Grant Anderson’s difficult year as an up-and-down guy
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 pitcher Grant Anderson.
Who remembers how the Rangers acquired Grant Anderson?
I can always remember that the Rangers got Anderson from the Seattle Mariners. Exactly how and exactly when tends to fade into the background, though. For a while I kept thinking he was who the Rangers got for Rafael Montero, which is incorrect — the Rangers got Jose Corniell for Montero in the 2020-21 offseason.
No, the Rangers got Anderson from the Mariners in exchange for pitcher Connor Sadzeck at the beginning of the 2019 season. Sadzeck, who was out of options, had been designated for assignment by the Rangers at the end of camp, despite putting up a 0.96 ERA in a 13 outing, 9 inning cup of coffee late in 2018 (walking 11 batters while striking out 7 probably had something to do with that). Rather than get nothing for Sadzeck but the waiver claim fee, Texas sent him to the Pacific Northwest in return for a sidearming Texas native who was a 21st round pick out of McNeese State the previous summer.
Sadzeck had supposedly been kind of traded once before — he was one of the players the Milwaukee Brewers had to choose from as the Player to be Named Later from in the Jonathan Lucroy trade. The Brewers selected outfielder Ryan Cordell instead. The total deal was Lucroy and Jeremy Jeffress for Lewis Brinson, Luis Ortiz and Cordell, in a deal that didn’t work out as well as hoped for either side (though the Brewers were able to use Brinson as the headlining player going to the Marlins in the Christian Yelich trade, so that’s something).
Sadzeck is still banging around, incidentally. He had a good first couple of months in the bigs in 2019, landed on the injured list with inflammation in his elbow, was released at season’s end, had brief stints in the systems of the ChiSox, Brewers (for whom he made two appearances in 2022), and Twins, was released by Minnesota and pitched Indy Ball in the second half of 2023, and spent the 2024 season pitching at AAA for the Pirates.
Grant Anderson is also still around, which you probably are aware of, since you are reading this Year in Review post about Grant Anderson’s time with the Rangers in the 2024 season. It was not what we would characterize as a successful year for Anderson, but Anderson was one of 855 people to throw a pitch in the major leagues in 2024, and that counts for something. I tried to figure out what percentage of the world’s population pitched in the majors in 2024, and the answer I got back was expressed in scientific notation, if that tells you anything.
Anderson was fortunate enough to be a major league pitcher in 2024. Or, I should say, for isolated periods in 2024. You see, in the year of 2024, major league teams are going to have one or two pitchers on the 40 man roster whose primary job in a given season is to be summoned to the major leagues on short notice when needed, and then go back to the minors when no longer needed. For such a role, a team is going to look for a player whose development has more or less plateaued and thus doesn’t need to be consistently in a rotation or getting regular work out of the pen, who has options, and who, I suspect, has a certain amount of mental toughness and resiliency.
Being able to pack quickly is also a plus.
I do find myself wondering how someone like Anderson, who spend a year shuttling between AAA and the majors, manages their living situation. Do they just keep apartments in both cities? Or is that just the optimists? I guess a really optimistic player in that situation would have an apartment or house rented in Arlington (or whatever city the big league club plays in) and just get a hotel room when in the minors. The pessimists probably do it the other way around.
Anyway. Anderson started the season in the majors, and was called up to the majors six different times. The number of major league appearances he made in those six call up stints were 3, 1, 12, 1, 1, and 5. He was optioned back to the minors after the first five of those stints, and a placement on the injured list ended his final stint in the majors, though he was sent on a rehab assignment at Round Rock before the season ended, and thus ended his season pitching for the Express.
Anderson was not good in the major leagues in 2024. I believe I mentioned that earlier. I also mentioned that he is a sidearmer, and one of the fundamental characteristics of sidearming pitchers is that they tend to have pretty big platoon splits.
Anderson, a righthander, allowed righthanded hitters to slash .295/.339/.361 against him in 65 plate appearances, with 17 Ks and 4 walks. For MLB as a whole, righthanded hitters slashed .241/.303/.389 against righthanded pitchers, so Anderson was right around league average. And he was probably a little unlucky against righties, as he allowed a .395 BABIP to them. So fine there.
Lefties, though? In 55 plate appearances, lefties slashed .313/.400/.938 against him, an insane 1338 OPS. And they did that despite a .192 BABIP against Anderson, as lefties hit 10 home runs off of him in 2024.
I did a double take when I saw that. 10 home runs in 55 plate appearances by lefthanded hitters? Insanity. Madness. It couldn’t be.
Alas, it could be. Add in the one home run that a righthanded hitter had against him, and Anderson had a 3.7 HR/9IP ratio in 2024. That’s the highest HR/9 ratio in a single season in Rangers history for a pitcher with at least 25 innings pitched in a season. Only Drew Smyly in 2019 and Danny Darwin in 1995 had ratios of at least 3.0. In the history of MLB, only seven times has a pitcher thrown at least 25 innings in a season and allowed more than 3.7 HR/9. All of those are in the 21st century, incidentally, and that noise you hear is Jeff Frye yelling angrily at clouds about how hitters don’t know how to hit anymore (#shegone).
Anderson is one of three pitchers to have allowed 3.7 HR/9 in 25+ innings in a season. One of the other two is Steve Geltz, who I don’t think I’ve heard of before. The other is Kam Loe, who I have heard of before. Loe did his damage in 2013, while splitting time between the Braves, the Cubs and the Mariners, none of whom I remember him pitching for. I was probably distracted in 2013 by my irritation about having Lance Berkman and A.J. Pierzynski on the Rangers team and thus didn’t notice.
Anderson had an ugly 8.10 on the season, and a 7.59 FIP. He had “only” a 5.07 xERA and 4.33 xFIP, so, you know, if you’re looking for a reason for optimism, there’s that.
It is a far cry from his debut, in 2023, when Anderson struck out 7 of 9 batters faced in a relief outing against the Detroit Tigers. It was a time when the Ranger pen was a disaster, the seeming one weak spot for a team that got off to a dominant start to the year, and that debut led to optimism that Anderson could be an asset in short or middle relief going forward. The optimism was misguided, as Anderson had a 5.45 ERA after that, due once again to being torched by lefties, allowing a 1048 OPS to them while holding righties to a 648 OPS.
Grant Anderson is a perfectly acceptable major league pitcher, so long as he doesn’t face lefthanded hitters. 45.8% of the batters he faced in 2024 were of the lefthanded variety, however, and thus he wasn’t an acceptable major league pitcher in 2024.
Anderson now is perched on the edge of the 40 man bubble. He has an option remaining so he could well make it to the start of the 2025 season and be sent to Round Rock for another year of traversing I-35 on a moment’s notice. Or he could be gone tomorrow.
Such is the life of a specialist reliever in the Age of the Three Batter Minimum.
Previously: