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 relief pitcher Danny Coulombe.
When the trade deadline rolls around and you are a contending team, or a team that thinks it is still in contention, you go out and get a reliever or three. That’s just the way things work. Every contender wants relievers, non-contending teams don’t
have a compelling reason to keep a reliever who is going to be a free agent at the end of the season anyway, rebuilding teams are going to be willing to move relievers who are under team control beyond the current season.
So the Rangers — who were contenders at the deadline in 2025, despite what the revisionist historians want to claim — went out and acquired relievers. One of those was Danny Coulombe.
That deal…well, it is fair to say it didn’t work out as well as hoped.
Look, Coulombe is exactly the type of reliever who gets traded at the deadline. Journeyman, mid-30s, lefty, on a cheap one year deal. After being pretty not good early on in his career, he seemed to find a groove after joining the Minnesota Twins before the COVID season.
What’s funny, though, is that the Twins didn’t ever seem to be completely sold on him. They kept releasing him at season end or non-tendering him. He has signed with the Minnesota Twins as a free agent five times in his career — after 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024.
Anyway, from 2022-24 he had a run of 93.1 innings over 104 games where he put up a 2.41 ERA and a 2.96 FIP. In 2023-24 he was doing that for the Baltimore Orioles, who purchased him from the Twins at the start of the 2023 season. He pitched twice against the Rangers in the 2023 playoffs. In Game 1, he came on in relief of Kyle Bradish in the top of the fifth, walked Evan Carter, got Jonah Heim on a ground out to end the inning, and then got Nathaniel Lowe out to start the sixth before being pulled. In Game 2, he came on in the top of the second in relief of Grayson Rodriguez, who had given up five runs in the inning. He struck out Nathaniel Lowe and was replaced by Bryan Baker to start the third.
So the Twins re-signed him when he became a free agent after 2024, and he was excellent for them once again, allowing just four runs in 31 innings over 40 appearances. He only faced 122 batters in those 40 games, an average of 3.05 per appearance, and I’d wager that’s one of the lowest BF/G ratios in the “3 batters minimum” era.
His 1.16 ERA was sparkling, and even if his 2.01 FIP and 3.19 xERA suggested that was overachieving, his overall performance, both in the first four months of 2025 and in the several years prior to that, would lead one to believe that he would be a useful bullpen arm for the final two months of the season.
The Rangers gave up Garrett Horn to get Coulombe. Horn was the team’s sixth round pick out of Liberty in 2024, and had barely pitched due to having undergone Tommy John surgery. That’s not much of a price to acquire Coulombe — Horn didn’t crack the BA top 30 prospect list for the Twins this offseason — but then, small journeyman relief specialists generally don’t fetch much of a price.
Coulombe ended up pitching 12 innings over 15 appearances for the Rangers, and missed the first half of September with an injured list stint that was, I believe, for arm fatigue. I may be wrong, and if so, I will accept that, because I don’t care enough about the specifics of the stint to go look it up. It doesn’t matter for our purposes.
In those 15 appearances, Coulombe put up a 5.25 ERA, a 6.64 FIP, and a 5.82 xERA. That’s bad. Ironically, after not allowing a homer in his 40 games with Minnesota earlier in the year, Coulombe allowed three homers for the Rangers.
Coulombe only allowed runs to score in three games for the Rangers.
The first of those was in mid-August, the horrible Diamondbacks series. Coulombe allowed a solo home run to Ketel Marte with two outs in the top of the ninth, turning a 2-2 game into what would be a 3-2 Rangers loss.
The second of those was his next outing, in Toronto, when, asked to protect a 5-2 lead in the top of the 8th, he gave up three straight singles. Phil Maton came in and allowed all three inherited runners to score, along with one of Maton’s own, resulting in a 6-5 defeat.
That was one of the more demoralizing defeats we experienced, in a season that saw a whole lot of demoralizing defeats in the final two months of the season.
The third and final outing where he allowed a run was on August 26, at home against the Angels. Asked to give the final three outs with the Rangers up 7-0, he gave up a leadoff homer to Zach Neto, a single to Mike Trout, a scary fly out to Matthew Lugo, and a home run to Jo Adell. Phil Maton was once again summoned to clean up the mess, and he accomplished that, recording the final two outs in a 7-3 Rangers win.
That was it for Coulombe for a while. Even once he was brought back, he only pitched in four games, and didn’t ever seem to have regained Bruce Bochy’s trust.
That’s the way it goes with these rental journeyman relievers. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t. And if the Rangers are contending against in 2026, they’ll be making these same sorts of moves once again.
Previously:
