Rangers Roundup: Texas Adds Danny Jansen, Alexis Díaz, Tyler Alexander

The Rangers had just 35 players on their 40-man roster at the end of the Winter Meetings, and they did their best to rectify the situation on Friday, signing catcher Danny Jansen to a two-year deal and relievers Alexis Díaz and Tyler Alexander to one-year deals. The three moves have not yet been officially announced by the club, but with the agreements, the roster is starting to look not just fuller, but much more settled. These moves may look underwhelming on the surface, but Jansen fills the team’s biggest hole, and the relievers give the Rangers the kind of upside play they’ll need to find their way back into the playoff picture in 2026.

We’ll start with Jansen, who has agreed to a two-year, $14.5 million contract, according to Robert Murray of FanSided. He is the youngest of the three catchers who made our Top 50 Free Agents list, slotting in at 38th between J.T. Realmuto (30th) and Victor Caratini (39th). Jansen beat Ben Clemens’ estimated one year and $9 million contract, and the Rangers got an extra year at a lower AAV. You may be inclined to chalk that up the relative weakness of the catcher market, but keep in mind that last year, Jansen was the only catcher to make the top 50, and the Rays gave him one year and $8.5 million.

Jansen joins the 35-year-old Kyle Higashioka in Texas. Right now, our RosterResource projections have Jansen as the starter, but it’s not hard to envision the two splitting time 50/50. Jansen should constitute a real improvement over Jonah Heim, whom the Rangers non-tendered after he put up negative WAR in both 2024 and 2025. Beyond that, though, Jansen is not necessarily a sure thing. No matter which metric you ask, Jansen has been one of the worst defensive catchers in the game over the past two years. Maybe the Rangers think his trouble framing pitches will be mitigated by the introduction of the ABS challenge system. That’s not a sure thing either, but if it does work out that way, it could make Jansen something of a steal.

The real worry is that Jansen’s bat has also disappeared of late. He was an above-average hitter from 2021 to 2023, then his wRC+ dropped to 89 in 2024. It bounced back to 103 in 2025, but the advanced numbers don’t trust that rebound. His 85 DRC+ was the worst mark of his entire career. Jansen is a true-blue lifter-puller who is capable of beating his xwOBA by yanking home runs down the left field line. That’s what he did after a deadline trade to Milwaukee, and it worked out great (fulfilling Clemens’ prophecy that Jansen spends one month every year looking like Babe Ruth, or at least Babe Ruth in Rec Specs). But Jansen’s strikeout rate spiked past 25% this year, a full four percentage points above his previous high. He seemed to be selling out for power, and it’s hard to know what he’ll look like in 2026.

It’s also important to note that 2025 was Jansen’s first season without an IL stint since 2020, and human beings, especially the ones who spend their lives squatting and catching 100-mph fastballs, don’t usually get healthier in their 30s. If all this is coming off as pessimistic, keep in mind that the Rangers just signed, according to Clemens, the second-best catcher on the market. Really, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to argue that he’s a better bet than Realmuto, considering that he’s four years younger and coming off a better season at the plate. It is difficult to find a great catcher in free agency. Yes, the Rangers were starting from a pretty bad place, but they upgraded the catcher position at a pretty reasonable price.

Now we move on to the relievers, both of whom signed one-year deals with terms that have not yet been reported, according to Jeff Passan of ESPN. Alexander and Díaz are wild cards in their own way. Díaz is famously the younger brother of Edwin Díaz, and for a minute there, he looked like he might be even better as a closer. He was brilliant as a rookie in 2022, great in 2023, decent in 2024, and then, uh, not decent in 2025. Díaz ran an 8.15 ERA and an even uglier 8.51 FIP, losing his closer spot in Cincinnati, then bouncing to the Dodgers and the Braves. Just like his brother, Alexis throws a four-seamer and a gyro slider from an extreme sidearm release point. Unlike his brother, his fastball is 1.5 mph slower than the league average. In addition to losing his velocity, he lost his command in 2025. His walk rate skyrocketed and his strikeout rate plummeted. Things got ugly in three different cities.

Still, it doesn’t take too much effort to look at Díaz and see a decent reliever in there. He has clearly undergone some mechanical changes. His arm angle on the fastball jumped from 9 degrees in 2024 to 16 degrees in 2025. That might have been intentional, an attempt to recapture the magic of the 2022 season, when he also threw from a 16-degree arm angle. However, he’s raised the arm angle on his slider even higher, and the pitch now has a very different spin orientation. All of this is to say that Díaz very much looks like he’s still figuring things out. That’s not necessarily what you want from a 29-year-old pitcher, but that’s also how you find somebody with upside. Nobody expects Díaz to run a sub-2.00 ERA again, but if the Rangers can help him figure out his mechanics, he could still be a useful piece.

Alexander is a 31-year-old soft-tossing lefty who has a combined 4.91 ERA and 4.53 FIP over the past four seasons. But wait! In 2025, he put up a career-best 1.3 WAR thanks to a career-best 3.64 FIP. But wait! That great FIP was mostly a result of a career-best 7.3% of his fly balls turning into home runs. His hard-hit rate on those fly balls was 42.2%, the exact same as it was in 2024. The Rangers are smart enough that they’re not going to be fooled by a fluky HR/FB%, but it’s not hard to look at Alexander and see upside.

Specifically, you need to look at Alexander’s sweeper, which is beloved by all three of the public stuff metrics. In 2024, it was his best pitch according to Baseball Savant’s run values. In 2025, it took a step back thanks to a .365 BABIP. To be clear, that BABIP wasn’t necessarily fluky, at least not in the way we normally think of batted ball results as fluky. It was nearly identical to the pitch’s expected batting average, but it’s not as if batters were crushing the ball. They just dumped a lot of singles over the infield. Still, we’re talking about just 72 batted balls, few of which were crushed. Although the results weren’t there, the pitch had the second-lowest hard-hit rate of Alexander’s repertoire and the second-highest whiff rate. Nevertheless, he throws it just 22% of the time and throws either a four-seamer or sinker 44% of the time. Alexander does lead with the sweeper to lefties, with a usage rate of 38% against them, but it’s possible that he could find more success by spamming the pitch.

All of these players have upside. Jansen could still be a league-average hitter, and his defense can’t get much worse. If all he does is repeat the last two underwhelming seasons of his career, it would push the Rangers out of Replacement Level Killers territory at the catcher spot. Alexander could figure out how to ride that sweeper to success. Díaz appeared for three different teams in 2025 because he pitched terribly, yes, but also because two teams thought they saw something they could fix. The Rangers finished six games out of the Wild Card in 2025, but as late as July 27, their playoff odds were still above 50%. This is a team that is still only two years removed from winning the World Series, one with a high payroll and designs on contention in 2026. Nobody gets there without a few things going right, so it makes sense to plug the biggest holes and take a few chances hunting for upside.