Top of the Order: Could the Rangers Waive the White Flag?

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

For Friday’s column, I took the time to run down a long list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers and claimed prior to September 1, which is the deadline for them to be playoff eligible with their new teams.

The Rangers were the most intriguing of the teams I covered in that piece, for the obvious reason that they are the reigning World Series champs. Many of the players from last year’s club are still around, though some of them are currently injured, and even as Texas struggled this season, the organization and its fans held out hope a surge wasn’t far off. That said, the Rangers are simply running out of time. The trade deadline has passed and their playoff odds are below 2%. The reality of their situation has led me to ask the following question: Could the team that just won the World Series become the Angels less than a year later?

Maybe that suggestion is a bit of an exaggeration. After all, the Angels are one of the most dysfunctional organizations in baseball and, again, the Rangers just won a championship. However, there are obvious parallels to be drawn between the 2024 Rangers and last year’s Angels when it comes to how they approached the trade deadline. On the morning before this year’s deadline, the Rangers had a 12.0% chance to make the playoffs; at that time last season, the Angels’ odds were only a bit better, at 19.5%. Those uninspiring postseason probabilities didn’t stop either team from adding players when they probably would’ve been better off dealing their players on expiring contracts. The Rangers acquired Andrew Chafin and Carson Kelly, while last year’s Angels went all-in by trading for Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Randal Grichuk, C.J. Cron, and Dominic Leone. And both teams saw their odds get longer after they made these moves. The Angels spiraled and finished with a losing record for the ninth straight season, while the Rangers’ odds stood at 1.6% entering play Monday.

Last year, the Angels waived four of the five players they traded for — Giolito, Grichuk, Leone, and López — along with Matt Moore and Hunter Renfroe. Grichuk was the only one who went unclaimed. At that point, the Halos knew they weren’t going to the playoffs, so they decided to see if they could get rid of some of their players on expiring contracts to shed the remainder of their salaries. Before waiving the six players, the Angels projected to be pretty well above the first luxury tax threshold, but once the five were claimed, the team, amazingly, ducked the tax line by just $30,000.

The Rangers may try to accomplish the same thing because, after all, they’re in a similar position. We currently project the Rangers’ CBT payroll to be just under $251 million, or about $14 million over the tax line. Since the Rangers paid the luxury tax last season, but not in 2022, all overages will incur a 30% tax, so that $14 million becomes $18.2 million. Since their CBT payroll is under $257 million, they won’t pay any additional overages, nor will they have their top draft pick moved back 10 spots, as would have been the case if their payroll was at least $287 million.

The $14 million overage is quite a lot to get off the books, but it’s not impossible if they act quickly. If they wait until just before the end of the month to put players on waivers, they probably won’t be able to cut enough salary to dip below the threshold. The earlier the Rangers place players on waivers, the earlier those players can be claimed, thereby taking them off the Texas payroll earlier, which would reduce the team’s CBT payroll.

Here’s how much money would come off the books if the Rangers waived their players on expiring contracts and those players were claimed on August 31:

• Nathan Eovaldi: $2,650,538 (Eovaldi has a player option for $20 million that becomes available to him with 36 more innings.)
• Max Scherzer: $2,078,853 (The prorated portion of the $30,833,333 the Mets are covering would get transferred to the new team; the Rangers don’t get to keep it.)
• Andrew Heaney: $2,026,882
• David Robertson: $1,559,140
• José Leclerc: $974,462
• Kirby Yates: $701,613
• Andrew Chafin: $662,634 (Chafin has a 2025 club option for $6.5 million.)
• Carson Kelly: $545,699
• José Ureña: $272,849
• Travis Jankowski: $265,054
• Robbie Grossman: $233,871

That adds up to just under $12 million, or $2 million short of what the Rangers would need to lop off the payroll. But if all of these players were claimed on August 25 instead, the Rangers would be able to shed $14.5 million from the books, enough to avoid paying the tax.

Complicating matters, though, is this: Who would actually get claimed? Eovaldi and Scherzer would have to go to make the CBT machinations work, but they both would come with injury concerns. Scherzer, who landed on the IL just after the deadline passed, is now getting further evaluation on his fatigued shoulder, making it a potential landmine to claim him. Eovaldi left his last start with “side tightness,” which at the very least puts his next start in doubt; even if this doesn’t send him to the IL, it’s something that could make teams less likely to claim him if he were made available. And if the Rangers don’t know whether teams would claim both pitchers, it probably wouldn’t be worth it for them to try and shed the salaries of their other players.

The Rangers were able to extend their TV deal with the embattled Diamond Sports Group (operator of Bally Sports), but only for one year, which leaves their 2025 telecasts in doubt. As we’ve seen with the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Rockies, MLB has been willing to take over the broadcasts for teams whose deals with Diamond Sports expired, but those are direct-to-consumer packages, which commissioner Rob Manfred has said don’t generate as much revenue as deals with regional sports networks. Even as the league will now redistribute competitive balance tax payments to teams losing TV deals, it’s unclear if the payments — capped at $15 million per team — will be enough to make up the difference. So while it could be argued that from a purely financial perspective, it would behoove the Rangers to get rid of any salary they can knowing that there’s plenty of uncertainty for next season, I don’t think they should.

Even if keeping everyone around is done just to placate the fans and give them a better team to root for down the stretch, the value in that isn’t nothing. Fans spend money, and any drop-off in attendance would obviously affect the Rangers’ bottom line as well. It also wouldn’t send a great message to either the fans or the remaining players if the Rangers were to punt on this season, their title defense campaign, when the only purpose of waiving the white flag would be to cut costs. (Yes, the pun was very much intended.) It would’ve been much easier to sell a fire sale at the deadline than it would be now; at least two weeks ago, the organization could’ve gotten players in return who could’ve contributed to a winning club in the near future. Sure, you could make the case that the decision not to sell before shouldn’t influence the Rangers now, that getting something, even salary relief, is better than getting nothing at all. After all, the players the Rangers would waive now are pending free agents who might not be around next year anyway. However, let’s consider what might happen if the Rangers waived a few players and then tried to re-sign them in the offseason.

Money always talks, but it seems less likely that these players would want to return to a team that ushered them out the door for no reason other than the fact that the organization just didn’t want to pay them. Future free agents, too, might think twice about signing with the Rangers, opting not to go to a team that recently jettisoned its significant contributors for financial purposes.

Ultimately, I tend to think this is more of a thought exercise than a significant likelihood: Rangers owner Ray Davis really likes to win, and as I’ve established, the CBT incentive isn’t there for them as it was for the Angels. The Angels were trying to end a playoff drought and quickly reversed course. Meanwhile, the Rangers just won their first title and have their sights on contending for their second one as soon as next year, and unlike the Angels, the Rangers have a legitimate path to win the 2025 World Series despite their woes this season. Waiving rentals wouldn’t change that, and the potential morale drawbacks could be too much to ignore. If the benefit is so minimal and the downsides are so unknown, why break it up? Just play out the string and reload for 2025.