Ezequiel Duran is still a Texas Ranger
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 infielder Ezequiel Duran.
It has been three and a half years since the Texas Rangers acquired Ezequiel Duran as the prize, the lead piece, in the deal that sent Joey Gallo to the New York Yankees. For most of those three and a half years, I’ve been expecting the Rangers to trade Ezequiel Duran, and it hasn’t happened. And with each day that passes, it appears more and more likely Ezequiel Duran will be a Texas Ranger when the 2025 season starts.
Duran’s long-term future with the Rangers seemed to be in doubt just four months after the Rangers acquired Duran. Exactly four months, in fact — the Rangers acquired Duran on July 29, 2021, and it was on November 29, 2021, that the news broke that the Rangers were signing Corey Seager, one day after the news broke that the Rangers were signing Marcus Semien. With a half a billion dollar double play combination, and Josh Jung in line to take over at third base, it didn’t seem like Duran had a pathway to regular playing time with the Rangers.
Duran wasn’t traded in the 2021-22 offseason, though given that there was a lockout that started literally the day after the Semien and Seager signings became official, and ran into February of 2022, that isn’t all that surprising. Duran ended up getting called up in June, got sent back down late in the month, then returned after the All Star Break to spend the final two and a half months with the big club. He was just okay, slashing .236/.277/.365 in 220 plate appearances and putting up a 0.1 bWAR while playing mostly third base. For a 23 year old getting his first taste of the major leagues, it was acceptable.
It was also, I figured, the last we’d see of Duran in a Rangers uniform, what with the Rangers pushing to make big moves to supplement the Seager/Semien splash from the offseason before. The Rangers needed pitching and lots of it, and Duran appeared to be a likely trade chip the Rangers could and would use to address that need.
That didn’t happen, and as it turns out it was a good thing it didn’t happen, as Duran ended up being a key contributor to the 2023 Texas Rangers, filling in admirably for Corey Seager when Seager missed time early in the year and then in late July, and getting time at most of the other positions in the lineup when Seager was healthy. Duran finished the year 8th on the team in plate appearances and slashed .276/.324/.443, good for a 110 OPS+.
Yes, Duran faded badly in the second half of the year, slashing .225/.283/.310 from July 1 through the end of the season, and he got very little playing time over the final few weeks of the season, but the .320/.361/.557 slash line he put up was a not-insignificant part of Texas banking a bunch of wins early in the year. And as you may recall, the Rangers ended up needing just about every win they accumulated in 2023 to make the playoffs. So Ezequiel Duran still being a Ranger in 2023? A good thing.
But I still thought he’d be dealt last offseason. He wasn’t. And this time, that non-trade didn’t work out so well.
Duran once again played all over the field for Texas, literally manning every position at one point or the other except pitcher and catcher. He did not, however, come close to accumulating as many plate appearances as he did in 2023, despite Josh Jung and Evan Carter missing most of the 2024 season, and despite third base and left field being two positions he played regularly in 2023.
He also did not come close to performing as well offensively as he did in 2023. In 285 plate appearances, Duran slashed just .246/.288/.321, good for a 75 OPS+ — even worse than his underwhelming 2022 production. Duran actually got sent down in late June for a month, with the Rangers hoping it would help him get straightened out and back in a groove.
Duran was called back up in late July, on the heels of a six game series in Albuquerque that saw him go 12 for 25 with five home runs, but he actually hit worse upon his return, slashing .172/.226/.172 in 31 plate appearances from his recall in late July through the end of August. The one positive is that Duran showed some signs of life in September, slashing .254/.299/.381 in 18 games that month, which, while still not good, is at least not terrible, especially for a middle infielder.
And once again, the offseason arrives, the Rangers need to make moves, and it seems like Duran is one of the most likely candidates to be dealt. He’s superfluous to the Rangers’ needs — while he has played first base and left field some, he’s not a good enough hitter to have value at those positions, and there are entrenched starters ahead of him at second base and shortstop and third base, and as a bench player, he would seem to be behind Josh Smith. Duran, it would seem, has more value to another team as a potential starting infielder than he does to the Rangers as their second string utility guy.
Ezequiel Duran’s offensive ceiling is inherently limited by the type of hitter he is — he doesn’t walk (bottom 15th percentile in walk rate in 2024), but strikes out roughly an average amount of the time. Duran had a 0.22 BB/K ratio in 2024, and of the 324 major league hitters who had at least 250 plate appearances, only 34 had a worse ratio than that.
That doesn’t mean that Duran can’t have success offensively — his K rate was even worse in 2023, his walk rate was about the same, and his 0.19 BB/K ratio that year was better than just 18 of 328 hitters with at least 250 plate appearances. Despite that, he had his best season, putting up a .330 wOBA and .319 xwOBA. A .319 xwOBA from a competent defensive second baseman or shortstop has value.
