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 relief pitcher Marc Church.
Last offseason, Chris Young went about building the 2025 Texas Rangers bullpen in an unconventional fashion. He largely eschewed the popular picks, choosing instead to put together the pen out of spare parts and various items people had left on the curb
on heavy trash day. He was channeling Roc from the eponymous early-90s sitcom.
There were a few reasons for that strategy, of course. One of the rationales, though, was that the Rangers had a couple of guys in the upper minors who fit the profile of the high-octane late inning reliever that everyone covets. You get a few guys with funky arm angles and 92 mph four seamers with a ton of rise off the “free to a good home” pile and combine them with your homegrown young flamethrowers and you have a potential recipe for success.
The 2025 Rangers bullpen did have a surprisingly amount of success, but the homegrown young flamethrowers who were expected to step up contributed minimally to that.
One of them, Emiliano Teodo, came out of the gate at AAA with three shutout appearances covering five innings, with 7 Ks against just 1 walk, before giving up 10 runs in his next three outings, going on the injured list, struggling to throw strikes in his return to Round Rock in mid-May, making a half-dozen appearances before disappearing for two months after giving up six runs in less than an inning of work on June 1, and then spending most of the remainder of the year in AA.
The other, Marc Church, made the Opening Day roster, made five appearances where he struggled with his command, was sent down, was put on the injured list with an oblique injury, returned to Round Rock in late May, made six appearances where he walked 9 of 32 batters faced, then went back on the injured list in late June, this time with elbow inflammation. Church only pitched once more the rest of the season, a one inning appearance for Hub City in early September, where he allowed two runs in an inning, but didn’t walk anyone, which is a plus.
And so this offseason, an offseason where it was hoped that the work to be done on the bullpen would be lessened by the presence of Church and Teodo, who in an ideal world would have done enough in 2025 to be penciled into the 2026 Opening Day bullpen, is featuring Chris Young buying sticks of Wrigley’s to chew thoroughly so he can then use it to patch together a bullpen out of things he is able to get at Chuck E. Cheese with just 23 tickets and a frequent visitor card.
Church’s stuff is legit, and if he can stay healthy and show a modicum of command he would be a viable part of a major league pen. That whole command issue has felled legions of hard-throwing righthanded relievers of his ilk, however, and missing a bunch of 2025 due to injury — after missing four months in 2024 due to shoulder issues — means that the “stay healthy” part may be more aspirational than realistic.
Previously:
