The Rangers Had a Homecoming With Chris Martin Late Last Night

The Rangers’ busy offseason continues with their biggest (if only literally) signing yet: right-handed pitcher Chris Martin. It’s a nice landing spot for the 38-year-old reliever, who was born and raised in Arlington and previously spent a season and a half with his hometown team at the end of the 2010s. Those links are more than just trivia; Martin reportedly was so eager to return to the site of his birth (kind of like a salmon) that he signed for the fabled hometown discount: $5.5 million over one year. That’s a 42% pay cut from his salary with the Red Sox last season.

At 6-foot-8, he’s also one of the very few active players who can look GM Chris Young in the eye. Here’s a fun fact from the Department of I Looked This Up So You’re Going to Hear About It: There are 52 right-handed pitchers in major league history who have been listed at 6-foot-8 or taller. Four of them are named Chris, and the Rangers are halfway to collecting the full set. If Texas trades for Cardinals righty Chris Roycroft next, surely Chris Volstad will be waiting by the phone expecting a call about a scouting job.

Martin didn’t reach the major leagues until he was almost 28, and even then, it was with the Rockies, so it only kind of counts. After a two-year stint in Japan, he re-established himself in the big leagues in his first stint with Texas, and has mostly been a solid mid-to-high-leverage arm since. He even won a World Series with the Braves in 2021.

Martin is neither a workhorse nor a guy with knockout stuff. His career high in innings is 55 2/3, his fastball sits in the low-to-mid 90s, and he has no breaking ball worth speaking of. What Martin does have is the kind of a three fastballs-and-a-changeup repertoire (my favorite Hugh Grant comedic role) that basically doesn’t age if you can command it.

Martin throws one pitch with glove-side movement — his cutter — up in the zone, plus a sinker and a splitter down, and a four-seamer with good arm-side run basically anywhere. As for command, when Martin has been at his best he’s posted absolutely minuscule walk numbers. AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil walked more batters before the All-Star break last year than Martin has in his entire major league career, which spans nine seasons and 369 appearances. Among active pitchers with at least 300 career innings, Martin has the second-lowest BB% and BB/9 ratio; in both cases, he trails George Kirby by a tiny fraction of a point.

He’s not exactly Emmanuel Clase, but for $5.5 million Martin’s definitely worth a spin. As for his role, Martin has never been a full-time capital-C closer, but he is a veteran who’s pitched plenty in high leverage. I doubt he’d freak out and melt down if handed the ball in the ninth.

The big righty is coming off a mixed two-year stint with the Red Sox. In 2023, Martin felt the warm, comforting favor of the BABIP and strand rate gods, and posted a 1.05 ERA in 55 appearances. Things were a little stormier in 2024; Martin’s ERA rose to 3.45, but his FIP only went up from 2.44 to 2.78. Martin is your classic bad-luck bounceback candidate.

And Young’s club could stand to pick some low-hanging fruit.

Last year’s Rangers didn’t have quite as bad a World Series hangover as it looked — they were actually two games over .500 from July 1 on — but things didn’t go well. There were injuries, mystifying slumps by star players, and also the bullpen was pretty awful. The Rangers were 25th in the league in reliever WAR, 23rd in K-BB%, and 27th in ERA-. That futility came in spite of an absolutely stellar season from closer Kirby Yates.

Now, the Rangers’ bullpen was pretty shaky on the run to the World Series in 2023, but Young’s tolerance for relief shenanigans has been exhausted. When I’m talking to people who are frustrated by their team’s performance, I often ask whether they actually want to trade everyone or if they’re just upset. Well, Young really did seem to be sick of looking at his relievers’ stupid faces, because he got rid of all of them.

Really. The 2024 Rangers had some fairly big names in their bullpen; not just Yates, but David Robertson and José Leclerc, and they’re all gone. Well, they’re all free agents, anyway. It’s possible that one of them re-signs, but Young has been busy adding new members to this bullpen, and there are few remaining spots available. As it stands, though, of the seven pitchers who threw the most innings in relief for the Rangers last year, six are no longer with the organization. (Congratulations, Jacob Latz, you have survived The Great Culling.)

Martin enters the equation because Young, having cashiered pretty much his entire bullpen, needed to build a new one from scratch. This he’s been doing, gradually, over the course of the winter. Since mid-December, he’s traded for Nationals lefty Robert Garcia and signed free agent relievers Jacob Webb, Shawn Armstrong, Hoby Milner, and now Martin. (Milner, who somehow turns 34 next week, is also a local: He was born in Dallas, went to high school in Fort Worth, and played college ball for the Texas Longhorns.)

So yeah, those guys, plus Latz. Plus Josh Sborz, who’ll miss a big chunk of the start of 2025 after his shoulder underwent one of the grossest-sounding procedures in the surgical lexicon: debridement.

What, then, should we make of this completely remade bullpen? Insofar as there’s an obvious coherent plan here, it seems to be that the Rangers have binged on pitchers who fit one or both of two criteria: Either they massively underperformed their FIP last year, and/or they’re cheap.

Well, that sure is a collection of pitchers full of various qualities and attributes. Ideally, this won’t be a huge friction point for a club with Nathan Eovaldi, Jacob deGrom, and enough huge bats to fill out a sanctuary for flying foxes. But if it is, and it does fail, there is good news: It’ll be quite easy for Young to turn over the entire bullpen again next offseason.