One of 2023’s October heroes had an injury plagued 2024
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 Josh Sborz.
What would you do to be a hero?
What would you give up in the future to be forever immortalized in a moment of ultimate triumph?
Josh Sborz was a hero in October 2023. The iconic image of Josh Sborz spiking his glove after striking out Ketel Marte for the final out of the Texas Rangers’ 2023 World Series championship run is indelible, will forever be part of the memory of every Texas Rangers fan, up there with the Corey Seager scream as far as images that immediately evoke the feelings of that title.
It capped an incredible postseason run by Sborz, who had only returned to the active roster a few days before the end of the regular season, and whose health, reliability and effectiveness for the postseason were all in question. Sborz threw 12 innings over 10 appearances in the postseason, allowing just one run, striking out 13, walking 4 and allowing 4 hits. The Rangers won 9 of the 10 games he appeared in — the one loss being the Game 5 ALCS loss we will not speak of — and he capped it off with 2.1 scoreless innings to finish off Game 5 of the World Series.
Sborz did all this in a season that included three stints on the injured list. Between rehab stints in the minors, he threw 68.1 innings over 58 appearances. That was the most innings he had ever thrown as a season as a reliever, the most he’d thrown since logging 116 innings as a starter for AA Tulsa in 2017, and he did it while going on and off the injured list.
Sborz was rewarded for that effort, beyond just saying he’s a World Series champion. Yes, he got a ring, but so did Matt Bush. So did Sandy Leon. Alex Speas, J.P. Martinez, Spencer Howard, Ian Kennedy…they all got rings.
But what Josh Sborz did was cement his place in Rangers history, as one of the guys who stepped up and shouldered a huge part of the load in the Rangers’ successful playoff run, who was instrumental in the Rangers winning 13 games in October. He wasn’t the most important part of the title run, didn’t singlehandedly grab the Rangers’ first flag, but he is on the short list of the most important contributors to the four postseason series triumphs, and he’s the guy who will forever be remembered as being on the mound when the last out was recorded.
That reward, as it turns out, may have come at a price. The heavy workload Sborz bore last year, particularly in October — the ninth month of the baseball season, going back to the beginning of spring training — looks to have taken a toll on him, to have potentially impacted his 2024 season.
2024 was, for Josh Sborz, a season of starts and stops. Four separate trips to the injured list, all due to shoulder issues. Multiple rehab stints, including one that had to be paused for a couple of weeks. 13 rehab appearances in minor league games.
The good news is that, when he was healthy, Sborz pitched well in the big leagues in 2024. He had a 3.86 ERA and a 2.62 FIP for the Rangers this year.
The bad news is that he didn’t pitch in the majors much. Sborz made 17 appearances in the big leagues this year. Josh Sborz had almost as many games in the minors in 2024 rehabbing as he did in the majors pitching. And one can’t help but wonder, suspect, believe that tthese issues stem, at least in part, from his workload in 2023.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, and all that. I know. Maybe Josh Sborz isn’t healthy in 2024 even if the Rangers don’t make the playoffs in 2023. Maybe his shoulder was going to give him problems regardless, and the thresholds he passed last year did not impact him this year.
One can’t help but think there’s a connection, though.
Sborz faces an uncertain future right now. He made just $1.03 million in 2024, and the arbitration process will only bump that up a few hundred thousand for 2025.
And that assumes he even makes it to arbitration. With the uncertainty surrounding his health, the open question as to whether he will be able to pitch in 2025, how much, how effectively, he could be non-tendered. A year after being a World Series hero, he could find himself out on the street because an amount barely above the league minimum is determined to be more than he is worth. He could be out there scrambling for a minor league deal, hoping to latch on with a team and get the opportunity to get healthy, get back to where he was before 2024, get his career back on track.
And Josh Sborz could well do that. He could put the shoulder issues behind him and have several more successful seasons in the big leagues.
Or Josh Sborz, who turns 31 in December, could find himself unable to get his stuff back, unable to keep his arm healthy, could find himself forced out but younger pitchers with fewer miles on their arms and smaller medical histories in their files. Could find himself in that situation because, perhaps, of how hard he was pushed in 2023 in the pursuit of a title.
What would you do to be a hero?
Would you sacrifice your career, your earning potential, your future in the game in order to be part of the one team left standing at the end of the season? To not just be part of the one team, but a key part, someone who fans will forever associate with the Texas Rangers reaching that pinnacle?
We say all the time we’d give our right arms to have something, achieve something. Its an idiom, a figure of speech, a throwaway line.
Most of the time.
Previously: