ARLINGTON -- The Rangers are 50-50 after 100 games in the 2026 season.
A .500 record after 100 feels apt for this team, which has gone through its fair share of ups and down to this point. And after a 10-3 series-opening loss to the White Sox on Monday night at Globe Life Field, a decision at the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline looms ahead.
Trades and Transactions presented by CohnReznick
• 2026 Trade Deadline: Aug. 3, 6 p.m. ET
• Latest trade buzz and rumors
• Tracking every trade
“We need to continue to play winning baseball and continue to stack on wins, get above .500 and maintain our position in the standings,” said Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young. “The playoff race is wide open right now.
“Can we put ourselves in the best position to help our playoff odds? There are things that you can't control and things that we can't predict. But I'd like to believe, like I said, that we still have our best baseball ahead of us, and getting healthy is a big component to that.”
Young briefly addressed the media ahead of the start of this seven-game homestand Monday, speaking about the Trade Deadline and the desire to thread the needle between what’s right for 2026 and what’s right for 2027 and beyond.
The Rangers have now lost three of their first four games coming out of the All-Star break, surrendering the slim lead they had atop the American League West. These next 12 games are as important as they’ll play all year.
“I think the standings in the American League are what they are,” Young said. “It's wide open. And we're right in the middle of that. We put ourselves in a decent position, and again, it's not reflective of where we want to be necessarily, record-wise. But the reality is, there's a lot of parity in the American League, and our group has done a good job of holding our head above water. Will we play our best baseball at some point in these next 60 games? And if we can, then obviously we could be a playoff team.”
The Rangers' theoretical needs lie in a high-leverage relief option -- like many teams -- and maybe a right-handed bat, and they’re likely not the only ones there either.
Despite the rotational struggles out of the break -- 20 runs in four games started by Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, MacKenzie Gore and Cal Quantrill -- reinforcement should come in August and September anyway with Jordan Montgomery (UCL), Cody Bradford (UCL) and Jack Leiter (ankle), in that order.
And with that being said, when it comes to getting back on track, it starts with the pitching.
“You show up the same way every day, and that's to win baseball games,” said deGrom after surrendering five runs in 4 2/3 innings Monday. “We played good going into the break and haven't played good right after the break. So we gotta lock it in and play good baseball. We gotta do it for the rest of the year. It starts with the starting pitching, and we got to do a better job as a group.”
And honestly, will the fluidity of the division and the league affect the market as a whole? If only five teams league-wide view themselves as sellers, there’s only so many viable players for the buyers to acquire.
“I've learned in this game, you think you have it all figured out, you think things are going to go one direction, and then it goes a complete opposite direction in terms of the market,” Young said. “It's just really hard to predict. I do think that there are a number of teams that are looking at this, saying, ‘We can make a push here.’ Maybe that creates more of a buyer's market.
“Maybe over the next 10 days, it does the opposite, where some teams just say, ‘Hey, we're just, you know, we just haven't established ourselves as one of the better teams, and this isn't the year to go all in.’ I have no idea.”
Regardless of the market or the division or the race, what matters most to the Rangers right now is winning baseball games. That’s the only thing that will determine their fate come Aug. 3 and beyond.
“It's very clear that you're either winning or you're not,” Young said. “I want to see winning baseball. That's pretty straightforward in my opinion.”