Texas’ Trade Deadline Was About Managing Risk. Now We’ll Find Out the Reward.
The baseball season is a long one, but just past the middle of it each year is a signpost sure to get every team’s hardcore fans on the edge of their seats, no matter how the first two-thirds of the schedule has gone. Deadlines, by their nature, are adrenaline fuel. Baseball’s trade deadline is no different, but for some teams the work-up necessarily—if not uncomfortably—involves a two-headed approach.
That’s where the Rangers were this week. As much as we might have liked to see Chris Young emphatically move the needle, the job was instead, because of how the team has played for four months, to thread it.
Young wasn’t inactive. He made a trade on each of the final three days he could, moving starting pitcher Michael Lorenzen to the Royals and picking up reliever Andrew Chafin and catcher Carson Kelly in separate deals with the Tigers. The Lorenzen trade, which netted a 26-year-old bullpen prospect, could fairly be categorized, in the baseball
parlance, as the move of a seller, while adding Chafin and Kelly for three minor-league pitchers and a minor-league catcher were certainly buys. The Detroit trades clearly signal that Young is looking to win this year—Kelly will be a free agent this winter and Chafin might be—but the GM of the reigning world champs didn’t dip into the top tier of his farm system to make louder trades.
And that appears to have been by design. The Rangers’ trade activity was an exercise in risk management.
It’s fair to say that every unit of the team has gotten a boost from where it was as recently as a week ago:
The rotation: Lost Lorenzen, but Tyler Mahle should be back next week, and Jacob deGrom is on track to return in a month
The bullpen: Added a high-leverage weapon in Chafin, who joins the Kirby Yates-David Robertson stratosphere, allowing Bruce Bochy and Mike Maddux to rely less often on Jose Leclerc, Josh Sborz, and Jake Latz in high-leverage spots; the activations of Dane Dunning and Cody Bradford add length as well.
The lineup: Added Josh Jung
The bench: Should be better with Kelly as Jonah Heim’s backup given what Andrew Knizner had been giving the team, and with a hopefully refurbished Ezequiel Duran, who had been destroying Triple-A pitching
After the trading clock ran out on Tuesday, Young was asked by the local beats why he opted not to make any splashier moves. His response: “I think it speaks to our confidence level in this roster. We really believe in the group we have … I truly believe our best baseball is ahead of us these next two months.”
What he said next, however, jumped out. “But this division is very tough. Houston is very good. Seattle is very good. And we certainly have dug ourselves a little bit of a hole here. But nobody’s run away with the division.”
No, but after starting the season 12-24, the Astros’ 43-28 record is the best in baseball. And they added starter Yusei Kikuchi in a trade this week—which is less than what the Mariners added, headed up by outfielder Randy Arozarena, high-end reliever Yimi Garcia, and veteran bat Justin Turner. Texas is now 4.5 behind both, with nothing but above-.500 opponents on the schedule until the final five days of August.
Young didn’t say the quiet part out loud, but his activity on the trade market suggests one of two things, if not both: an unwillingness to increase the payroll any more and/or a concession that the Rangers’ 2024 hill—the top of which is in sight only because the AL West is baseball’s weakest division by far—is too steep to take out too big a prospect mortgage.
It’s anyone’s guess which of the two factors kept the Rangers from adding a bat, considering the club’s offense has been a bigger issue all year than its pitching and Evan Carter is reportedly done for the year. Giants left-handed-hitting outfielder Michael Conforto and Rays right-handed-hitting first baseman Yandy Diaz were rumored most frequently, but neither was moved.
The risk, however, in paying whatever the asking price of San Francisco or Tampa Bay or anyone else might have been is that bringing in one more bat—to reduce the roles of Leody Taveras or Travis Jankowski; to give Adolis Garcia, Nathaniel Lowe, or Josh Smith added breathers; to provide Jung occasional days off as he reacclimates to the grind—is that Young and his group may have concluded (probably too strong a word: let’s go with “evaluated”) that this may not be the year. There’s no shame in that. In fact, it’s probably good business. The Rangers looked lifeless in the two games in St. Louis since the deadline passed, and unfortunately they’ve had too many nights like that this season.
The level of prospects the Rangers traded to get Chafin and Kelly did not put a huge dent in the farm system. I had pitchers Chase Lee (No. 40), Joseph Montalvo (No. 51), and Tyler Owens (No. 57) plus catcher Liam Hicks (No. 48) all in the back half of my preseason Top 72 Prospects rankings, though to be fair Montalvo was about to move into the top 30. From that standpoint, taking a chance that Chafin (who has a $6.5 million club option for 2025 with a $500,000 buyout) and Kelly could help the run for a 2024 playoff spot carries little downside. Heck, when I update my rankings, I’m going to have reliever Walter Pennington, the pickup for Lorenzen, nearly as high as I would have had Montalvo.
There’s no Cole Ragans (the cost to acquire Aroldis Chapman last summer) in the bunch. And no Luisangel Acuna (the Max Scherzer cost) or Thomas Saggese or Tekoah Roby (the two prospects traded for Jordan Montgomery). That’s not coincidental. Young was far more willing to bet big on last year’s team. And, even without the benefit of hindsight, he should have been.
But think about this: imagine if the 2023 Rangers, after limping to the finish in September and losing the division lead and the wild card bye on the regular season’s final day, had gotten ousted from the playoffs by the 99-win Rays. Or gotten knocked out by the 101-win Orioles after eliminating Tampa Bay. We would be lamenting the Chapman deal forever at a level that no Rangers trade has ever been panned, especially after he left in free agency and Ragans proceeded this summer to make the first of what could be a series of All-Star teams.
Fortunately, the Chapman, Montgomery, and Scherzer trades paid off at the ultimate level, rewarding Young’s aggressive trade deadline maneuvering. The 2023 lineup—certainly prior to last summer’s deadline—did not underperform at anywhere near the level of this year’s.
Banking on internal improvements for both the offense and the pitching staff, along with making relatively low-cost moves to bring in help, feels like the right level of managing risk. Maybe this will be a typical Bochy arc, one that continues with his team winning the whole thing every other year. Moving frontline prospects now, when those players could help down the road—or be traded this winter or next summer, when the team is perhaps in a better position to win—might not have made 2024 enough of a success to justify weakening things for 2025 and beyond. I’d have been a little nervous if the Rangers had moved someone like Alejandro Rosario, Kumar Rocker, Braylin Morel, or Yolfran Castillo this week.
“We just looked at our roster every way we could over the last couple of weeks since the draft,” Young told the media on Tuesday. “And there just are not that many ways we felt to improve what is a very good roster. Our expectation is that it’s going to come together here these last two months of the season, and these guys are going to smell it, they’re going to know what’s at stake. They’re championship-caliber players. And they’re going to live up to the expectation. That’s my belief in this group.”
I trust Young believes every word of that. But underneath the comments may have been an internal determination, unspoken, that the long game is what matters most.
If Texas somehow turns things around and earns its way back into the playoffs, there’s a very good chance Chafin will be a big part of the reason why, not to mention Jung and Mahle and deGrom. But if the season ends with Game 162, it’s OK: Young probably didn’t part with anything this week that will come back to haunt the Rangers. If it was his evaluation that winning in 2025 is a better bet than winning in 2024, then taking steps now to improve solely on the edges was probably the perfect play.
