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 infielder Cody Freeman.
Cody Freeman spent more time in the major leagues in 2025 than I think any of us expected to be the case. Or wanted to be the case, for that matter.
Freeman had a short stint in the bigs right after the All Star Break when Sam Haggerty went on the injured list, and then was sent back down after about a week when Haggerty returned. A little less than a month later, Freeman was called back up again in mid-August, once again taking the place of Sam Haggerty, and ultimately sticking around until the end of the season due to, you know, everyone being injured.
Freeman had the role of “young-ish guy in AAA who can play a lot of positions who can be pressed into duty in the big leagues if need be” in the second half of 2025. That role had previously been held by Jonathan Ornelas, who was designated for assignment in May and then sold to Atlanta, because that’s where all the players DFA’d by the Rangers end up.
Freeman’s time in the majors in 2025 was relatively uneventful. he slashed .228/.258/.342 and played a variety of positions, none of them particularly well according to the advanced defensive metrics.
Freeman wasn’t on the 40 man roster until he was summoned in July, and would have been a free agent at the end of the season had he not been added to the 40 man at some point before season’s end. He ended up with a -0.3 WAR of both the f and b varieties. He seemed to generate a degree of enthusiasm among Rangers fans that was disproportionate to his actual performance.
Really, though, what is more interesting to me than Freeman’s 2025 major league performance is Freeman’s 2025 minor league performance. He appeared to be a completely different hitter in AAA than he had been throughout his entire minor league career up to that point.
In 71 career games in low-A, Cody Freeman has slashed .247/.357/.383.
In 196 career games in high-A, Cody Freeman has slashed .235/.308/.384.
In 124 career games in AA, Cody Freeman has slashed .262/.318/.428.
In 97 career games in AAA, Cody Freeman has slashed .336/.382/.549.
That’s a big jump! And yes, the PCL is a great league for hitters, and yes, Freeman had been one of the Rangers’ infielder-to-catcher conversion projects and was catching at least some of the time until the 2024 season, and so not catching anymore probably helped him.
But even so…that’s a big, big jump in performance.
In looking at his historical minor league data, one can see how that change manifested. Here’s Freeman’s K rates in the minors by year:
2021 — 15.8%
2022 — 16.1%
2023 — 18.4%
2024 — 18.1%
2025 — 8.7%
That’s a huge drop in Freeman’s strikeout rate in 2025 compared to prior years. And its at AAA, where he is seeing more experienced pitchers, and where one would expect his K rate to go up rather than down.
One would expect that Freeman was swinging less frequently once he got to AAA, but that wasn’t the case. He swung at 44.4% of pitches with Round Rock in 2025, compared to 44.2% and 46.3% the previous two seasons.
The difference is in contact rate — after putting up contact rates a little above 80% in his career prior to 2025, with a high of 82.8% in AA in 2024, Freeman had an 89.9% contact rate at AAA in 2025.
To put these numbers in perspective, Steven Kwan had an 8.7% K rate in the majors in 2025, which was the fourth lowest K% among qualified hitters.
Nico Hoerner had an 89.9% contact rate in the majors in 2025. That was the fourth highest contact rate among qualified hitters.
Freeman was able to maintain an elite contact rate — 88.5% — in his time in the majors. His K rate jumped up to 15.7%, which is still well above average in terms of avoiding strikeouts.
The problem was, though, that Freeman didn’t walk in the majors — he had a well below average 4.1% walk rate — and he didn’t make quality contact. His hard hit rate and average exit velocity were both near the bottom of the league, and almost 60% of his balls in play were either ground balls or infield pop ups.
Freeman has two options remaining, and seems most likely to start the year back at AAA as infield depth. It will be interesting to see, should he be in Round Rock for the bulk of the year, whether he can replicate the offensive success he had there in 2025.
With the Rangers needing a righthanded bench bat, there’s been talk about Freeman possibly filling that role. However, Freeman has not performed especially well against lefties — in fact, he has reverse splits over the last three seasons. That makes it hard for him to have value in a big league bench role at this point.
2025 was a big step forward for Freeman. He had a successful year at AAA and got regular playing time in the bigs in the final six weeks of the season. Now we just need to see if he can build on that for 2026.
Previously: