Spitballing the Rangers' 2025, 2026, & 2027 rosters: Part 1 of a four-part series.

But first, to set the table for 2025, we get things rolling with some July 2024 trades.

When I decided to undertake the effort to project how the Rangers roster might metamorphose between now and the start of the 2025 season — and again going into 2026, and into 2027 — I looked back at a similar exercise I went through back in 2019 for The Athletic, just to see how I structured the story. The first thing I saw was . . . maybe the strangest story lede I’ve ever written (at least unironically):

The fool’s errand is typically the stuff of pranks, the wild-goose chase foisted on the gullible, the rite-of-passage snipe hunt. I’m not sure what it says when the exploitee is the exploiter himself (cf. “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client”), and I’m the least qualified, in the instant case, to judge how silly it would be to come up snipeless . . . and yet choose to have another go at it. When I took it upon myself a year ago to spitball two-and-a-half years of trades and free agent signings and come up with a 2021 Rangers roster, I mean, yeah, it was fun, but I really had no shot. Imagine predicting in the middle of Season 5 who the players would be going into Game of Thrones Season 8. (I’m only on Season 4 now, so this is where the analogy ends.)

Re-reading that wore me out, and I’m always looking out for you guys. So, this time, let me make this as plain as I can.

I’m about to scare up some trades.

Sign some free agents.

Make adjustments to the roster of the current World Champions, one that remains largely intact (at least as far as the payroll is concerned; the active 26 is another matter), to try — in arguably realistic ways — to maximize the chance that this team can win again, if not this year then in one or more of the next three.

But that doesn’t mean we’re writing 2024 off. The team is testing out collective resolve lately, but it’s a long season. The Rangers’ window is tied largely to the next few years, that is, before Corey Seager and Marcus Semien and Jacob deGrom and Adolis Garcia are either gone or drifting past peak performance. I expect Chris Young to remain aggressive this July, to the extent that ownership greenlights it — as long as the team doesn’t play itself out of the appropriate range that warrants that sort of approach over the next two months.

So as we look toward the construction of the 2025 edition of the Texas Rangers, which I’ll engage full-force in Part 2, we’re going to use Part 1 to get things started early, as I expect Young’s DNA will motivate him to do. I’m cooking up three summer trades — at least two of which double as an opportunistic head start on 2025.