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Texas Rangers 2024-2025 offseason


ztejas

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  • 3 weeks later...

Todd Zeile is a name I have not thought of in a minute. 

 

And reminder for this tomorrow (Monday) night at 11:00. 

On 12/2/2024 at 7:24 PM, shadow_operative2.0 said:

Also, our official WS video finally drops a week from today on Prime for $13. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0D7N6YZBQ/

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12 minutes ago, shadow_operative2.0 said:

Burger is really bad defensively at 3B, Josh needs to bow up & play 140. 

So sad he bowed down last year and got crushed with 98 at his face which led to him breaking his wrist in 3 places.  Such a little bowed down bitch, eh?    

 

C'mon man  

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ESPN+

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Rangers grade: B+

The Rangers filled an every-day lineup slot with a player who has a projectable track record and four controllable seasons left. They dealt three expendable prospects, and while doing so always carries the possibility of looking bad years down the line, Burger offers a lot more certainty than any of them, or even all of them together.

Burger is a masher who can be counted on for at least 25 to 30 homers if he plays every day and is likely to push into the mid-30s at some point in his career. He rates in the 84th percentile or better at Statcast in measures such as exit velocity, barrel rate and bat speed. In other words, he hits the ball hard.

That said, Burger is a pretty undisciplined hitter with poor chase rates and a walk rate that should be better than it's been. That's both a worry and an opportunity for the Rangers, because such players always have a little untapped upside. Even better: With just over two years of service time on his ticker, Burger has one more pre-arbitration season and his entire arbitration window ahead of him.

Barring further trades, such as one involving Nathaniel Lowe, who is nearing the end of his arbitration window, Texas should field a more or less set lineup when healthy. Burger slots in as an everyday DH and his power stick will carry more value in that role, as his overall WAR won't be dragged down by his poor defensive metrics. (And that's the case even though moving to full-time DH is a hit on positional value.)

Burger doesn't have anything in the way of a platoon differential, but neither does Lowe, so any notions of a first base platoon probably should be forgotten. But Burger can fill in for Lowe when needed and offers some additional depth at third, where Josh Jung has dealt with so many injuries.

The Rangers' offense is one of the most likely bounce-back stories as we look ahead to 2025, and that group was only an every-day DH away from being a complete set. Now, Texas is complete, especially because the bench looks strong as well, and the Rangers can turn their full attention to solidifying their pitching staff. 

My favorite part of the deal is Morris doesn’t like it. 

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The Sam era is likely over.

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The Texas Rangers announced today that they have signed veteran righthanded relief pitcher Shawn Armstrong. To make room for Armstrong on the 40 man roster, the Rangers have designated catcher Sam Huff for assignment.

Armstrong, 34, was signed by Cleveland as an 18th round pick out of East Carolina in 2011. He has appeared in 299 major league games, almost all of them as a reliever, and has a career 4.15 ERA and 3.89 FIP. He started the 2024 season with the Tampa Bay Rays, was traded to the Cardinals at the trade deadline for Dylan Carlson, claimed on waivers by the Chicago Cubs in late August, then released by the Cubs in late September.

Between the three teams he had a 4.86 ERA in 66.2 innings over 57 appearances, with a 3.57 FIP and 5.10 xERA. He made $2.05 million with the Rays last year, and I imagine his deal with the Rangers is somewhere around that amount. 

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The deals: Texas Rangers trade 1B Nathaniel Lowe to Washington Nationals for LHP Robert Garcia; signed free agent DH Joc Pederson to two-year, $37 million contract. Pederson can opt out after the first season.

Rangers grade: A-

Sometimes the best moves are the ones you didn't even think a team necessarily needed to make. 

It seemed like the Rangers' positional player group was more or less set after they added slugger Jake Burger and catcher Kyle Higashioka early in the offseason. When Texas acquired Burger from Miami, rumors were already out there that Lowe was a trade candidate but the roster looked pretty good as it was, and I'm not a fan of contending teams making cost-cutting moves unless it's part of a series of maneuvers that improves the near-term baseline.

That's how it turned out for Texas in this case. The news that Lowe was being shipped to the Nationals for Garcia came out Sunday evening. In a vacuum, I didn't love the move because it violated that aforementioned precept but I didn't hate it that much because Garcia is a legitimate candidate to assume a high-leverage role, making this more than a straight salary dump.

It also seemed likely that the deal was a precursor to something else and that turned out to be the late-night/pre-dawn news that Pederson had agreed to a pact with the Rangers. Now it all makes sense, and the Rangers are in a better place. In an AL West that is there for the taking, a modest upgrade matters a lot and taken as a whole, these moves might prove to be more than a marginal upgrade.

Pederson is more consistently productive than Lowe and his swing is better suited to Globe Life Field, which at this point has been around long enough that we have fairly informative park factors for the venue. According to Statcast, the park plays as the seventh-most power-friendly park for lefty swingers. While both hitters swing from that side, Pederson is much more of a fly ball, pull-heavy slugger than Lowe, who is below league average in both attributes, and Pederson simply has more power. That's reflected in markedly better scores in both average exit velocity and barrel rate.

The Pederson/Lowe swap does shuffle the roster. Lowe is a very good all-around player, a Gold Glove winner for his work at first base in 2023 who shows little in the way of a platoon differential. Pederson, on the other hand, remains subpar against same-side pitching and while he has played plenty of outfield in his career, he didn't don a glove at all during the 2024 season for Arizona. His sprint speed has declined annually and now ranks in the bottom quartile of the majors. The Rangers, if healthy, probably won't need him to play a position often, if at all, but it's still true that he's a straight-DH who isn't great against lefty pitchers.

The roster is better anyway. Pederson improves the power profile of a lineup primed for a bounce-back as a group, especially when considered in combination with the Burger pickup. Burger will do the heavy lifting at first base. The Rangers can make a lot of lineup combinations work because of the dynamic, one-two bench duo of righty-swinging Ezequiel Duran and lefty-swinging Josh Smith, so Bruce Bochy should be able to find a late-inning glove to spell Burger at first if needed.

Meanwhile, Lowe became the cost of clearing the payroll space to accommodate Pederson. That changes the clubhouse dynamic, always worth considering when thinking of a recent World Series winner, but in this case it's not necessarily a bad thing. Lowe was a steady, quiet presence in what sometimes feels like a staid Rangers clubhouse, and Pederson is, well, he's Joc Pederson.

And don't sleep on Garcia. A late bloomer, Garcia's 4.22 ERA for Washington doesn't make much sense when you look under the hood. Garcia struck out 75, walked just 16 and allowed four homers over 59⅔ innings, peripherals which translate to a 2.38 FIP. He was undermined by a .331 BABIP, which (along with six unearned runs allowed) suggests the Nats' defense did him no favors. Indeed, his tracking metrics are promising in terms of hard-hit rate, barrel rate, chase rate and strikeout rate.

Garcia misses bats and gets soft contact. He gets elite results on a changeup that he throws to righties, cutting down on any platoon complications. (And it was only righty hitters; according to Statcast, Garcia threw 295 changeups to righties in 2024 and zero to lefties). The Rangers appear to have landed Garica at just the right time and even if he goes south, he has just over one year of service time and will have the pre-arbitration salary that goes with it.

Even with these moves, the Rangers still need to add depth to the pitching staff, but they have more room under the tax line with which to maneuver. As it is, this roster is coming along very nicely. 

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