Rangers Stock Up on Pitching With Merrill Kelly and a Pair of Relievers

On June 30, the Rangers lost to fall to 41-44, 10th place in the American League. Then they turned it on. Since the calendar flipped to July, they’ve gone 16-8 and rocketed into the playoff picture. They’re tied with the Mariners for the last AL Wild Card spot. With their sights now set on thriving in October, they needed to reinforce a pitching staff that has been quite good up top but got shakier as you went down the depth chart, and the Diamondbacks were happy to oblige. As Ken Rosenthal first reported, the Rangers are getting Merrill Kelly in exchange for Kohl Drake, Mitch Bratt, and David Hagaman. They also acquired Danny Coulombe and Phil Maton in separate deals to shore up the middle of their bullpen.

Texas has a famous starting rotation. The two stars, Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, need no introduction. Second on the team in innings, slightly ahead of Eovaldi? That’d be World Series winner Patrick Corbin, famous both for his high highs and low lows. The back of the rotation? Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, famous college teammates before they were famous prospect teammates. But Leiter and Rocker have been flat this year, and Corbin was bad enough for long enough that I’d be a little scared of counting on him. Tyler Mahle, another celebrated Rangers starter, has been out since June. Jon Gray is headed for free agency and has perhaps been banished to the bullpen for the remainder of 2025. And it’s not like deGrom has been the paragon of health over the last few years.

Kelly lengthens the playoff-ready portion of Texas’s rotation immediately. His career 3.74 ERA and 3.97 FIP are accurate representations of his work, as are his 22% strikeout rate and 7.4% walk rate. In other words, he’s a perfect mid-rotation arm, better than average (he’s managed a 3.22 ERA and 3.53 FIP this season) but squarely short of an ace. He’s 36 and a free agent after this year, which limits his return somewhat, but he’s a dependable playoff starter and thus a very desirable deadline target.

In theory, the Rangers already had enough pitching depth that Kelly is surplus. In practice, though, it doesn’t feel that way at all. Mahle is no lock to return promptly and effectively; he hasn’t started a rehab assignment yet. Corbin is a year removed from being one of the worst pitchers in baseball. Leiter and Rocker aren’t missing bats. The top two are really solid assuming health, but committing, on July 31, to choosing two playoff starters out of Mahle, Corbin, Leiter, and Rocker would be foolhardy in my opinion.

What’s more, this isn’t a sure-fire playoff squad setting up options for a few months down the line. The Rangers are tied for the last spot in the tournament field. They’re scrapping for every win, and their fifth starter (Rocker) has a 5.73 ERA with uninspiring peripheral statistics. Kelly makes them more likely to reach the playoffs in addition to raising their floor once they get there.

That sounds great, so it might surprise you to learn that I think this trade tilts toward hurting Texas more long-term than it helps short-term. Because in order to lock up that roster certainty, the Rangers surrendered a bounty of prospects. Drake, the headliner of the deal, was the fourth-ranked prospect in the Rangers organization. He lives off of a mid-90s fastball that has spectacular life and deception, one of those short-armed, flat-planed darts that hitters simply can’t get a bead on. An 11th-round flier in 2022, he’s been steadily climbing the minor league ladder ever since and reached Triple-A earlier this month.

As Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan noted in the Rangers prospect list, that kind of fastball utility opens doors for players who otherwise wouldn’t have the raw juice to make their secondaries play. The rest of Drake’s pitch mix is only so-so, but it plays way up because of his four-seamer. He even has reasonable command; occasional spikes in walk rate don’t worry me or the team. A generation ago, Drake would be a “crafty lefty” who threw 89 and walked a two-seamer around the zone. Now, crafty lefties sit 93-95 and run four-seamers up at the letters. Baseball is wild, man.

Bratt isn’t far behind Kohl as a prospect; we had him eighth in Texas’ system and now sixth in Arizona’s, a 45 FV 22-year-old starter. A fifth-round pick out of high school in 2021, he’s slowly climbing the minor league ranks, and this year he’s barbecuing hitters in Double-A with a low-90s fastball and outrageous, would-be-good-in-the-majors command. His 4.3% walk rate might undersell it; he also gets a lot of his whiffs thanks to well-placed heaters, and he’s running a 28.5% strikeout rate.

We have Bratt down as a safe back-end starter, but that caliber of prospect occasionally catches a velocity uptick and pops. If Drake is a modern-day crafty lefty, Bratt, a southpaw himself, is a lot closer to that older model I mentioned up above. He’s savvy enough to do that even with well below-average velo; teams like the Guardians have showed how good pitchers like this can be if they take a big step forward on the stuff front.

