With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.<\/p>\n
Today we are looking at infielder Cody Freeman.<\/p>\n
Cody Freeman spent more time in the major leagues in 2025 than I think any of us expected to be the case. Or wanted to be the case, for that matter.<\/p>\n
Freeman had a short stint in the bigs right after the All Star Break when Sam Haggerty went on the injured list, and then was sent back down after about a week when Haggerty returned. A little less than a month later, Freeman was called back up again in mid-August, once again taking the place of Sam Haggerty, and ultimately sticking around until the end of the season due to, you know, everyone being injured.<\/p>\n
Freeman had the role of \u201cyoung-ish guy in AAA who can play a lot of positions who can be pressed into duty in the big leagues if need be\u201d in the second half of 2025. That role had previously been held by Jonathan Ornelas, who was designated for assignment in May and then sold to Atlanta, because that\u2019s where all the players DFA\u2019d by the Rangers end up.<\/p>\n
Freeman\u2019s time in the majors in 2025 was relatively uneventful. he slashed .228\/.258\/.342 and played a variety of positions, none of them particularly well according to the advanced defensive metrics.<\/p>\n
Freeman wasn\u2019t on the 40 man roster until he was summoned in July, and would have been a free agent at the end of the season had he not been added to the 40 man at some point before season\u2019s end. He ended up with a -0.3 WAR of both the f and b varieties. He seemed to generate a degree of enthusiasm among Rangers fans that was disproportionate to his actual performance.<\/p>\n
Really, though, what is more interesting to me than Freeman\u2019s 2025 major league performance is Freeman\u2019s 2025 minor league performance. He appeared to be a completely different hitter in AAA than he had been throughout his entire minor league career up to that point.<\/p>\n
In 71 career games in low-A, Cody Freeman has slashed .247\/.357\/.383.<\/p>\n
In 196 career games in high-A, Cody Freeman has slashed .235\/.308\/.384.<\/p>\n
In 124 career games in AA, Cody Freeman has slashed .262\/.318\/.428.<\/p>\n
In 97 career games in AAA, Cody Freeman has slashed .336\/.382\/.549.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a big jump! And yes, the PCL is a great league for hitters, and yes, Freeman had been one of the Rangers\u2019 infielder-to-catcher conversion projects and was catching at least some of the time until the 2024 season, and so not catching anymore probably helped him.<\/p>\n
But even so\u2026that\u2019s a big, big jump in performance.<\/p>\n
In looking at his historical minor league data, one can see how that change manifested. Here\u2019s Freeman\u2019s K rates in the minors by year:<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a huge drop in Freeman\u2019s strikeout rate in 2025 compared to prior years. And its at AAA, where he is seeing more experienced pitchers, and where one would expect his K rate to go up rather than down.<\/p>\n
One would expect that Freeman was swinging less frequently once he got to AAA, but that wasn\u2019t the case. He swung at 44.4% of pitches with Round Rock in 2025, compared to 44.2% and 46.3% the previous two seasons.<\/p>\n
The difference is in contact rate \u2014 after putting up contact rates a little above 80% in his career prior to 2025, with a high of 82.8% in AA in 2024, Freeman had an 89.9% contact rate at AAA in 2025.<\/p>\n
To put these numbers in perspective, Steven Kwan had an 8.7% K rate in the majors in 2025, which was the fourth lowest K% among qualified hitters.<\/p>\n
Nico Hoerner had an 89.9% contact rate in the majors in 2025. That was the fourth highest contact rate among qualified hitters.<\/p>\n
Freeman was able to maintain an elite contact rate \u2014 88.5% \u2014 in his time in the majors. His K rate jumped up to 15.7%, which is still well above average in terms of avoiding strikeouts.<\/p>\n
The problem was, though, that Freeman didn\u2019t walk in the majors \u2014 he had a well below average 4.1% walk rate \u2014 and he didn\u2019t make quality contact. His hard hit rate and average exit velocity were both near the bottom of the league, and almost 60% of his balls in play were either ground balls or infield pop ups.<\/p>\n
Freeman has two options remaining, and seems most likely to start the year back at AAA as infield depth. It will be interesting to see, should he be in Round Rock for the bulk of the year, whether he can replicate the offensive success he had there in 2025.<\/p>\n
With the Rangers needing a righthanded bench bat, there\u2019s been talk about Freeman possibly filling that role. However, Freeman has not performed especially well against lefties \u2014 in fact, he has reverse splits over the last three seasons. That makes it hard for him to have value in a big league bench role at this point.<\/p>\n
2025 was a big step forward for Freeman. He had a successful year at AAA and got regular playing time in the bigs in the final six weeks of the season. Now we just need to see if he can build on that for 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2393],"tags":[52311,5,4,149,1567,69,3240],"class_list":{"0":"post-577171","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas-rangers","8":"tag-2025-season-in-review","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-rangers","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-texas-rangers","14":"tag-texasrangers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116085137279540812","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}