SURPRISE, Ariz. — For most of his career, Joc Pederson’s spring training performances have been pretty reliable predictors of his upcoming season.
Which will surely make you gulp when you see he’s taking a .486 OPS into the final week of exhibitions.
But the reliable predictor is this: His season tends to be the inverse of his spring.
A year ago, he posted a 1.018 OPS in spring and hit five homers. Then he didn’t hit his first in-season homer for the Texas Rangers until May. And you know how the season went. But it extends well beyond that. The year before, with Arizona, it was a horrendous .558 in spring followed by the best season of his career. 2023: Great spring, so-so season. 2022: Spring bad, season great. We can pretty much do this all the way back to 2018, but you probably get the point already. Don’t put too much stock into thinking Pederson’s season will mimic his spring.
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“Spring training is always a weird place,” Pederson said. “You always want to play good and you always want results. I’m not saying that you go out there and you try to get out. But I also think there’s a time to peak. What really matters is having a good season and not a good spring. I know people can panic, but I’m working on some things with [hitting instructor Justin Viele]. Feel like the process and the cage work have been elite. And I don’t think there is a correlation between spring stats and the season.”
Turning 34 in April, he’s also veteran enough to know that, at some point, the process must yield results. And the runway gets shorter in direct correlation to age and contract obligations. No, he won’t run out of runway before the season starts. All the same, though, he sure wouldn’t mind seeing some of that work pay off with results now.
He is in the final year of a two-year deal. While the Rangers aren’t about to write off $18 million before the season begins, the runway might not last much beyond his April 21 birthday. The Rangers will have at least one similarly experienced veteran DH – either Andrew McCutchen or Mark Canha – on the roster. Pederson is a lefty hitter, who has traditionally excelled against right-handed pitching, but if it’s a lefty DH the Rangers need, they could use switch-hitting Sam Haggerty in the spot and could consider Alejandro Osuna as an extra outfielder/DH.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It’s Pederson’s job for now. And there are some numbers worth noting from this spring that fall more under process than actual results.
His average exit velocity of 94.2 mph is up over 2025. He continues to work with Viele on getting his swing “more vertical” to launch balls deeper. They spent time on that in the cage at Pederson’s home over the winter, but it’s still different against live pitching. Breaking bad habits can be a process, too.
“Obviously in the season it is a results-based game, but, yeah, he’s going to be in the lineup,” manager Skip Schumaker said. “I trust the work that he’s putting in. I know with that much work, you’d like to get results. But I think he’s trending in the right direction.
“You see veterans struggle at the beginning, and then they start getting hot at the right time and heading into the season. So you trust it. I know he didn’t have the year that he wanted to have last year. And he wants to prove that that year was an outlier. He had some injuries that didn’t help either. But I think if he’s healthy, he’s going to be just fine.”
Two other factors that may play into getting him to a better spot: He seems to be much more in sync with Viele than perhaps he was with Donnie Ecker, the hitting coach who was dismissed at the end of April last season, and without firing shots at anybody in particular, he sees a more cohesive and collective approach to hitting throughout the team. He said from the spring opener last year, when the Rangers saw only 101 pitches in a game against Kansas City, he was confused by the approach.
“It was very different than I’d experienced in the past,” Pederson said. “After that game, I said I don’t think that’s acceptable. I don’t think that’s the standard you want to go out with, that we’re just swinging out of our butts at anything and that we need to address that. It didn’t get addressed then and it carried over to the season.
“This spring, we are working together, working on attacking our pitch, in our zone. And I think that makes goals more attainable. I think you have to give a lot of credit to Skip coming in with good energy, having a quality standard. He’s put effort into getting guys to enjoy being at the field, emphasizing that. And when you put that much effort in, there’s going to be some return.”
The Rangers are betting the return is coming.
“We’ve seen some really good things,” president of baseball operations Chris Young said. “The work has been there. He’s taken great care of himself. He’s motivated and hungry. We expect Joc to bounce back. He’s a big part of our team. We know what he can do when he gets hot. I think he’s a great complement to the group we have with his approach, his ability to mix slug and on-base percentage. And we expect him to have a good year.”
If he doesn’t, though, it’s very possible he won’t get the whole year.
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