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.
Today we are looking at catcher Jonah Heim.
Man…I don’t even know what to say about Jonah Heim. What the hell happened here? How did a guy who looked like he would be a nice first division catcher for the team suddenly become terrible?
The reflexive reaction is that, well, Heim had a career year in 2023
like seemingly everyone else did for the Rangers that year, and then went back to being who he was. But that’s not true! I mean, yes, Jonah Heim had a career year in 2023 — was terrific defensively, and was slashing .280/.337/.479 when he landed on the injured list in late July — but he was good in 2022 as well. Heim had a 2.7 fWAR and 2.4 bWAR in 2022, as he hit fine for a catcher and was good defensively.
In 2024, Heim cratered offensively, slashing .220/.267/.336. He also went from being great at throwing out runners in 2023 to bad at that in 2024, but his framing — his strongest measurable trait defensively throughout his career — was still very good.
In 2025, Heim once again hit poorly, with a .213/.271/.332 slash line, but also wasn’t good at blocking pitches (38th percentile per Statcast) and, perhaps most alarmingly, he was only in the 33rd percentile in framing. This, after being in the 98th percentile in framing in 2021 and 2022, in the 95th percentile in 2023, and the 74th percentile in 2024.
How does that happen? How does a catcher suddenly go from being an elite framer to a really good framer to a below average framer in a two year span?
I wish I knew the answer.
Offensively, Jonah had much the same problem in 2025 as he did in 2024 — he got eaten up by fastballs and he stopped pulling the ball in the air. Last offseason I noted that the biggest discrepancies for Heim between 2023 and 2024 was his walk rate dropping and his hitting fewer balls in the air, particularly to the pull side. After having over 25% of his balls in play being pulled in the air in 2022 and 2023, that dropped to 17.3% in 2024. If Heim was going to go back to being the hitter he was in 2022 and 2023, that trend would have to reverse.
And early on in 2025, it looked like it was. Heim homered twice in the second game of the season — Kyle Higashioka got the start on Opening Day — and at the end of April was slashing .273/.325/.455. It looked like, offensively anyway, Heim was back.
But no. From May 1 through the end of the season, Heim slashed .198/.258/.302. And while his walk rate improved — he walked 7.4% of the time, still below his 2022 and 2023 rate of 8.5%, but better than his 5.3% walk rate in 2024 — he actually got worse in regards to his fly ball/ground ball tendencies.
In 2022 and 2023, Heim hit the ball in the air 61.1% and 63.7% of the time, respectively, compared to a major league average of 55.8%. That dropped to 58.2% in 2024 and 58.7% in 2025.
Heim pulled the ball 50% and 45% of the time in 2022 and 2023. In 2024, it was 38.3%, and in 2025, it was 40.7%.
And when he did pull the ball, more and more often, it was on the ground — 24% of the balls Jonah Heim put into play in 2025 were pulled ground balls. Only 16.7% of balls in play from Heim in 2025 were pulled in the air — even worse than his disappointing 2024 number.
The inclination is to put some of it on the much-discussed issue of the Shed killing fly ball hitters in 2025 — Heim had a slash line of .204/.266/.282 at home last year, compared to .220/.275/.374 on the road — but his xwOBA, which shouldn’t be impacted by that, was still .276, the worst of his career, and a mark that put him in the 4th percentile in MLB, per Statcast. So we can’t really place the blame on the Shed for Heim’s offensive struggles.
Fun fact — after hitting two home runs at the Shed on Opening Day, Heim only hit one more homer at home the rest of the season.
No, you’re right, that’s not really a fun fact.
Heim has also shouldered a very heavy workload the past several years. Since the start of 2022, Heim has appeared in 513 games — the second most of any player who has made at least 80% of his appearances at catcher, behind only Cal Raleigh, who has appeared in 576 games.
Early in spring training, there was a story about how the team “had some stern conversations,” as then catching coach Bobby Wilson put it, in the 2024 exit interviews about the improvements Heim needed to make in his offseason conditioning:
Getting Heim back to his 2023 form started at that exit interview.
What would his offseason look like? What would the strength and conditioning schedule be? How does the training staff keep Heim healthy?
Whatever it was that they were doing, it doesn’t appear to have worked.
Heim has gone from an All Star in 2023 to, in 2026, someone who settled for a $1.25 million deal with the Atlanta Braves on the eve of camps opening, and who might not have a major league job once the Braves’ starting catcher, Sean Murphy, returns from hip surgery.
It has been a precipitous fall for someone who, at one point, appeared to have made the Rangers’ catching position a strength for years to come.
Previously:
