Things are less than ideal for the Texas Rangers currently. The team is three games under .500, and Wyatt Langford and Josh Smith are both on the injured list, and yes, if you check the B-R page, both players have gotten off to bad starts, but Langford, in particular, profiles as one of the Rangers top players, so his absence hurts the lineup.

On the other hand, the Rangers have played either the most difficult schedule so far this season, or the second most difficult schedule, depending on where you look, and are just two games behind the Northern California Athletics in the American League West, so, you know, things could be worse.

The Rangers will have the Vandy Boys — Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter — starting the first two games of the series. Each has been up-and-down this season, looking great at times and looking awful at other times, often in the same game.

Rocker is a sinker/slider guy who has a changeup that is still a work in progress, and who generates a ton of ground balls. His slider is his best pitch, and when he’s on, he throws it for strikes enough to keep hitters from sitting on his sinker. When he’s not on, he struggles to throw strikes and hitters will tee off on his sinker. Rocker is terrible at holding on runners, and the Rangers catchers aren’t great at throwing out baserunners, so the Cubs will almost certainly look to run on him. Base stealers are 5 for 5 against him this season, and 17 for 17 against him in his major league career.

Leiter, on the other hand, relies on a high-speed, high-spin fastball that generates swings-and-misses. He introduced a kick-change last year that he’s used much more this year — its his second most frequently thrown pitch — and, unusually, he throws it frequently to righthanded hitters as well as lefties. It can be a devastating pitch, but he struggles to command it — if you look at the heat map for the changeup, you will see that the pitch can end up anywhere from above the batter’s head to hitting the ground 4 feet in front of the plate. When Leiter is on, he racks up Ks and gets a lot of pop ups and lazy fly balls. When he’s not on, his pitch count gets out of control early on, and he gives up a lot of loud contact in the air.

Jacob deGrom is slated to pitch the finale. You might have heard of him before. He’s pretty good. He’s no longer “best pitcher in baseball” Jacob deGrom, but he is still “legitimate No. 1 starter” Jacob deGrom. The biggest issue with deGrom is that he’s much more homer-prone since coming back from Tommy John surgery — he’s allowed just 13 runs this year, but 6 home runs, and allowed 26 homers last year.

The bullpen is a collection of no-names, but has performed quite well so far this season. Manager Skip Schumaker has tended to go with Jakob Junis and Jacob Latz as his primary options late in games with a lead.

The offense has been erratic. Corey Seager is off to a slow (for him) start, though he’s still got a 114 OPS+. Brandon Nimmo and Josh Jung are off to great starts offensively, though Nimmo is nursing a hamstring issue that has limited him of late — he’s missed a couple of games over the past week, and DH’d when he has played. With Smith and Langford out, the Rangers have had to use Andrew McCutchen — on the roster as a platoon DH — in the outfield some, and put Joc Pederson in right field against the Yankees on Thursday, something we hope we will never have to see again.

Globe Life Park played very hitter-friendly in 2023, when the Rangers won the World Series, but since the start of the 2025 has played as an extreme pitchers park due to the ball not carrying well at all. A ball off the bat that seems like it should land 10 rows back will end up caught on the warning track. Don’t be surprised if we have a low-scoring series.