Building the 2025 Rangers roster: The bullpen.
Our work here is just about done. The Rangers? Same.
I’m in a fantasy baseball league with 26-man rosters, 20-man farm systems, and a keeper format. It’s the only way to keep me interested. As a 1970s kid raised on Cowboys football, I was spellbound when the team brought in Preston Pearson and John Dutton — the very rare player in those days whose football card I had from another team. I sent letters to Tom Grieve in the ’80s and Doug Melvin in the ’90s suggesting minor-league free agents they ought to consider bringing to the Rangers. (True, if embarrassing, story.)
All of that is to say I’ve always been drawn to the idea of building a team with both the short and long term in mind. It’s why I started writing as a hobby more than 25 years ago, and why I’ve stayed with it. I’m obsessed with the build.
It’s why I’m trying out a new feature this offseason, something that The Athletic would never have approved and that this new Substack format is perfect for. As I outlined in September:
I’m going to dedicate a story to every position on the field, with a picture-in-picture structure to it. Where does Texas go in center field in 2025? At the same time, what is the long-term vision for the position? Is there a path for a player to step in internally? Or is an external upgrade more likely — and maybe even as soon as this winter?
And so on. We’ll look at the landscape for every position, and for the rotation, and for the bullpen. We’ll consider the possibility that the Rangers run it back with the same player in 2025 as well as the idea that there could be a change — and in that scenario, we will look at options from the farm system, discuss specific free agents who could fit, and spitball some trade scenarios.
Chris Young said in a radio interview late in August: “This season has been embarrassing for us. This is not what we expected. And I expect our players to be equally as embarrassed as I am how we’ve played.” There are going to be financial guardrails on what Young is able to do this winter, but he is not going to stand pat. These aren’t the Jerry Jones Cowboys.
With each positional look, we’ll examine three paths the Rangers could go down as they look to construct the roster they’ll take to camp: running it back with the status quo, promoting from within, and adding players through free agency or trades.
We now come to the end of this three-month, 11-part series, aiming to step into the shoes of Chris Young, Ross Fenstermaker, and their group and work through the process of retooling the Rangers’ roster in the pursuit of another championship.
Like the Rangers did with Kyle Higashioka, we started this offseason series at catcher — and, similarly, we’ll be in lockstep with the team at the end, too, wrapping things up in the bullpen.
Probably. Theoretically, they could be done. Gone from the relief corps that Texas ended the season with are Kirby Yates, David Robertson, Jose Leclerc, Andrew Chafin, and Jose Urena; added since have been Robert Garcia, Jacob Webb, Shawn Armstrong, Hoby Milner, and prospect Luis Curvelo.
Though the Rangers’ adds and subtracts cancel each other out mathematically, there is a glaring difference between the two groups. The first includes four pitchers who have had regular stretches closing games out in the last two seasons. The second contains zero. Texas returns a total of two saves from the last two seasons: a one-batter finish by Grant Anderson against the White Sox late last August (though he was designated for assignment Monday and could move on), plus a 2 ⅓-inning effort from Josh Sborz about 10 months earlier that you might recall.
And Sborz will be out until midseason, recovering from shoulder surgery.
The interesting part there is that, if — no: when — Texas does add one or maybe two high-leverage pitchers before spring training (with reunions possibly on the table, as none of the five above deletions are actually departures; all remain unemployed), it pushes pitchers like Walter Pennington, Jacob Latz, Marc Church, Gerson Garabito, Cole Winn, Matt Festa, and Daniel Robert a bit further down the depth chart (if not off the 40-man roster in certain cases), and that’s good. It also presumably reduces the temptation to work Jack Leiter in relief, unless that’s the vacuum evaluation, and instead he can continue to make starts in Round Rock.
One last time, let’s get to it. This series has been a blast to map out and write; I can’t imagine how much fun the real thing has been to execute. And thankfully, the Rangers obliged my own ability to execute by leaving work to be done in the bullpen. It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun to just recap things in this final installment. This project is called “Building,” after all. Not “Summarizing.”
On to the bullpen, and the different paths the Rangers could go down to complete it — and the roster — in time for camp.