Just a few years ago teams across Major League Baseball were taking notes about how the Texas Rangers won the 2023 World Series. Now, the Rangers are back to taking notes.
The Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays will face each other in the World Series which begins on Friday. It's a unique matchup of two small market teams at a time when Major League owners and the MLB Players Association are fighting over the financial future of the game. While they try to divide up billions, the Brewers and the Rays will try to win their first World Series.
The Rangers should be watching closely. Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young wants his team to get younger and more athletic, which likely means getting less expensive. The Brewers and the Rays have built winners on a budget. That also means they can’t keep everyone.
Neither team has many free agents after the season. But there's one that could be a perfect fit for the Rangers bullpen in 2027.
The Right World Series Free Agent to Pursue
Milwaukee left-handed reliever JoJo Romero has had a good postseason. The 30-year-old is 2-1 with a 1.69 ERA in four games, with nine strikeouts and one walk in 5.1innings. He’s only allowed two hits and one earned run.
He had a solid regular season for the Brewers, who acquired him from the St. Louis Cardinals at the trade deadline. He went 3-3 with a 3.36 ERA in 55 games, with 54 strikeouts and 18 walks in 56.1 innings. Batters hit just .238 against him. That isn’t an aberration. He’s posted an ERA of 3.68 or lower in each of the past four seasons.
He’s emerged as a workhorse lefty with a healthy strikeout-to-walk ratio who doesn’t allow batters to hit well against him. His opponent batting average for the past five seasons is below .240.
He doesn’t have overpowering stuff. He relies on a sinker-sweeper combination for 81% of his pitches. He throws a four-seam fastball just 2% of the time. But it’s the action on those two pitches that gets hitters to do something that every team values — ground balls. His ground ball rate was 51.2% in 2026, which was in the 88th percentile in the Majors per Statcast.
That isn’t an aberration, either. Dig into his history in the Majors and he has one of the best ground ball rates in baseball when he has the innings to quality. One year it was close to the 100th percentile.
Texas tends to turn over its bullpen year to year. If may not be able to retain Tyler Alexander, a left-handed with similar traits. If the Rangers can’t, then signing Romero would be the perfect fit.
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