With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.
Today we are looking at pitcher Merrill Kelly.
Sometimes things don’t work out.
Such is the case with the 2025 acquisition of Merrill Kelly.
There is a sort of…generic quality in regards to Kelly’s time with the Rangers.
Kelly is kind of a generic mid-rotation starter. Strikes out an average amount of guys,
avoids walks, is a little home prone. The kind of guy who, in his walk year, teams will pursue as a rental, plugging him in the middle of their rotation knowing that they won’t have to worry about him.
I don’t know that there’s anything he did on the field for the Texas Rangers in 2025 that particularly stuck in my mind. He wasn’t memorable. He was just kind of there.
The Rangers parted with three pitching prospects for Kelly, a couple of run-of-the-mill lefties who were 40 man eligible this past offseason and a 2024 draftee coming off of elbow surgery who had barely pitched as a pro. The two lefthanders, Mitch Bratt and Kohl Drake, had some cachet, had earned some attention, but weren’t atop the Rangers’ pitching prospect pecking order. They are kind of generic lefty pitching prospects. Good chance of making the majors, not a great chance of being impact guys.
David Hagaman, the 2024 fourth rounder out of West Virginia, was seen by most of us as the third guy in the deal at the time, but he’s been getting some run and impressing folks since he got back on the mound after surgery.
None of the four were premium draft picks, so good on the Rangers’ scouting and player development staff for taking them and turning them into pieces for a deadline deal, one for a pretty solid pitcher who you’d figure would be potentially starting twice in a seven game series.
Of course, that necessitates getting to the playoffs, something the Rangers, you may recall, failed to do.
Kelly isn’t the reason the Rangers failed to make the playoffs, but he wasn’t a big help to the cause, either, putting up a 4.23 ERA and 4.18 FIP in 55 innings over 10 starts. Not what the Rangers were hoping for over the final two months of the season, but then, you could say that about a number of players who donned the Texas uniform over the final two months of the season.
I guess we can re-hash the arguments about whether the Rangers should have been buyers or not, whether they should have targeted a hitter instead of a pitcher. All those guys getting injured in like a ten day span in August really de-railed everything and made the argument moot.
So Kelly was here, and then re-signed with Arizona after the season, and we all move on. Sometimes the trade deadline deals work out. Sometimes they don’t.
Previously:
