With the 2026 Major League Baseball season having now come and gone, the Texas Rangers will have to look back and wrestle with what went wrong as they missed the postseason for the third straight season.

Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young said that, based on internal projections, they felt like the team would be capable of winning 82-85 games, but were able to rattle off just 80 and fell short of winning a division that was won by a team with a record of just 81-81.

Here are two key factors in Texas falling short of their ultimate goals this season.

Coming into the season, we knew that if Texas wanted to make a real run, the starting pitching would have to be at the forefront of it.

With a three-headed monster of Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, and MacKenzie Gore, the Rangers felt like they had one of the best 1-2-3 punches in all of baseball.

Combine that with the fact that Jack Leiter took a significant step forward in 2025, and there was reason to believe that the rotation could put up a similar season to the historic one they had just a year prior.

Unfortunately for the Rangers, deGrom, Eovaldi, and Gore all had down years by their standards, and Leiter didn’t take the next step in his progression (which was in large part due to not being healthy).

Instead of being a real team strength, Texas had a starting rotation that was just serviceable, and it was part of what cost them a spot in the postseason.

The Rangers' 2026 offense was never going to be the historic one that we saw in 2023, but there was no doubt reason to believe it would be better than we’ve seen in recent years.

In large part, that sentiment was true but not necessarily for the reasons that we thought it would be.

Ezequiel Duran came out of nowhere to be the team’s offensive MVP, and while his breakout is certainly welcomed by all within the organization, you would prefer to get that in addition to good seasons from your best offensive players.

The likes of Corey Seager, Wyatt Langford, and Josh Jung struggled to stay on the field this season, and their absence was noticeable.

Ultimately, everyone suffers significant injuries throughout the course of a 162-game season, and the ones who overcome them are most often some of the last teams standing.

However, if you take the three best offensive players out of the picture for much of the year, pretty much any team is going to have a hard time getting where they want to go, and it cost the Rangers this year.