The Texas Rangers didn’t have many offensive highlights worth replaying from a .500 season. Which is why Jake Burger’s loudest swing of 2025 keeps coming up in winter conversations. On June 5 in Tampa, Burger launched a 442-foot homer to center field at George M. Steinbrenner Field—the longest home run hit by any Ranger all season, per MLB.com’s team-by-team roundup.
That distance matters because it captures the player Texas thought it was acquiring: a legitimate power bat capable of changing games with one mistake. It also matters because it arrived during a year when almost everything else about Burger’s debut in Arlington felt uneven, interrupted, and unfinished.
The Swing That Reminded Texas Why It Traded For Him
Burger’s 442-footer came with Statcast juice behind it, leaving the bat at 107.3 mph with a 24-degree launch angle. It wasn’t a cheap “wind-aided” shot or a quirky ballpark special. Even with the Rays temporarily playing at the Yankees’ spring training home, the homer’s appeal was simple: that ball would have left plenty of big-league parks.
It also created a weird footnote. MLB.com noted Burger’s blast was the “shortest of the longest” among the 30 clubs’ top shots. Which says more about the league’s power environment than it does about Burger. Still, for a Rangers lineup that finished with a .684 team OPS, moments like that were rare enough to feel like a promise.
The important context: Burger’s homer was the Rangers’ longest, not MLB’s longest. MLB’s season-wide leaderboard had multiple shots well beyond 442 feet. But for Texas, that one swing functioned like a receipt. The power is real. The question is everything around it.
What 2026 Has To Look Like For Burger To Matter
Burger finished 2025 slashing .236/.269/.419 with 16 home runs in 97 games. Texas even sent him to Triple-A Round Rock briefly to iron out his swing. Then the year got swallowed by health setbacks: an oblique strain, a quad injury, and the wrist sprain he played through before undergoing surgery after the season.
When Burger spoke with MLB.com’s Kennedi Landry late in October, he didn’t dress it up. He called the season “very inconsistent” and pointed first to availability. He believes that if he gets 500 to 600 at-bats, he’ll be where he needs to be. That’s the cleanest roadmap for 2026, because the Rangers don’t need Burger to be perfect. They need him to be present.
They also need him to be functional when he doesn’t feel locked in. Burger talked about avoiding the “mechanical rabbit hole,” leaning on a “B swing,” and finding ways to contribute instead of piling up quick strikeouts. That’s not empty self-help talk—it’s the difference between a low-OBP slugger being a lineup drag and being a livable middle-order piece.
There’s also a career trend Burger specifically flagged that Texas can’t ignore: he’s historically stronger in the second half (.272/.330/.527) than the first half (.232/.277/.433). If the Rangers are banking on a rebound, they need him to arrive in April looking like a finished product, not a hitter still searching for his timing.
Burger is entering arbitration and remains under team control for three more seasons, which gives Texas some runway. But 2026 still feels like the pivot year. If the wrist is truly fixed and the approach work sticks, the Rangers can reasonably expect more of the hitter they targeted in the trade: steady power that shows up more than once every few weeks. And if that happens, a 442-foot reminder from Tampa stops being a novelty and starts looking like a preview.
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