April 14th, 2024 – Much hope is still in the air as the Texas Rangers are early in their title defense with the entire season still ahead of them.

The same day, Texas announced that Cody Bradford would be placed on the injured list with back soreness.

When the defending champs lose their number five starter usually it’s no big deal but Bradford wasn’t pitching like a fifth starter.

In three starts Bradford was 3-0 with an ERA of just 1.40 and improved mightily with each start all of which came at home.

Flash forward to Wednesday night, Bradford had his best start of the season throwing seven shutout innings in the Rangers’ 2-0 shutout win over the Toronto Blue Jays at Globe Life Field.

Bradford’s arguably best start of his entire career comes exactly a week after his worst career start in Arizona where he gave up 8 earned runs in 3.2 innings against the D-Backs.

“Baseball is a weird sport. Anytime you have a rough start, you’re going to be pitching again. This week, it was seven days later,” Bradford said.

“Throughout the week, you’ve just got to try and digest what happened. See where you can make adjustments, whether it was just the game plan went wrong, or just poor execution, or a little bit of both. Then you flush it.”

Not only is Bradford closing out the 2024 season strong, he looks to be closing in on a rotation spot in 2025.

It’s not quite clear what the Texas rotation will look like when camp breaks next season. Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney are set to be free agents and players like Dane Dunning and Jon Gray continue to bounce back and forth from the pen to the rotation.

At this point, all we know is that Jacob deGrom will be the ace of this rotation and will feature Tyler Mahle in the equation somewhere.

Other than that, things are pretty open, and Cody Bradford seems to be making a very early impression.

Don’t be surprised if 2025 rolls around and Cody Bradford is a key piece to the Texas Rangers’ attempt to make it back to the postseason.