As the last micro-units of World Series dopamine wane in their bloodstreams, Rangers fans might have winced when Cole Ragans trotted to the mound for the Kansas City Royals in the American League Division Series on Monday night.
The former first-round pick had battled through injuries to make the majors as a long reliever when, in June of 2023, the soaring Rangers dealt him to the Kansas City Royals for Aroldis Chapman. Write-ups of the swap, understandably, focused on Chapman’s potential impact. Ragans was often explained in the last paragraph, sketched as “a controllable left-hander who struggled through a 5.92 ERA in 24 1/3 major league innings this season but could slot into their rotation for the foreseeable future.”
And that was accurate. There just isn’t such a thing as a truly foreseeable future.
The Ragans who showed up for his Royals debut last summer was transformed. Since that day, he has the fourth-best park-adjusted ERA in MLB among pitchers who have thrown at least 200 innings. His fastball sits around 96 mph, and his changeup elicits a whiff 48 percent of the time a batter swings. In his first postseason start, he blanked the Baltimore Orioles and struck out eight in six innings. He looks like a 26-year-old ace.
So there he was on Monday. Standing tall under the lights of Yankee Stadium as the first batter stepped in with championship dreams on the line. That batter was Gleyber Torres, Chapman trade chip of the past.
The butterfly effect takes its name from an evocative example, but its conception traces back to a rounding error. In the early 1960s, a meteorology professor named Edward Lorenz was simulating weather patterns when he took a shortcut and entered one variable as 0.506 instead of its fully detailed 0.506127. He found that the minuscule difference rendered the results of his model unrecognizable, that the equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings could alter the course of a tornado.
Thanks to baseball’s rigorous annual routine, rounding error outcomes burst into reality just about every year—see this season’s Detroit Tigers, who in August had postseason odds so low (0.2 percent) that a beat writer booked his honeymoon for October. Each and every one exposes the multitudes within the calculations that drive baseball decisions.
In the Chapman-for-Ragans trade, Chris Young and the Texas front office operated on the short-term end of trade calculus, which is usually the short end of the overall value stick, by design. Give up five or more years of control of a likely major leaguer, get three or four critical months from a proven contributor. It’s a tactic fewer teams are willing to try in the 2020s, when collecting a bushel of puzzle pieces is viewed as a better bet than paying a premium for a missing piece.
A postseason format that thus far has sifted out division champs and delivered golden underdogs only bolsters the case that sustained contention should be the goal. The momentum of that logic is evident in the roster Tetris of (consistently winning) franchises such as the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays. It’s also evident in the market price of midseason closer acquisitions. Look no further than Chapman himself back in 2016, when the lefty was at the peak of his powers and the charmed Chicago Cubs were chasing their first World Series in 108 years. Theo Epstein traded Torres, MLB Pipeline’s No. 24 prospect, for half a season of Chapman’s services.
Eight years later, Chapman’s age at the time of last summer’s deal—he was midway through his age-35 season—explains part of the reason he was available for the relatively cheap cost of pre-breakout Ragans. But the steepest prospect price paid for a relief pitcher in 2024 would also look light to observers from a decade ago. The most promising player moved was probably pitcher Dylan Lesko, who went from the San Diego Padres to the Tampa Bay Rays for Jason Adam, but he came with control questions as he works back from Tommy John surgery. The best overall package was perhaps the Los Angeles Angels’ haul for Carlos Estevez, in which they acquired borderline top-100 pitching prospects George Klassen and Sam Aldegheri from the Philadelphia Phillies.
Since his debut in 2018, Torres has been tremendously useful, if inconsistently so. By FanGraphs WAR, he stacks up as one of the 60 best position players in baseball over that span. Now approaching free agency, he’s batting leadoff for a Yankees team that has not managed to break through for a championship during his tenure.
The Cubs, of course, won the World Series with Chapman (and despite his famous blown save in Game 7).
Trying to game out the past unravels in a hurry.
On one hand, you could convincingly argue Chapman wasn’t all that impactful for the 2023 Rangers. By park-adjusted ERA, they had MLB’s 24th-best bullpen the day they traded for Chapman and the 28th-best bullpen the rest of the way.
On the other hand, Jose Leclerc’s arm might have turned to Jell-o if he had been asked to work even one more high-leverage inning last October, and those dismal post-trade bullpen numbers were due, in part, to a 10.42 ERA from Josh Sborz, who whipped out a 0.75 ERA postseason and got the final seven outs in the clinching game of the World Series. Then there’s the matter of Ragans himself. Recall his usage as a Ranger prior to the trade when, following a dominant spring training, Texas attempted to use him as a multi-inning reliever instead of a starter, to those aforementioned deleterious results. Would he have figured out his winning formula without a change of scenery?
Whenever a trade idea appears to present a simple choice—win now versus win sustainably—it’s probably an illusion, a passing feeling more than a concrete structure with Door 1 and Door 2. However nice it would be to slot Ragans into the rotation, Rangers fans should try to watch his success, however long it lasts, with warmth.
No one could claim Chapman is the reason the Rangers won their first World Series, but there are a lot of ways that chain of events could have gone slightly awry, a lot of timelines where Chapman is part of the reason they didn’t win a World Series. Just ask the Phillies and Estevez, who gave up Francisco Lindor’s back-breaking grand slam on Wednesday night.
The Texas timeline is a bright one no matter how high Ragans flies. To whatever degree the ultimate value calculation shakes out in the Royals’ favor, it will be inextricable from the banner above Globe Life Field and every joyous moment it inspired. Consider that beautiful changeup a rounding error in an impossible equation.
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