Danger Texas Ranger
Everything Is Not Always Bigger in Texas
Of all the MLB storylines that haven’t received the amount of coverage that they deserve, there is none more deserving of our eyeballs than the high-risk game of free agency poker that the Texas Rangers are currently engaged in. It’s so big that it puts the movie ‘Rounders’ to shame.
Over the last two offseasons, the team have signed the following players:
2022
SS Corey Seager (10-yrs, $325 million)
INF Marcus Semien (7-yrs, $175 million)
SP Jon Gray (4-yrs, $56 million)
2023
SP Jacob deGrom (5-yrs, $185 million)
The early returns in 2022? Not great. Texas finished with a record of 68-94 and fired manager Chris Woodward 114 games into the season. Semien posted a batting average of .248 and an OPS of .733. While Seager was an All-Star, he finished with an uninspiring stat line of .245/.317/.455 and a .772 OPS. Gray was effectively average, with an ERA of 3.96 and a 5.54 FIP. For spending over half a billion dollars in contracts for three players, the ROI was atrocious.
So, what did the front office in Texas, led by EVP, GM, and living ventriloquist dummy Chris Young, do? They doubled down and raised the stakes! God dammit this is Texas; they go big or go home down there!
In the offseason leading up to the team’s 2023 campaign, Texas signed Jacob deGrom to a fat whopper of a contract to be the centerpiece of their starting rotation. For those keeping score at home, that’s approximately $741 million in contracts that the Rangers shelled out for only four players. That’s more than double the 2023 payroll of the New York Mets (~ $345.8 million). It’s the type of spending that makes Steve Cohen jealous. The team also made a managerial change, signing future Hall of Famer, and three-time World Champion, Bruce Bochy to a 3-year contract and bringing him out of retirement.
Now, has the 2023 season bore any fruit for this high-priced Texas Rangers roster? Actually, yes. As of this writing, they’re 52-39, and sitting atop the AL West. For deGrom, it has been a mixed bag. While his 2.67 ERA is respectable, he got pulled from his fourth start of the year on April 17th due to injury concerns (a game in which he was no-hitting the lowly Kansas City Royals through four innings of work). He was also the Ranger’s starting pitcher on Opening Day against the NL Champion Philadelphia Phillies. But he only lasted 3.2 innings that day, giving up five runs. As of now, deGrom is out for the year with a UCL injury, which requires season-ending Tommy John surgery, and he won’t be back until 2024. The $500 million left-side-of-the-infield duo in Semien and Seager have been productive at the plate, and Jon Gray has one of the better starter ERA’s on the team. It’s only a small sample size, but if you put any stock in the output of these four players, combined with an early first place lead in the division, it is progress.
Do I personally expect it to hold up moving forward? No, absolutely not. The reason being is that everything has to regress back to the mean. And to put a historical context to this, how many times have we seen teams pay through the nose in hopes of a championship run and come up empty handed? How many teams sign expensive contracts that turn out being massive duds? I understand that the Texas Rangers are in first place in their division. But this type of success will be hard to sustain when you’re in an AL West with the defending World Series champions in the Astros, a team in the Angels that have the two best players in the game today, and a young, upstart Mariners squad.
It’s all rainbows, unicorns, and ice cream sundaes for the Rangers right now, but if they’re not careful, it could be ‘danger time’ in Arlington, TX.
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