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 starting pitcher Patrick Corbin.
The Texas Rangers looked around in the middle of spring training, 2025, and said, we need a cheap replacement level starting pitcher who will take the ball every fifth day and not get knocked out early. So they went out and signed Patrick Corbin,
or more or less accomplished that.
I am pretty sure I described the Corbin signing, at the time, as weird. I got it, though. The Rangers didn’t want to cycle guys who weren’t ready through the rotation, didn’t want to have to deal with a spot in the rotation that regularly recorded just 8 outs and messed up the bullpen for the next few days. They wanted someone with a certain baseline level of replacement level competence.
And for what they wanted, Patrick Corbin fit the bill. He had been bad the previous four seasons with Washington, though there was a very mild improvement in 2023-24, when he put up a 5.41 ERA and 77 ERA+, compared to a 6.05 ERA and 66 ERA+ from 2021-22. But he had taken the ball every time out — he was one of just three pitchers to start at least 200 games from 2018 through 2024 — and that reliability had value for the Rangers, given the state of their rotation. And Texas would be putting a quality defense behind Corbin, and he added a cutter in the second half of 2024 that, it was thought, could result in an improvement in 2025.
The Rangers wanted a pitcher who would make 30 starts and avoid disaster outings, and paid Patrick Corbin $1 million plus incentives with that in mind.
Viewed through that lens, the Patrick Corbin signing was more or less a success. Corbin made 30 starts and a relief appearance. He threw 155.1 innings. He generally avoided disaster outings, at least until August, where he had a stretch of four starts where he allowed 17 runs and made it into the fifth just once.
Corbin’s K rate of 19.8% was the highest it had been since 2020. His walk rate was more or less in line with what it has always been. His home run rate was the lowest it had been since 2019. And yes, the Shed and its pitcher-friendly ways in 2025 contributed significantly to that — Corbin allowed 15 home runs in 80 innings on the road, compared to 6 homers in 75 innings at home. His home/road ERA splits — 3.36 ERA at home, 5.38 ERA on the road — can largely be explained by that.
Was Patrick Corbin good in 2025? I guess it depends on your point of view and what you look at.
Corbin was definitely better than he was the previous four years. His 4.40 ERA and 4.75 xERA were both the best he had put up since 2019 — his last empirically good season, and a very good season 2019 was for Corbin — and his 4.25 FIP was only beat out since 2019 by his 4.17 FIP in 2020. His ERA+ of 83 and ERA- of 109 were his best marks since 2020.
Notably, Corbin stopped being rocked quite so bad when hitters made contact off of him. Corbin has always been susceptible to loud contact — even in his two really good seasons, 2018 and 2019, he allowed an xwOBA on contact of .386, almost 20 points higher than what the league allows as a whole on contact. That got much worse beginning in 2020, when he began a stretch of five straight seasons where he allowed at least a .400 xwOBA on contact, which is very bad.
That loud contact resulted in a divergence between his ERA and FIP. From 2021-24, Corbin had a 5.71 ERA but a 4.99 FIP. While the theory behind FIP being more reliable than ERA is that pitchers have minimal control over what happens to balls in play, and whether they are hits or outs, as we discussed with Caleb Boushley, that’s not necessarily the case. With Patrick Corbin, his xERA over that span ran from 5.47 to 6.29, which would seem to indicate that it wasn’t bad defense causing all those runs to score.
From 2020 through 2024, Corbin was generally in the bottom 15% in hard hit rate in baseball, which is what I think one would expect, given the discussion above. In 2024 he was in the 3rd percentile, with a hard hit rate of 46.7%. In 2025 that dropped to 40.4%, putting him right in the middle of the pack in hard hit rate. Corbin hadn’t allowed a slugging percentage of less than .481 in the previous four seasons. The combination of the lower hard hit rate, the Shed, and the strong Rangers defense resulted in Corbin allowing a slugging percentage of .430 in 2025.
So Patrick Corbin was better in 2025 than in prior years. That doesn’t mean he was good, though. fWAR would disagree — it reflects a 1.9 fWAR in 2025, as well as a 1.7 fWAR in 2024. B-R has Corbin at below replacement level each of those years. I think B-R is probably closer to correct.
With the 30 starts he logged in 2025, Corbin now has 233 starts since the start of the 2018 season, one behind Jose Berrios, five more than Luis Castillo, eight more than Aaron Nola, ten more than Charlie Morton. Kyle Gibson is still 12th on the list, with 201 starts over that stretch, despite making just four starts in 2025.
At this point, though, Corbin may be stuck on 233 for a while. He is currently unsigned, and with Opening Day just a few weeks away, it would seem like he may not have a job in 2026. On the other hand, the Rangers didn’t sign him in 2025 until March 18, so he could still get a call from a team with a hole in their rotation who needs someone who take the ball every fifth day and not blow up.
Previously:
