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 utility guy Dylan Moore.
How many reasons can you come up with for wanting the Texas Rangers to win the division in a given year?
One could say that there’s just one reason, and its that you are a fan of the Texas Rangers, and so inherently you want them to succeed, and winning
the division is a success.
But beyond that obvious fact, what other reasons might there be?
Take the 2025 Texas Rangers. I wanted the Rangers to win the division because they hadn’t won the division since 2016, and I wanted to end that run of not winning the division title, meaningless though that may be in the Wild Card Era.
I wanted the Rangers to win the division so they’d finish ahead of the Astros, because screw the Astros.
I wanted the Rangers to win the division because I didn’t want the 2023 world title to be seen as a fluke, a team that played great and then didn’t do anything else afterwards.
I wanted the Rangers to win the division because of what a great story it would be, overcoming all the injuries that near crippled the team late in the season.
And, fairly low down on the list — but on the list nonetheless — is the fact that, over the final month of the season, the Rangers had two guys playing regularly for them who had been released earlier in the season by the Seattle Mariners. And it would be very funny to me if the Rangers passed the Mariners and finished ahead of them with a couple of guys the M’s had cast off.
It didn’t happen, of course, because of course it didn’t. Too many injuries, too much ground to make up.
But it would have been very amusing. At least to me.
Dylan Moore was one of the guys the Mariners released who the Rangers scooped up. Released by the Mariners on August 25, signed by the Rangers on August 27, Moore made his first appearance on August 29 for the Rangers. He seemed to be a good luck charm at first, as the team went 9-2 in the first 11 games he appeared in for Texas. He appeared in seven games after that, and Texas went 0-7 in them, so so much for that.
The Mariners were 44-44 in the games he appeared in for them, so maybe there was something inherently average about him, something that wasn’t limited to just himself but manifested in the team around him. Maybe the Rangers, by signing him, ended up locking themselves into a .500 record for 2025. Maybe the Mariners would have finished at .500 if they had not released him.
As with Luke Jackson, Moore signing with the Rangers brought his career full circle. He was originally drafted by the Rangers in the 7th round in 2015 out of the University of Central Florida, a senior sign who got $10,000 so the Rangers could go above slot for Eric Jenkins and Michael Matuella, their second and third round picks.
And like Luke Jackson, the Rangers traded Moore to the Atlanta Braves in 2016, for an insubstantial return. The Moore to Atlanta trade was actually a three way deal in late August, back when you could still make trades after July 31. Former Ranger Jeff Francoeur, on his last legs in his final major league season, went from Atlanta to Miami. Miami sent Matt Foley, motivational minor leaguer, to the Braves. Texas got international slot money from both Atlanta and Miami.
I had forgotten Jeff Francoeur played for the Rangers until just now. The Rangers traded Joaquin Arias to the Mets for him on August 31, 2010.
Man, that was a long, long time ago.
Moore spent six-plus seasons with the Mariners as a useful role player, even winning a Gold Glove for utility guy in 2024. We can condemn the Rangers for giving up on Moore barely a year into his pro career and getting little in return for him, I guess, if we are especially condemnation minded today. But the Braves released him at the end of spring training in 2018, after he had slashed .207/.291/.292 as a 24 year old in AA the year before, and apparently then didn’t do much that spring to suggest he was going to be any better going forward.
Milwaukee then signed Moore, and he had a pretty good season in their minor league system in 2018, splitting the year between AA and AAA. It wasn’t good enough to convince them to add him to their 40 man roster, however, and he became a free agent at season’s end. Seattle snatched him up a week later on a major league deal and, well, the rest is history.
Moore got 30 plate appearances in his 18 games for the Rangers in 2025, slashing .259/.300/.481 while helping fill in for the injured Marcus Semien at second base. I am hard-pressed to think of anything particularly memorable about his month with Texas. Really, in my mind, he stands as an avatar for the pets-heads-falling-off state of the Rangers in the last six weeks or so of the 2025 season.
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