Cole Winn’s surprisingly successful 2025 season
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 Cole Winn.
So is Cole Winn good now?
Winn, the last man standing (or, at least, still in the organization) from the disastrous 2018 draft, seemed to be destined for perpetual NRI-land not too long ago. A consensus top 100 guy heading into the 2022 season, he got his shit rocked in AAA in both 2022 and 2023, to the tune of a 6.83 ERA in 222 innings for the Express in those two campaigns. A more successful 2024 in AAA, in a relief role, led to opportunities in the majors, and after five scoreless appearances to start his major league career he allowed 15 runs in his final eight major league appearances before missing the final three and a half months of the season with “right shoulder discomfort,” which is never good.
So coming into the 2025 season, the answer to the “is Cole Winn good now?” question would have likely been, no, probably not.
But that was then, this is now, as the Monkees once sang, and as we used to see on the HBO listings constantly in the mid-80s (I guess someone there was a big Emilio Estevez fan). And as of now the answer is…probably different?
Winn was sent to AAA to start the year and put up 12 straight appearances without allowing any earned runs. That’ll get you noticed. It led to him being brought up to the majors in mid-May, and he continued that remarkable streak, putting up 11 straight appearances in the bigs before allowing a run in late June against the Mariners. Two days later he gave up a three run homer to Mitch Garver in the 12th inning, and even though he’d shut down the M’s in the 11th, he was sent back to AAA (though really, that was about fresh arms more than anything).
Continued good work in AAA got Winn back to the majors after the All Star Break, and he kept putting up zeroes, registering 11 more straight scoreless appearances before going K, walk, homer (to Bobby Witt Jr., so I mean, whaddya gonna do?), HBP in a mid-August game, after which he was put on the injured list with nerve irritation in his hand. Winn returned in mid-September, allowed two runs in eight appearances, then spent the final series on the injured list because of shoulder irritation again.
Winn ended the year with a 1.51 ERA in 41.2 innings over 33 appearances for the Rangers, and his 1.1 bWAR was second highest among relievers, behind Shawn Armstrong’s 1.5 bWAR, unless you consider Jacob Latz a reliever despite his eight starts, in which case Winn was third on the team. Either way, pretty good.
Ah, but now, as Paul Harvey says, you’re going to hear the rest of the story.
Winn didn’t miss a ton of bats in 2025. His K rate of 21.6% was a shade below league average. That’s fine, except he also walked 10.5% of batters he faced. That’s not good. That’s comfortably below average. In addition, his hard hit rate of 48.1% was way below average.
So not surprisingly, the non-ERA stats show reasons for concern. Winn had a 3.90 FIP, a 4.37 xFIP, and a 4.12 xERA. He did allow just 3 home runs, in large part because he generated lots of ground balls. But he also allowed just a .194 BABIP, with over 90% of the runners he allowed being stranded. Neither of those are encouraging from a sustainable-future-performance standpoint.
Winn, unusually for a middle reliever, threw five pitches regularly, six pitches in all (he threw his curve just six times, so we can ignore that). He threw three varieties of fastball — a four seamer, a sinker, and a cutter. None of them featured a lot in the way of movement. All three had a xwOBA over .300, and his sinker, which he threw 21% of the time, was especially lit up, as he allowed a .400 wOBA and .389 xwOBA off of it.
On the other hand, his slider and split-finger were both much better. The slider showed a ton of horizontal movement, and his split finger had a bunch of drop. The slider resulted in a .154 wOBA against (though a .276 xwOBA) with the splitter resulting in .206/.255. His splitter was his least used pitch, though he still threw it 12.1% of the time.
Simplistically speaking, we could say Winn should use the slider and splitter more and junk the sinker, though of course reality is much more complicated and we are talking about a rather small sample size of pitches.
So is Cole Winn good now? I don’t know. He’s obviously quite reliant on his defense as a groundball guy who doesn’t strike out a ton of guys. The 3.90 FIP and 4.12 xERA make him someone who is fine, I guess, in a low-leverage role in the pen, though obviously, if you think his true talent is more like the 1.51 ERA he put up (oh, and the 0.59 AAA ERA last year), then you can slide him much higher up in terms of the leverage role he fills.
Winn is out of options, so barring injury (and after two i.l. stints with shoulder issues and an i.l. stint with a nerve issue in the past two seasons, I’m starting to worry about whether there’s a TOS issue looming), he’ll be in the Ranger pen to start the season. There’s not a lot of blue chip, skins on the wall relievers in the mix, so he will get the opportunity to show what he can do.
It would be nice if he turned out to be a solid relief pitcher. I think the Rangers could use one of them.
Previously:
Category: General Sports
