The Rangers have already added four relievers this offseason: Robert Garcia, Jacob Webb, Shawn Armstrong, and Hoby Milner. However, they’re still lacking a proven high-leverage arm; Webb, Garcia, Armstrong, and Milner have a total of 15 career saves among them. With that in mind, president of baseball operations Chris Young still has work left to do. He acknowledged as much, telling Evan Grant of The Dallas Morning News, “We’re going to need to continue to pursue leverage arms.”
To that point, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal recently described re-signing Kirby Yates as “a priority” for Texas. Similarly, Grant wrote that they would “absolutely love” to re-sign their All-Star closer. Yates was phenomenal for the Rangers in 2024. The veteran right-hander pitched to a 1.17 ERA and 2.85 SIERA in 61 appearances, saving 33 games in 34 chances. He was just as successful at inducing whiffs as he was at limiting hard contact, thanks to a highly effective four-seam and splitter pairing. Despite his 37 years of age, he was one of the most dominant closers in the game, vastly outperforming the one-year, $4.5MM contract he signed ahead of the season.
It’s easy to see why the Rangers would love to reunite with Yates, even though he’ll come with a much higher price tag this time. MLBTR put Yates at no. 38 on our Top 50 Free Agents list, predicting he’d sign a one-year, $14MM deal. Young might have to get creative to find room in the budget for a contract like that – Texas is reportedly trying to drop beneath the luxury tax threshold in 2025 – but his recent decision to trade Nathaniel Lowe shows he’s not afraid to do just that. RosterResource currently puts the Rangers’ luxury tax payroll at approximately $229MM, which is $12MM below the first tier of the tax. Signing Yates could push them over, but not so far over that Young wouldn’t be able to find a way to bring them back down.
The Rangers bullpen finished 26th in ERA and 23rd in SIERA in 2024. To make matters worse, they lost their four most experienced, high-leverage arms to free agency: Yates, David Robertson, Andrew Chafin, and José Leclerc. Arms like Webb, Garcia, Armstrong, and Milner will be much-needed reinforcements, but none can quite replace what the team lost at the back end of the ’pen. Thus, bringing back Yates makes perfect sense. A.J. Minter, another veteran arm who has been linked to the Rangers, could potentially fill that hole instead.
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