ARLINGTON, Texas — Brandon Nimmo set season highs with 4 hits and 5 RBI, 3 of them driven in with two outs, and the Texas Rangers beat the Athletics 8-5 on Tuesday night at Globe Life Field.
Texas moved to 69-70 and pulled within one game of the first-place Houston Astros, who lost 5-1 to the Chicago White Sox. Batting fourth behind Corey Seager and Wyatt Langford, Nimmo scored Seager with a two-out double in the first inning and again with a two-run single in the fifth. Seager doubled twice and scored 3 times.
Piecing the swing back together has been a joint project with Rangers lead hitting coach Justin Viele, and Nimmo stayed at the ballpark after the team buses left during the road trip through Chicago and Milwaukee.
“That’s baseball,” Nimmo said in a postgame interview on Rangers Sports Network. “It was no secret that I was struggling and trying to find my way. And that’s baseball. You’re going to have ups and downs. And when nights like this come along, you just enjoy them. You got to get a little bit lucky and some hard work goes into it as well.”
“I was able to come through in some good situations for us and we needed all the runs that we could get,” Nimmo continued. “So you just enjoy nights like tonight. Don’t think too much about it. Just enjoy it and have a good night’s sleep tonight.”
Before homering and stealing a base in a loss last week, Nimmo had gone 2-for-35 across a nine-game stretch and had not hit a home run since Aug. 9. He entered Tuesday hitting .264/.329/.423 with 14 home runs, 53 RBI, 30 doubles, and 7 stolen bases in 132 games.
Brandon Nimmo Points to Cage Work With Justin Viele
Nimmo tried not to drive himself too crazy through the stretch.
“JV and I have been working, just trying to piece the puzzle back together,” Nimmo explained. “We knew it wasn’t too far gone and it wasn’t too broken. Trying to not think things through too much. Give ourselves a little bit of grace in the fact that it was August. And sometimes things just get a little bit tired. And we were trying not to do too much. But I was trying to stay afterwards and make sure that I was doing my due diligence in order to try and figure anything out that I could. And so just a lot of hard work from JV and I. And I think that sometimes when you do that, you get it to pay off, but you just never know when. So just trusting the process. And getting a little bit lucky helps, too.”
“But there’s definitely been a lot of hard work come into it and a lot of it from JV,” Nimmo added. “But I try to not drive myself too crazy. Everybody who’s played knows that it can get a little bit scary in your head at times. So I was trying to not go too far down the rabbit hole, but make sure that I was doing my due diligence to try and find what I could in order to work on.”
Viele was elevated to lead hitting coach for 2026 after working as a co-hitting instructor in 2025, one of six holdovers on the staff Rangers manager Skip Schumaker assembled last November. Alex Cintrón joined that staff as major league hitting coach after nine seasons in Houston.
Texas acquired Nimmo from the New York Mets on Nov. 24, 2025, in a one-for-one trade for Marcus Semien, ending a 10-year run in Queens that began when New York drafted him 13th overall in 2011. Nimmo hit 25 home runs and drove in 92 runs for the Mets last season. He is signed through 2030 on the eight-year, $162 million contract he agreed to before the 2023 season, and New York sent Texas $5 million as part of the deal.
Texas Rangers Score at Least 7 Runs in Three Straight Games
Nimmo said Logan O’Hoppe delivered a sacrifice fly after entering the game, and that Joc Pederson singled the other way off the bench to start the scoring.
“I think me being in the middle of the lineup and not just being an out with a helmet on, that helps,” Nimmo said. “But Corey’s been swinging the bat really, really well. Wyatt in between us, and then Freeman has been doing awesome. Burger loves playing the A’s, and so for me, I think it’s just been a whole team effort. Really good at-bats from the top down.”
“Getting the sac flies when we need them,” Nimmo noted. “O’Hoppe came right into the game, got a sac fly. Joc came right off the bench, getting a base hit the other way to get things started. So you’re just seeing guys that are super prepared and ready for their at-bats, and you’re seeing that come to a lot of success for us lately. So we’ll see how long we can ride it, and it’s a good time to get hot.”
Seager, Langford, and Nimmo combined for 8 of Texas’ 12 hits. The Rangers have scored at least 7 runs in three straight games after beating Milwaukee 7-4 on Sunday and the Athletics 8-1 on Monday.
Langford has 15 home runs and is slugging .448 in 86 games. Seager, who has made three trips to the injured list, is hitting .221/.323/.400 with 13 home runs and 34 RBI in 78 games. Jake Burger leads Texas with 78 RBI, and Pederson leads the team with 24 home runs. Cody Freeman is hitting .300 in 22 games. O’Hoppe, acquired from the Los Angeles Angels in late July along with reliever Chase Silseth, has appeared in 5 games since his recall from Triple-A Round Rock.
The Athletics fell to 53-86 and lost their fifth straight game. MacKenzie Gore allowed 1 run over 5 1/3 innings for the win, and Jacob Latz struck out both hitters he faced for his 28th save in 31 chances, one night after Texas had 4 relievers available for the series opener.
Texas goes for the sweep in Wednesday’s series finale at 1:35 p.m. CT on Rangers Sports Network. Left-hander Cody Bradford (0-3, 3.42 ERA) starts for the Rangers against Athletics left-hander Jacob Lopez (5-4, 4.62).
