Rangers’ road back to World Series contention requires more than just spending money

Texas Rangers management had the highest of hopes for 2016 first-round pick Cole Ragans as he began to deliver on his promise in the Futures Game as a Hickory Crawdad in 2021 and then won Pacific Coast League honors with the Round Rock Express in 2022. Ragans made the American League All-Star team this season and will open the playoffs on the mound Tuesday afternoon.

For the Kansas City Royals.

When you win a World Series, you can justify a trade that bites you in the butt for years to come. That’s what GM Chris Young did when he sent Ragans to the Royals for Aroldis Chapman last summer, a move the team felt had to be made as its bullpen began to stagger. The Rangers got rings in 2023, even if Chapman became more of a pitcher to be avoided than a late-inning force. Once you grab that trophy, outsiders can never knock the moves that charted the course.

But as you look at what happened to the Rangers in 2024 and try to figure out what’s next, man, do the Rangers need to have a first-round pick come through the way Ragans has in Kansas City. And that’s what is most concerning about Texas’ washout of a season, one that ended quietly Sunday in Anaheim with a 78-84 record. There was nothing championship-like about this team or this season despite so many of the same hitters and pitchers being in place on manager Bruce Bochy’s lineup card each day.

It wasn’t record-setting like the tanking Florida Marlins, who won the World Series in 1997, then sold off everything but the clubhouse furniture to go 54-108 a year later. But the Rangers weren’t inspiring, either. In your dreams, you want to capture a championship and then compete for titles for years to come. Locally, you want to be the Cowboys of the ‘90s (for those with long memories) playing in four straight NFC championship games and winning three Super Bowls.

For now, the Rangers have embarked on a path more reminiscent of the Mavericks, who managed to bring home a title in 2011 and then went 10 seasons before winning another playoff series. Nothing suggests Texas has to be down for that long, but this team has a weird mix of young and old, and there’s certainly reason to think the roster in 2025 won’t look as strong on paper as the one that just produced a losing season.

If you assume Eovaldi becomes too expensive a free agent to re-sign, then Bochy takes a staff without an anchor into the 2025 season. How many innings are you counting on from Jacob deGrom? He gave the club 10 2/3 this year after his return from Tommy John surgery. He’s 37 next June. He was a risk worth taking for a team that can afford it, but I don’t think anyone is putting a “1″ next to deGrom’s name on their future Rangers rotation chart.

Texas fans finally saw a little from the long-awaited Vanderbilt duo of Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter. Saw too much of Leiter, in fact, whose 8.83 ERA in nine appearances doesn’t lead anyone to cast him in a major role in the near future. Rocker, coming back from surgery late in the season, had his moments — 3.86 ERA and 14 strikeouts in 11 2/3 innings — but that’s all these are. The Rangers don’t need moments, they need someone to beat the Astros, who, despite considerable roster changes and, yes, draft penalties, remain the class of the American League West. Since Texas won the division in 2016, the Astros have finished first every year but the 60-game 2020 season. They are forever the Rangers’ target.

2024 was a bad-luck season when it came to the Rangers’ supposed Rookie of the Year candidates. While Wyatt Langford heated up during the summer after a surprisingly power-less start and finished with 16 home runs and 74 RBIs, Evan Carter — such a force throughout the playoffs at this time last year — missed nearly the entire season with a stress reaction in his back. That’s a scary proposition for the future, no matter how hard he works at his return.

Corey Seager, the team’s best player who simply does not play enough (82 games missed the last two seasons), turns 31 next April. Adolis Garcia will be 32 and Marcus Semien 34. All three are still at least reaching back to touch their prime, but how long before the Rangers can develop enough pitching to support their bats in a meaningful way? You can’t always trade for pitching or pay free-agency prices, no matter how deep your pockets. The Yankees might have bought Gerrit Cole’s rights to top their rotation, but they developed Luis Gil and Clarke Schmidt.

That’s why there has to be something beyond Young shopping for help this offseason. The Rangers won a World Series with borrowed pitching, and no one is taking that away from them. But this game gets immeasurably simpler if you can bring just a small dose of your own player development to the pitcher’s mound. And that’s where Texas has struggled as long as the franchise has been here.

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