyles.

The bullpen has been good, especially the late game bullpen outings in Rafael Montero and Jonathan Hernandez, as they have done a great job closing out games, and picking up wins for the Texas Rangers, especially Montero, who has picked up a save in all five of his outings, and has yet to give up an earned run on the season.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Herget, Jesse Chavez, and Ian Gibaut have all been really bad thus far out of the bullpen (and this is just out of the active relievers), but those guys have typically been pitching in games that haven’t really been that close, where they are either making the deficit larger for the Texas Rangers, or to where Chris Woodward has to use his late inning guys because of their inability to make games close.

Okay, pitching staff rant over.

On to the offense, Nick Solak has been terrific, and even after an 0-3 outing on Sunday, he is hitting a robust .299 on the year, looking really good on both offense and defense. Todd Frazier has also been terrific this year, hitting .317 for the Texas Rangers, leading the club in batting average (among qualifiers).

Jose Trevino and Derek Dietrich have both looked very good in limited action thus far this season, with Trevino hitting .375, and Dietrich hitting .364, and making a strong push to take over Rougned Odor‘s job at second base.

And on a less positive note, despite Odor raising his batting average up to .151 on the year, and having a three game hitting streak, it still seems like it is in the best interest for the Texas Rangers long term to move on from him at second with either Dietrich or Anderson Tejeda.

Continuing with slumping players, the Texas Rangers also have Elvis Andrus hitting below .200, at .184 on the year, and still really struggling to get things going. Joey Gallo has also been in a bit of a slump as well, seeing his batting average dip to below .200 before he hit a home run in Sunday’s loss against the Colorado Rockies to bring it up to .203.