Carter, Langford duo makes Texas a unique defending champ

When the 2024 Texas Rangers take the field to defend their World Series title, you’ll be unsurprised to see them return many of the same veteran stars who helped bring the championship home in the first place – names like Marcus Semien, Jonah Heim, Nathan Eovaldi and Adolis García.

But it’s not the same roster, either, and not just because of the few players who have left. Instead, Texas might be doing something that just about no defending champion in baseball history has ever tried.

If you’ve been paying attention to Spring Training in Arizona this year, you know that outfield prospect Wyatt Langford has been one of the standouts of the spring. Langford, 22, was the fourth overall pick in the 2023 Draft just nine months ago, and he’s the No. 6 overall prospect in the Majors, per MLB Pipeline. Through 12 spring games, he’s hitting .375 with a 1.243 OPS as he makes his case for the Opening Day roster.

Meanwhile, fellow outfielder Evan Carter made his debut last September and was a big part of the team’s run to the ring. But he played so briefly in the regular season that he retains his rookie and prospect eligibility for 2024 – he’s ranked one spot ahead of Langford, at No. 5 overall – and he’s actually 10 months younger than Langford is.

We know with almost complete certainty that Carter, who is also having an excellent spring, will be the regular left fielder in Texas in 2024. We don’t know for sure that Langford will be there on Opening Day – injuries to infielders Corey Seager, Nathaniel Lowe and Josh Jung may shake up the roster at the start – but the fact that Langford wasn’t included with the other Texas prospects for Spring Breakout is telling. Whether or not he’s there on March 28, he’s going to get a ton of Major League time this season.

Carter is projected for 575 plate appearances, per FanGraphs. Langford is projected for 588, split between designated hitter and the outfield corners.

That means the defending champions are going into the season with a pair of 22-and-under rookie position players in their lineup and projected to play major roles. If you’re wondering if that's unusual, it is. With one extremely notable caveat, it’s never happened – at least not like this.

In fact, let’s not even require 500 plate appearances. Let’s bump it down to a mere 350, a number that both Carter and Langford seem all but assured of reaching, barring major injuries.

Only 42 teams in history have given a pair of 22-and-under rookies at least 350 plate appearances in a season. So forget the “defending champion” aspect of it for a moment, because even without that, it’s a rarity. When both Arizona (Alek Thomas, Geraldo Perdomo) and Detroit (Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene) did it in 2022, it was the first time it had happened in more than a decade, since the 2011 Royals of Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas.

Of course, most of the teams that give that much run to rookies do so for a reason: They had plenty of playing time available due to a lack of past success. The ’21 Tigers lost 85 games, and the ’21 D-backs 110. Those 2011 Royals? Well, the 2010 Royals had just lost 95 games. On the whole, those 42 teams had a cumulative winning percentage of .444 in the prior season, or approximately 90 losses over 162 games.

In fact, if you look at those 42 teams, you can basically split them into a few groups:

• Really bad (.450 win% or less): 25 teams
• Below .500 (.450-.499 win%): 8 teams
• Winning, but not winners: 8 teams
• Defending World Series champions: 1 team

So approximately 60% of the teams that gave two rookies this young this much playing time were coming off truly dreadful seasons, and more than 75% of those teams were coming off losing seasons.

Of course, on the rare occasions we’ve seen this happen, it often heralded the start of a new age. The 1977 Tigers, for example, lost 88 games, then added a pair of rookie infielders the next season. Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell would spend the next 19 seasons together. Hosmer and Moustakas helped the Royals win a ring in their fifth season together. The 1988 Mariners lost 93 games, then added Ken Griffey Jr. and Omar Vizquel in 1989. It’s not always a bad thing.

But it’s not this, either, and that gets us back to our enormous caveat. The 2024 Rangers won’t be the first defending champions to do this, yet it’s hard to compare them to the only previous time this happened.

That’s because in 1998, the defending champion Marlins gave regular time to rookies Mark Kotsay and Derrek Lee, each of whom went on to have long, successful careers in the Majors. By strict definition, they were coming off a World Series ring, just like the 2024 Rangers will be. But while the 2024 Rangers look a lot like the 2023 Rangers, the 1998 Marlins looked almost nothing like the 1997 Marlins, since that team had gone through an infamous fire sale in the offseason that reshaped the entire franchise.

The 2024 Rangers have to overcome decades of evidence that it’s almost impossible for a team to win consecutive World Series titles. They’re already facing numerous injuries in the infield and the rotation. The odds, clearly, are stacked against them. But most defending champions don’t have a pair of rookies this talented, either. No traditional defending champs ever really have.