Texas Rangers: Why is all so quiet on the trade front?
By Kenneth Nash
We’re less than 24 hours away from the deadline, yet the Texas Rangers have yet to be linked to any concrete, advanced rumors. What gives?
Flashback to just a week ago and it seemed that the Texas Rangers were gearing up to pull in a king’s ransom for their top trade assets. Comparisons to past deals had Texas fans looking forward to netting new top prospects and rebuilding the minor league system. However, fast forward back to today and we’re under 24 hours until the deadline and not only have we not seen deals, we haven’t even really seen a lot of concrete rumors.
Mike Minor, Hunter Pence, Chris Martin all looked likely to get dealt before tomorrow’s 3 p.m. deadline. Danny Santana, Jose Leclerc and even Nomar Mazara were thought to possibly join them. However, besides a couple of tweets from national writers denoting interest from various clubs in various Rangers, we haven’t seen anything that referenced advanced talks.
All that’s to say, what’s going on? It’s not just the Rangers that aren’t seeing a lot of action, but the league as a whole. First, this is the first season we’re seeing a single, hard-set deadline. In the past, July 31st was the trade deadline but teams could still make deals during the August waiver period. That period is no more however meaning all acquisitions by contenders have to be made by tomorrow. That’s thrown a big curveball to clubs who always knew that they had another month past the 31st to continue forming a roster ready for a postseason run. Now, your moves are your moves and there isn’t much opportunity for further adjustments.
Additionally, it seems that the buyers and sellers of the market highly disagree on price. Buyers and sellers are likely to disagree as is the nature of making deals, but the disparity this year seems to be on another level. This is particularly evident in the starting pitching market. Many local writers, myself included, thought we’d be seeing Mike Minor net at least one, possibly two Top 100 prospects. We thought the Rangers would be netting a number of highly ranked prospects as we’d seen in years past. However, with the Marcus Stroman to the New York Mets trade, we saw that perhaps the market wasn’t being as generous as we thought. Stroman likely had a similar value to Minor this season and netted a couple of the Mets Top 10 prospects, both pitchers, but neither cracking the MLB Top 100 list. That set the market a lot lower than we initially anticipated and has no doubt factored into the backed up hot stove.
It remains to be seen whether any big time deals will get done before the deadline involving the Rangers. The bright spot is that Texas isn’t forced to sell this season but we should still see some movement.