Another injury-shortened season
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 third baseman Josh Jung.
I hesitate to call Josh Jung’s 2024 a “lost season,” because that seems a bit too extreme. Maybe “disoriented season,” or “stuck on the side of the road season” is more apropos.
Jung was sidelined at the start of spring training in 2024 due to a calf strain. He missed most of spring training and his availability for Opening Day was somewhat in question until just days before the season began. When the lights came on he was ready, though, and started the season red hot, going 7 for 17 with a pair of homers and a 1415 OPS before a fateful at bat against Phil Maton in the 9th inning of Game 4 of the season.
Texas was up 7-3 in the top of the ninth in Tampa, and Maton was asked to finish things out for the Rays. He didn’t have it on that day, giving up a double and a lineout before issuing an intentional walk to Corey Seager and then hitting Evan Carter and Adolis Garcia back-to-back.
So red hot Josh Jung comes up, bases loaded, Rangers are up 8-3, you’re feeling good, thinking maybe Jung can bust up the struggling Maton and give the Rangers a double digit offensive output for the day. You thought wrong, of course. Jung, instead, was busted up by Maton, getting hit in the right hand/wrist area on a pitch that, to add insult to injury, he swung at, resulting in a foul ball.
Bruce Bochy announced after the game that Jung had a fractured wrist. Frustrating. I started to write “devastating” instead of frustrating, but really, at the time, that didn’t seem to be the best adjective. Yes, it was bad news, and the type of injury that can have lingering impacts, but the initial feeling was this sort of injury usually has a 6 to 8 week timeline, maybe less depending on the severity.
I wrote at length about the Josh Jung situation (in a post entitled “The Josh Jung Situation”) the next day, and as these excerpts indicate, we (or I, anyway) weren’t at “devastating” at that point:
Jung had gotten off to a very hot start, despite missing most of spring training due to a calf strain. He went deep in the first inning of Monday’s game for his second home run of the season, and his slash line currently stands at .412/.474/.941. That slash line will remain static for a while — I would guess six to eight weeks. And once Jung returns, we shall have to see how well he initially performs, as wrist injuries can have lingering effects that, in particular, can sap power.
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The Rangers lineup is also deep enough that the offense shouldn’t be derailed by Jung’s absence. This is a potent offensive team that is solid from 1 to 9, and should continue to score runs. One need just look to last April, when the Rangers lost Corey Seager a week and a half into the season — the offense didn’t miss a beat and kept on rolling while Duran and Smith filled in.
I ended up being wrong here, in a couple of ways.
First, the Rangers’ lineup depth I spoke of? Way off base, for reasons we don’t have to get into in this particular post.
Second, the six to eight week guess was wrong. After Jung’s surgery, it was announced that the injury was more severe than initially thought, and he would be out for eight to ten weeks. That estimate ended up being, at first blush, overly optimistic, as Jung started his initial rehab assignment with AAA on June 16, 11 weeks after he was injured.
Then, after four games with the Express, Jung was pulled off his rehab assignment due to lingering soreness in his wrist. Jung was in limbo for a while, and we spent the early part of the summer watching for Jung updates, getting consistently disappointing news about his status and progress as the pain continued to linger and his ability to swing a bat continued to be hampered and the Rangers’ offense — and the Rangers team in general — floundered.
Jung finally went back out on a rehab assignment with Frisco on July 26, played three games for the Roughriders, and was finally activated from the injured list on July 30. He ultimately missed almost four months of the season.
The morning he was activated, the Rangers were 52-55, 3.5 games back in the American League West, which had the Astros and Mariners tied for first place. They weren’t out of the playoff race at that point, though that was mainly because their divisional rivals had been so mediocre, and a poor August would ultimately dash what hopes had remained at the time.
In Jung’s absence, his role in the lineup seemed to take on heightened importance. There was talk about Jung being key to the offense producing, his somehow being a catalyst in the lineup, that the sputtering Texas bats would come to life once Jung made his long-awaited return.
It was a weird narrative.
Jung’s return to the lineup did not, in fact, bring the offense back to life. Jung was awful upon his return — from July 30, his first game back, through the end of August, he slashed .229/.234/.314, with a brutal 29:1 K:BB ratio. September saw improvement — .285/.355/.464 in 62 plate appearances, three home runs, a more respectable 15:5 K:BB ratio — but the wrist pain continued to plague Jung. Ultimately, he was shut down with 10 games left in the season, and was placed on the injured list for the final week of the year.
When Jung was shut down in September, the reports were that the soreness in his wrist had returned in the previous few weeks. I’m just speculating here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the soreness had never really left, if he was battling through that the entire time he was playing after he was activated from the injured list. It would certainly help explain his dismal performance upon returning to the major leagues.
In the post I linked earlier, I also talked about Jung’s injury history:
Jung has been labeled as “injury-prone,” having missed significant time to injury in 2021, 2022 and 2023. He now has had two injuries that have cost him time this year, and it is only April 2. One can argue that this is just bad luck, that broken bones, such as sidelined him last summer and now this spring, are not the sort of thing that should be held against Jung. On the other hand, one of the leading indicators as to whether a player is going to miss time due to injury in the future is whether he’s missed time in the past. At this point, it isn’t unreasonable to have concerns about Jung’s ability to stay on the field in the future.
Again, this was written the day after he was injured, before we knew how serious the fracture was or how much time Jung would actually miss and how he would perform once he got back. The concerns I wrote about there have only increased since then.
The defining characteristic of Josh Jung’s professional career, up to this point, has been his inability to stay on the field. Jung is entering his seventh professional season — his sixth full season — and has played 354 games. The pandemic cost Jung the entirety of the 2020 season, but in the four years since, Jung has played just 310 games between the majors and minors.
122 of those games came in 2023, when he still missed a month due to a broken hand. Prior to that injury, he slashed .274/.323/.489 in 109 games, and that’s what I think we look at as what Jung can do, should do, if he can stay healthy for an extended period of time.
The Rangers are hoping to get that from Jung in 2025. Its his age 27 season, a time when he should be at his peak. A healthy, productive Jung would go a long way towards fixing last year’s broken Rangers offense.
But the problem with injury-prone players is that they tend to get injured a lot. And until Jung can make it through a full season without a trip to the i.l., those questions are going to continue to hang over him.
Previously: