Texas Rangers rumors: Carlos Gomez, Andrew Cashner among top free agents

Texas Rangers rumors: Andrew Cashner, Carlos Gomez and Tyson Ross are the Texas Rangers top free agents this upcoming offseason, and in Jon Heyman’s latest piece at Fan Rag, he ranks the top 60 upcoming free agents. Cashner is at #34 on the list, Gomez is at #39, and Ross is at #51 — that seems to put Cashner and Gomez in the category of players who will get nice, relatively short-term deals in the $10-15M per year AAV, while Ross is looking at a one year incentive laden make-good deal, most likely.

I don’t expect either Cashner or Ross to return to Texas — I think Cashner is going to be looking to cash in on his low-ERA 2017 campaign to snag a multi-year deal, which I suspect Texas won’t want to hand out, and I suspect the Rangers will not be inclined to roll the dice on hoping Ross regains his pre-injury form after this year’s disappointment.

Gomez, however, could be a fit, on a two or three year deal, given the lack of other center field options available to Texas. If the team doesn’t go outside the organization to fill center field, they would be looking at some combination of Delino DeShields, Drew Robinson and Jared Hoying to handle the job.

The number one free agent, of course, is Yu Darvish, the once and (maybe? possibly? we can hope?) future Ranger ace. Heyman says Darvish is looking for something along the lines of Stephen Strasburg’s 7 year, $175 million deal, which Texas was supposedly leery of ponying up for.

A perusal of the list really highlights how week this year’s free agent class is...Jake Arrieta, despite his rough first half, is number two, while Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas are #3 and #4. The #11-15 spots are taken up by Jason Vargas, Zack Cozart, Jay Bruce, Carlos Santana, and former Ranger Jonathan Lucroy.

Given the unimpressive nature of the class, don’t expect to see the Rangers make a big splash in free agency in upgrading their rotation. I’m sure they will have interest in Darvish and Arrieta, and Shohei Ohtani could opt to come over from Japan and make things interesting, but after that, you’re looking at Texas likely poking around on pitchers who are looking at short-term deals.