Finally, Hagaman is a 2024 fourth-round draft pick returning from internal brace surgery. He was 44th on our draft board but slipped thanks to his elbow injury. He didn’t start pitching in games until this June, but he’s been way too good for his opposition in the early going, with a 32.2% strikeout rate and 6.9% walk rate across two levels. He has huge stuff – we have a 60 on both his fastball and slider – and iffy command. He was a reliever in college but has the frame and athleticism to start, which is how the Rangers were using him and how the Diamondbacks figure to as well. We have him as a 40+ FV, but with huge error bars; if he makes it as a starter, he could be an absolute monster.

That strikes me as a lot of pitching to give up for Kelly. Honestly, I don’t think I could stomach it if I were running the Rangers. I’m a sucker for both pitchability guys and potential reliever conversions. Like I said, the Rangers needed some stability in their rotation, but they’ve sacrificed a lot of bites at the stability apple in future years for it. It’s never fun to sit on your hands, but it might be better than trading this much controllable and intriguing pitching for a single starter on an expiring contract.

It looks like even more of an overpay to me considering the other two pitching moves the Rangers made today. First, they acquired Coulombe from the Twins in exchange for Garrett Horn. Coulombe has been low-key dominant for years. Dating back to 2020, he has a 2.40 ERA and 2.96 FIP. The problem is that it’s been across 161 innings; he’s a lefty specialist who has dealt with injury issues. This year has been more of the same – he missed a month with a forearm strain, but his FIP and ERA both start with a one. He’s a classic LOOGY option.

Horn was a sixth-round pick in 2024 out of Liberty. He has a nice mid-90s fastball and is off to an excellent start in A-ball this year. As you’d expect from a 2024 sixth-rounder, he’s a little rough around the edges, but he’s a lottery ticket at worst, with the kind of good-shape fastball and improved strike-throwing that suggest he might be a fast riser. He’s even missing bats with his breaking ball this year. The error bars are wide here, but it’s an intriguing profile that would jump off the page if it came out of his hands a few ticks faster, a common refrain for the prospects in this writeup.

If one reliever is good, two is better. Maton is also headed to Arlington, with Mason Molina, Skylar Hales, and international slot money headed to the Cardinals in exchange. Maton has been incredible this year, with a gaudy 30.4% strikeout rate and a trail of missed bats to match. He works everything off of his huge two-plane curveball, a 75 mph rainbow that he throws more than any other pitch. Between that, a 90 mph cutter, and a sweeping slider he can manipulate at will, he puts batters on ice skates with a spin-heavy arsenal. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a stable path to success, and just a year ago, Maton was basically replacement level, but he’s cooking and has the résumé to back it up right now.

Molina, a seventh-round pick last year, looks to our prospect team like the kind of changeup-first college starter who won’t be challenged until the upper minors thanks to his excellent feel for his secondary stuff. He sits 90-91 and is more of a developmental stash than anything else. If he starts throwing 95 while keeping everything else intact, he might get pretty interesting. Until then, he looks like organizational depth to me.

Hales is a righty single-inning reliever with a huge, low-slot fastball that tails in on righty hitters. He’s had huge handedness splits throughout his minor league career, thanks to a classic sinker/slider arsenal and no usable offspeed pitch. You can imagine how it would look if everything came together, but that hasn’t happened yet, and 2025 has been tough so far. An uneven Double-A campaign preceded a promotion to Triple-A, where Hales was rudely greeted with four homers in his first seven appearances. He’s still a work in progress, but without major changes, he’ll struggle greatly to get big league lefties out.

I like the moves for Coulombe and Maton. They might not be household names, but they’re performing well right now and you can get them on your playoff team for cheap. The prospects the Rangers surrendered for them were late-round draft picks, the kind of guys who get replenished in the draft every year. The way the current minor leagues are structured, that’s not a huge price to pay. If I were a contending team and I could trade my sixth and seventh round picks in perpetuity to always have good major league relievers, I’d do it.

That makes the Kelly deal feel like too much to me. Some aspects of pitching – mid-leverage relief – could be had on the cheap this deadline. Starters were in much higher demand. A lot of playoff teams make up for bad no. 3 or 4 starters with great bullpens. Guys like Leiter and Rocker have been known to click. The Rangers were in a bind no matter what they did, but to my eyes, the prospect cost they paid was a more onerous penalty than the chance that their already-assembled rotation wouldn’t pan out, or couldn’t be patched by good relief help. It’s not that I don’t like Kelly as a starter. I think he’ll obviously improve Texas’ chances this year, and that he’ll be a good option if they make it to the postseason. I just think that about Coulombe and Maton too, and I like the price there much more.