Rangers' Aggressive Approach to Free Agency, Trades a Lesson to Risk-Averse MLB
The Texas Rangers may not be World Series champions just yet, but that doesn't make it too early to say the rest of Major League Baseball should heed their lesson.
As it is, the Rangers are two wins from winning their first championship after coming back from a blowout loss in Game 2 to take Game 3 from the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday. The final was 3-1, but the game mostly didn't feel that close.
Which is remarkable, considering the Rangers had to deal with not one, but two major in-game departures.
First it was veteran ace Max Scherzer, who was forced out by back spasms after tossing three scoreless innings to start the game. Then it was Adolis García, AKA the hottest hitter in the galaxy, leaving in the eighth inning with tightness in his side.
Even if neither did in Game 3, there's a non-zero chance of these injuries causing trouble for the Rangers in what remains of the World Series. They're going to need what healthy stars they have to carry the load.
It's a good thing, then, that their maneuvering over the last two years has left them with plenty of those.
The Rangers, Game 3 and Return on Investment
The Rangers have a 2-1 lead in the World Series in large part thanks to their $325 million shortstop.
It may have been García's solo home run that won Game 1 for Texas, but it was Corey Seager's two-run homer in the ninth that made it possible. One could say it was arguably the bigger hit, but there's no "arguably" about it according to Championship Win Probability Added. It rates Seager's homer as the biggest hit of the entire 2023 season.
Then on Monday, the other half of the Rangers' $500 million double play combination got in on the fun.
That's Marcus Semien, who preceded another two-run homer by Seager with a run-scoring single that got the Rangers on the board in the third. The two of them later teamed up on a huge twin killing to get Aroldis Chapman out of a jam in the eighth:
Even if he was the only one who gave up a run, Chapman has at least one thing in common with two other pitchers that Rangers manager Bruce Bochy called on in Game 3: It was by way of bold roster moves that brought them to town.
Chapman and Scherzer, who have 15 All-Star selections between them, arrived in Texas via the trade market in June and July. Appearing in between those two and throwing three scoreless innings was Jon Gray, whose four-year, $56 million contract makes him Texas' second-highest paid pitcher.
In case anyone's not picking it up, the gist is that these Rangers are built upon hired guns. It's even quantifiable, as their 26-man roster is tied for first in free agents, sixth in trade acquisitions and just 28th and homegrown players.
And this is fine. Lest anyone doubt it, a quick stroll down Memory Lane to 2021 is in order.
Just 2 Years Ago, the Rangers Seemed Screwed for a Long Time
It's not just that the Rangers were bad in 2021, though they certainly were in losing 102 games. It's also that they seemed hopeless.
The '21 season always was going to be a rebuilding campaign, but the Rangers made so little progress throughout it that their future looked even dimmer at the end of the year. To wit, B/R's Joel Reuter put them at No. 27 in his Future Power Rankings for 2024.
The Rangers didn't just lack talent at the major league level, after all. They also had a middling farm system. The very existence of contending luminaries like the Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros and Atlanta suggested that was a major problem, because...
Well, because a modern MLB contender can only be built upon homegrown talent, with big-ticket signings and trade acquisitions coming later. This is the basic summary of the status quo, but all the available evidence left little doubt this was the case.
But rather than take the slow, steady and seemingly only path back to contention, the Rangers opted for the baseball equivalent of a Get Rich Quick scheme.
It involved spending a league-high $828 million in free agency across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 offseasons, with Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney joining Seager, Semien and Gray in drawing big bucks from Rangers ownership. And Scherzer and Chapman weren't the only goodies to arrive via trade, as that was also how Jordan Montgomery, Jonah Heim and Dane Dunning also became Rangers.
The Rangers aren't batting 1.000 on these moves. Manager Chris Woodward and president Jon Daniels didn't even keep their jobs as the 2022 season brought more disappointment in the form of a 94-loss season. Tommy John surgery will keep deGrom sidelined deep into the 2024 season.
But if nothing else, the Rangers always figured to succeed in boosting local interest in their product and getting fans to show up to fill Globe Life Field's still-new seats. That panned out this year, as Texas was the fifth-biggest gainer in average attendance.
Less certain was whether the Rangers' aggressive shopping would ever reverberate in the win column, and this is that point.
The Rangers May Not Stop Winning Any Time Soon
Even if the Rangers didn't technically end the 2023 season in first place in the American League West, they finished with exactly as many wins (90) as the division-winning Astros and indeed spent 136 more days in first place.
This would have been a successful season for Texas even if it hadn't found its footing in the playoffs. But that's happened, and in historic fashion no matter what comes next.
At the least, the Rangers will exit these playoffs with an all-time record nine wins on the road. They also hold another record with a home run in 14 straight games:
Even if the Rangers do fall short of closing out the Diamondbacks, they'll be able to look ahead with unequivocal optimism.
Save for Montgomery, Chapman and the generally unheralded Mitch Garver, all the core members of this year's team are due to return in 2024. And far from letting it fester while they were loading up on veterans, the Rangers have also built their farm system into the sixth-best in MLB.
They already know the crown jewel of said system can hack it in The Show. That's Evan Carter, who hit .306 in 23 games in September before getting even hotter to the tune of a .333 average in October.
It is, of course, possible that it will all come crashing down on the Rangers in future seasons. The San Diego Padres and New York Mets found success with similar all-in, overnight approaches to winning until, suddenly, they didn't. They're the cautionary tales here.
There are nonetheless teams who should view the Rangers as something more like an ideal example. The Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants should be intrigued by the notion that contenders don't need to be built on homegrown players first and high-priced veterans second. It can, in fact, be done the other way around.
Two more wins, and the Rangers will even have a championship trophy to prove just how well it can work.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.
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