Texas Rangers stand pat at MLB trade deadline, both by design and circumstance
The Texas Rangers are an improved club from a year ago.
That’s good, of course, but it also left the club, which is 10 wins better than 2021 but still 10 games under .500 and eight games back of a wild card berth, in something of a no man’s land when it came to deal-making.
The MLB trade deadline ended at 5 p.m. Tuesday with the Rangers standing pat, for the most part. Reliever Matt Bush was traded to the Brewers for infielder Mark Mathias and left-handed pitcher Antoine Kelly.
Rangers president Jon Daniels and general manager Chris Young were hoping the strides the club made this season would force them into a move. Instead, Daniels said, the Rangers’ rough stretch the past month altered the way they viewed the deadline.
The Rangers have lost 12 of their past 18 games and are 22-32 since the start of June. Without a massive turnaround, they’re headed for a franchise-worst sixth consecutive losing season.
“Our general intent was to help the club this year as well as build for the future,” Daniels said. “I think how we’ve played here the last couple of weeks and just the nature of the standings, our focus shifted slightly from that to more about players who would be here in 2023 and beyond.”
In short, the Rangers weren’t in the mood or need for rental players and were not happy with the offers from the suitors for both Martin Perez and Matt Moore.
“We just felt like we weren’t going to be at the whim of the market, we weren’t just going to take the best offer at the last minute, these buzzer-beater deals you see race across the screen,” Daniels said. “We were going to hold a pretty high bar, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is they’re important to this club, they’re important members of the team, they’re contributing on the field.”
The Rangers (46-56), who lost 102 games a year ago, wanted a player they could expect to be on their future roster, not a player with potential upside. To that point, Young said one of the ancillary benefits of retaining Perez and Moore is the inside track it gives Texas in negotiating long-term deals this winter.
“We have an exclusive opportunity to negotiate an extension should that be an avenue we can find some common ground on for both players,” he said.
Starting pitching, Daniels said, will be atop the team’s priority list during the offseason.
“We feel from a long-term standpoint we’re still in really good shape in terms of having the flexibility and the options financially to deal for players, to do what we want to do,” he said. “We would have loved to land one of the bigger players for our team and our fans but it wasn’t to be at this point.”
