ARLINGTON — This is the vision when you select a prodigious player with the second overall pick in a draft, give them a boatload of money and hope that they can one day develop into a frontline starter.
The Texas Rangers, in the midst of a playoff chase, were guided to a series win vs. a team they needed to beat by a Jack Leiter masterclass.
“This was a fun — a really cool — outing,” Leiter said. “A fun game overall.”
Leiter pitched seven scoreless innings, allowed two hits, struck out a career-high 10 batters and walked none in a 10-0 win vs. the Cleveland Guardians Saturday night at Globe Life Field. He is one of four pitchers this season to allow zero runs, no walks and two or fewer hits in seven or more innings this season alongside Detroit’s Tarik Skubal, St. Louis’ Sonny Gray and Atlanta’s Spencer Schwellenbach.
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The win pulled Texas to within a half-game of the Guardians in the American League Wild Card standings. They can leapfrog them with a win Sunday afternoon. Leiter, who mowed down a team with the fourth-fewest strikeouts in the AL, helped make that possible.
“Wow, he was good,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said before he corrected himself. “He was outstanding.”
Leiter produced his career-best start with a mesh of his tantalizing stuff and the command and attack-based-mindset that has at times escaped him in his first full major league season.
Jack Leiter picked up strikeouts with four pitches tonight (FB, CV, SL and CH) but used the fastball for seven.
We didn’t see the usual two-strike struggles. He had two 3-0 counts and turned both into outs. Really, really impressive stuff.
— Shawn McFarland (@McFarland_Shawn) August 24, 2025
The issue that’s held him up the most this season is a propensity to lose batters and struggle to win advantage counts. Saturday, though, he threw 65 of his 93 pitches for strikes, landed nearly 60 percent of his pitches in the strike zone and only issued three three-ball counts. Of the 15 two-strike counts he worked, 14 ended in outs, and he averaged just two pitches per at bat when he got to two strikes.
He pitched with the kind of pace that made a game in which Texas scored double digit runs last just a shade over two hours. Seven of his strikeouts came on a four-seam fastball that averaged 97 mph. His arsenal of secondary pitches, which he was able to land for 15 called strikes or whiffs, helped set the heater up.
“I think I definitely kind of learned something about myself from this one,” said Leiter, whose 3.81 ERA is the 23rd best among all American League pitchers who’ve thrown 110 or more innings this season. “I was able to find that mental groove of just locking in on the target and just executing a pitch one at a time.”
Leiter, who lasted just 3 2/3 innings in his last game against the Kansas City Royals on Monday, worked with the team’s coaching staff between starts to both rediscover a feel for his secondary pitches and to readjust his mentality and focus toward the plate vs. himself. He was encouraged to throw his curveball for power over precise location and, in turn, tossed it more than a mile per hour faster than his average and landed it for six called strikes.
It was a “simplification of pitching,” as Leiter described, and a commitment to the target instead of an attempted mental overhaul each time that he made a mistake pitch.
There weren’t many on Saturday night.
“It was on full display tonight,” third baseman Josh Jung said. “I can’t rave enough about our starting pitchers, but Jack doing that tonight is huge.”
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