The Rangers are heading toward another bullpen shopping trip, and the bargain bin may be the only place that makes sense.
Texas already has a thin path forward for 2027. Jakob Junis, Tyler Alexander, and Cal Quantrill are all set to hit free agency, and the payroll picture is pointing toward even less flexibility than the club had during last offseason’s purge.
That matters because the bullpen wasn’t exactly a strength in 2026. Rangers relievers finished with a 4.47 ERA, 23rd in MLB, and even with those veteran arms in the mix, the group still had depth issues at times.
That puts the non-tender market under the microscope, even if the options aren’t pristine. One name that could shake loose is Camilo Doval, and if the San Francisco Giants move on, Texas should be ready to pounce.
The Giants’ books are already crowded. Willy Adames has been a bust.
Matt Chapman is aging and coming off season-ending core surgery. Rafael Devers finally looked like the slugger he was in Boston, but he also will be recovering from core surgery.
Those three players alone are set to cost $89 million on the club’s 2027 books. With that kind of money tied up, paying Doval’s projected $6.6 million in his final year of arbitration may not be in the cards.
San Francisco’s history with Doval only adds to the possibility. The Giants traded the right-hander to the Yankees at the 2025 trade deadline, watched the Yankees send him to the Pirates at the 2026 deadline, and then brought him back off waivers from Pittsburgh during the final days of the season. Given that they already moved on from him once, letting him go again would not be a shock.
For Texas, the appeal is obvious. The Rangers’ relief corps lacked strikeout power in 2026, posting just a 20% strikeout rate that ranked 26th in MLB.
They also didn’t throw hard enough across the board, with bullpen fastballs averaging 93.9 mph, good for 23rd in the league. Pitching to contact can work, but when bloops and bleeders start finding grass, the room for error disappears fast.
Doval would immediately change that look. In 2026, he averaged 98.8 mph on his four-seamer and regularly threw cutters that reached triple digits. That kind of heat would give Texas something different in the bullpen, something it clearly lacked.
The swing-and-miss profile isn’t quite as dominant as the pure velocity, but there’s still value there. Doval struck out 24.2% of the hitters he faced in 2026, which is solid if not overpowering. Over his career, though, he’s carried a 28% strikeout rate, and in his best early stretches he was above 30%.
The upside is easy to see because the résumé is still there. Doval posted back-to-back sub-3.00 ERA seasons in 2022 and 2023, and in 2023 he was an All-Star closer who led the National League with 39 saves. If the Rangers could get that version back, they’d have a reliever who could stack up with the top names on this offseason’s market.
Of course, that’s the gamble. The Pirates spent real prospect capital to acquire him, then decided he wasn’t worth keeping after only a couple of months. The Yankees paid even more to land him from San Francisco, and they were finished with the experiment after a year.
But if Doval gets non-tendered, the price tag should come down enough to make the risk worthwhile. At the very least, he could work as a change-of-pace middle reliever.
At best, he could settle back in as a late-inning weapon. For a Rangers team short on money and short on bullpen answers, that’s exactly the kind of bet worth making.
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