Rangers Ready to Listen on Seager and deGrom as Texas Weighs a Painful Reset

Three years ago, the Texas Rangers were world champions. Now they are the team willing to listen on almost anyone. According to Evan Grant of The Dallas Morning News, the Rangers will search for trade partners for Corey Seager and Jacob deGrom this offseason — and possibly Nathan Eovaldi too — as the club confronts a hard truth: the roster that won the 2023 World Series has run its course, and the money is no longer producing the wins. Texas finished 80-82 in 2026 and missed the postseason for the third consecutive year, a slow slide that ended with the Rangers tied with Houston in the AL West on the final day of the regular season and still watching October from home. President of baseball operations Chris Young said this week that he expects the 2027 payroll to look very similar to 2026's, around $190 million — and that the roster will look different. Those two statements, taken together, point in one direction. If the money stays the same and the names change, the expensive names are the ones that have to go. Seager is the hardest of the three to imagine in another uniform. The shortstop signed a ten-year, $325 million deal before the 2022 season and was the beating heart of the championship run. But 2026 was the worst season of his twelve-year career: a .227 average with 20 home runs and 51 RBIs in 102 games, and he played the final few months of it with an elbow problem that required surgery once the year ended. The Rangers expect him back for spring training, but the durability questions are now impossible to ignore — he missed 60 games this season, 50 last year, and 40 in each of the two seasons before that. He turns 33 in April, his contract runs through 2031, and like deGrom and Eovaldi, he holds a complete no-trade clause. Any deal would need his blessing. DeGrom's case is just as complicated. The 38-year-old made 31 starts this season and finished 11-11 with 201 strikeouts in 162 2/3 innings — his first 200-strikeout season in years, and proof that the arm still has its old electricity. But the run prevention told a different story: 76 earned runs, and a season that felt more ordinary than the name on the back of the jersey. He is owed $37 million in 2027, has had two Tommy John surgeries, and passed on a trade to Atlanta at the deadline. He will be 39 next year. Eovaldi, owed $20 million, is the third name in the conversation, and the fact that all three carry full no-trade protection means Texas cannot simply auction them off. This will be a negotiation, not a fire sale — and Grant's reporting makes clear the Rangers are only at the stage of listening. There is a certain sadness to it. Seager and deGrom were supposed to be the foundation of a decade of contention, the two stars around whom everything else was built. Instead, three straight Octobers without baseball have forced a reckoning. The Rangers are not tearing it down — not yet, and not with a $190 million payroll. But for the first time since the parade, they are willing to hear what the rest of baseball thinks their best players are worth.