The Rangers sent Corey Seager to see the club’s back specialist on May 17, 2026, and the team was still waiting on MRI results after the shortstop sat out all three games of a weekend series against the Astros.
Seager had not suited up since Wednesday, leaving Texas to play without one of its most important hitters at a point when the lineup was already searching for answers. Ezequiel Duran filled in at shortstop while Seager was out.
The timing matters because Seager had been on the field for 42 of the Rangers’ 43 games before the back issue appeared. This is not a role-player problem. Texas signed Seager to a 10-year, $325MM deal heading into the 2022 season, and he rewarded that bet with a second-place MVP finish in 2023 and World Series MVP honors that same year. He also played in 151 games in 2022, a workload that seemed to point to durability rather than fragility.
This season has looked very different. Seager was in a 0-for-27 slump and was slashing.179/.286/.353 across 182 plate appearances, with an 80 wRC+ that stood as the worst mark of his big-league career by a wide margin. Even with his recent slide, the Rangers had come to expect far more; he had posted a wRC+ of 138 or better in each of the previous three campaigns. His bat had not only cooled, it had collapsed at the exact moment the back problem surfaced.
That leaves Texas leaning on a thinner margin behind him. Duran has given the club a workable answer at shortstop, hitting.270/.339/.441 with three home runs and four steals, while piling up +5 Outs Above Average across 525 2/3 innings at the position. The defensive record is more complicated, though, because he also carried -2 Defensive Runs Saved at shortstop. He has stabilized the spot, but he is not a full replacement for a player of Seager’s caliber.
The depth chart only becomes more complicated from there. Sebastian Walcott is set to miss most of the year after undergoing an internal brace procedure on his elbow, and Cameron Cauley has been asked to cover multiple spots at Triple-A, including at least seven starts at shortstop at four different positions in all. Cauley is hitting to an 82 wRC+ with Round Rock. That leaves the Rangers without an obvious long-term fallback if Seager’s absence stretches beyond a short break.
The tension around Seager has always been the same one. He has been among the Rangers’ most productive players, but injuries have kept interrupting the rhythm, with thumb, sports hernia, hamstring and appendectomy-related absences in recent years. The club has lived with that tradeoff because the peak production has been worth it. The question now is whether this back issue is a brief pause or the kind of interruption that changes the shape of Texas’ season.