But Duran had that success because he hit the ball harder, and in the air more, in 2023 than he did in either 2022 or 2024. Duran’s 90.1 mph average exit velocity in 2023 was in the 65th percentile overall, while his 85.9 and 87.1 EVs in 2022 and 2024, respectively, were well below average. Duran’s average launch angle in 2023 was 14.0 degrees, compared to 9.5 and 8.9 in 2022 and 2024.
Duran’s fly ball rate in 2024 actually went up a little, from 23.2% to 24.3%, but his line drive rate went from 29.4% to 21.4%, with the net result being that he went from a 39.8% ground ball rate in 2023 to a 47.6% ground ball rate in 2024. Along with not hitting the ball in the air as much, Duran also pulled the ball much less, going from (per Statcast) a 34.3% pull rate (slightly below average) to a 29.1% pull rate (well below average).
We can see the relative change by looking at Fangraphs (I will note that they use different batted ball data than Statcast so their percentages are a little different). Duran pulled the ball more often than 65 of 328 players with at least 250 plate appearances in 2023. In 2024, only 17 of 324 players with at least 250 PAs pulled the ball less often than Ezequiel Dran.
Drilling down a little further using the Statcast data…Duran pulled 22 fly balls in 2023, with an average exit velocity of 94.6 mph. That was 1.3% of the pitches he saw, putting him 156th out of 365 batters in 2023 who saw at least 750 pitches. His 94.6 mph average exit velocity on those balls was 209th. His xwOBA of .645 was 182nd.
Duran pulled 9 fly balls in 2024, with an average exit velocity of 90.5 mph. That average exit velocity was 338th out of the 372 batters who saw at least 750 pitches in 2024. His 0.9% rate of pulling fly balls was 279th overall. Not surprisingly, Duran’s xwOBA on pulled fly balls last year — .415 — was 316th.
If you look at Duran’s 2024 hits spray chart on Statcast, Duran had a total of 5 extra base hits that were hit in the air to the left of dead center — three homers and two doubles. I counted 24 such extra base hits on his 2023 chart, including 12 of his 13 home runs.
If you’re wondering how Duran went from 38 XBHs (including 14 home runs) in 2023 to 14 XBHs (including three home runs) in 2024, that would seem to go a long way towards explaining it.
To be clear, I have focused on pulled fly balls because those are the ones where hitters can do the most damage. On pulled line drives, Duran was even worse relative to the league — 370th out of 372 batters in 2024 in xwOBA, at .513, on his 11 pulled line drives. His 1.1% percentage of pitches that resulted in pulled line drives was 333rd out of 372 batters. In contrast, it was 125th in 2023.
Despite being below average relative to the league in how often he pulled the ball, Duran had an above-average number of pitches he saw result in pulled ground balls. His 3.7% rate was 153rd. In 2023, the percentage was 2.5%, which was 346th.
The problem is, as we all remember Chris Woodward talking about when Willie Calhoun was designated for assignment, pulled hard hit ground balls aren’t particularly helpful. For the league as a whole in 2024, the xwOBA split between GB/LD/FB was .231/.688/.635. We want the ball in the air, especially when pulling it.
As a point of reference, the GB/LD/FB split on balls hit straightaway is .234/.644/.461. The split on balls hit the other way is .227/.574/.215. Balls in the air are good, especially if they are pulled or hit straightaway.
Fly balls the opposite way are bad, though. And that’s something that Ezequiel Duran did a bunch in 2024. At a 2.3% clip, Duran was 31st in percentage of pitches seen that resulted in opposite field fly balls. He had a .148 xwOBA on those. He was 17th in percentage of pitches seen that resulted in opposite field ground balls, which, as you will note above, is also not a good thing to do. Duran had a .274 xwOBA on those, for what it is worth.
In case you are curious, Duran was 149th in percentage of pitches that turned into fly balls to straightaway center, and 48th in line drives.
Anyway, the takeaway from all this? In 2023, Ezequiel Duran did a good job hitting the ball hard and in the air to his pull side. He was terrible at that in 2024. More pulled balls on the ground, more fly balls the other way, means bad offensive results. And remarkably, his .252 xwOBA was actually worse than his actual .270 wOBA — his bad offensive numbers in 2024 were actually better than his expected numbers, based on the batted ball data.
So, obviously, the goal for Ezequiel Duran for 2025 is to go back to pulling the ball, in the air, hard. How does that happen? Well, I don’t know. That’s outside of my wheelhouse.
I will note, though, that it does not appear that he was being pitched any differently in 2024 compared to 2023. He saw the same percentage of fastballs almost exactly — 31.6% in 2024 compared to 31.3% in 2023. The variation from 2023 to 2024 for all other pitches deviates by only a few percentage points. So it wouldn’t appear to be a “the league figured out how to pitch to him issue.”
So we know what to watch for with Ezequiel Duran in 2025. Its just a question of whether we will be watching for it with him in a Rangers uniform, a Round Rock uniform, or the uniform of another team.
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