This story was excerpted from Kennedi Landry’s Rangers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
ARLINGTON -- Unlike last October, the Rangers enter this offseason with a manager already in place and little to no movement atop the organization, as the front office gears up for what could be a busy offseason.
Here’s a look at the five biggest questions facing the Rangers:
Will there be any changes to the coaching staff?
Maybe the only place the Rangers could see turnover is on the big league coaching staff, many of whom are holdovers from the Bruce Bochy era.
“I think we're going to be talking about that the next couple days,” manager Skip Schumaker said at the end-of-year press conference. “I’m proud of all the work they put in, very grateful for them, but I think that's the discussion that we're going to have the next couple days.”
It’s now been just over a week with no announced changes to the coaching staff.
What will they do with the veteran players?
The Rangers -- however briefly -- considered some sort of retool at the Trade Deadline, when they approached Jacob deGrom about waiving his no-trade clause. He declined, opting to stay in Texas and try to get them to the postseason.
That didn’t come to fruition, and Texas now finds itself at a crossroads with big contracts for a quartet of veteran players -- deGrom, Corey Seager, Brandon Nimmo and Nathan Eovaldi -- all of whom have no-trade protection, compounded by a Rangers farm system that’s become depleted over the last two years.
President of baseball operations Chris Young didn’t commit to a rebuild, or even a retool, this offseason.
“If anything, we need to reshuffle our cards to some degree,” Young said.
What that means for the big names, we’ll have to wait and see.
Can the young core -- Wyatt Langford, Evan Carter, Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker -- develop in the right direction for 2027 and beyond?
The Rangers drafted and developed all four players between 2020-23, creating a core of talent that would hopefully complement the Seagers and deGroms of the world. That also didn’t come to fruition in 2026.
Langford was hurt too often, Carter couldn’t put much of anything together offensively, Leiter underwent surgery and Rocker struggled in a number of facets -- though he did finish stronger than the other three.
“I'll start by saying I don't want to specifically say they've regressed,” Young said. “I think there's a level of performance and a step we expected all of those guys to take that maybe we didn't quite see and realize. That said, there is development that takes place at the big league level that is not perfectly linear. But, our expectation and hope moving forward is that these guys do take that step.”
How will Young rebuild the bullpen?
Young has built discounted bullpens for three years in a row, some more successful than others. 2026 was not exactly successful, outside of the emergence of Jacob Latz as the closer after losing out on the fifth starter spot in Spring Training.
Tyler Alexander, Jakob Junis, Chase Silseth and Trevor Williams are all impending free agents. Chris Martin didn’t make it through the season healthy. There were some wins, like 31-year-old Peyton Gray becoming a key middle-relief arm, but Texas lacked stability down the stretch.
Now Young has to rebuild it -- seemingly on a budget -- all over again.
Can the front office build a team that plays to Schumaker’s preferred style of play? Can the current players on the roster be that kind of team?
Schumaker clearly wants to play a particular style of baseball, one that relies on speed and grit and athleticism. The Rangers, for a variety of reasons, couldn’t make that happen in 2026.
“I think there's a health component to it,” Schumaker said. “Quite honestly, there were some limitations with some of our guys that couldn't steal bases like they wanted to, or advance like they wanted to.”
That applies to guys like Langford and Nimmo, both of whom had nagging lower body injuries throughout the season. But there were clearly also a number of players without that level of speed and aggressiveness -- Josh Jung, Jake Burger, Joc Pederson and Seager -- who couldn’t always take the extra base, either. When looking at a potential reshuffle, it likely starts with Schumaker’s preferred style of play.
“I think it's a very big offseason for a lot of these guys -- not just the younger guys, but the older guys -- because we need them to be healthy, and we need to be able to push and and play the game as hard as we can without limitations,” Schumaker said. “It's a tough way to play when you're holding back. We need them to come in ready to know what the expectations are. That’s without limitations and hitting the ground running, because I think that's going to be an important part of this thing moving forward.”