Reliever J.T. Chargois will be in camp with the Rangers on a NRI deal
The Texas Rangers have signed veteran reliever J.T. Chargois to a minor league deal, the team announced today.
If you are a fringy reliever who was seeking a major league deal but, with camps opening, is having to settle for a minor league deal, the Rangers would seem to be a good team to sign with. The Rangers have added a bunch of relievers this offseason, but many of them are middling to mediocre options who are on relatively low dollar deals, and there would appear to be opportunities to make the club for a reliever who has a strong spring.
Chargois is a low-slot righthander who is almost exclusively a sinker/slider guy. He was originally a second round pick of the Minnesota Twins out of Rice in 2012 and pitched out of the bullpen for them for a good part of 2016, but was waived in the spring of 2018 after missing most of 2017 due to injury and was claimed by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Chargois spent the 2018 and 2019 seasons bouncing between AAA and the majors, then was released by the Dodgers after 2019 so he could sign with Rakuten in the JPL. He returned to MLB in 2021, signing with the Seattle Mariners, who traded him mid-season to the Rays. The Rays traded him to the Marlins after the 2022 season, and the Marlins traded him back to Seattle at the trade deadline. He became a free agent when Seattle non-tendered him.
Chargois has a career 3.35 ERA and 4.02 FIP in 231 innings over 244 major league appearances. He had a weird 2024 season, with a gaudy 2.23 ERA in 36 innings, but with a 4.90 FIP and a 4.40 xERA. Like most sinker/slider guys, Chargois historically has been a ground ball pitcher, but in 2024 he had just a 38.6% ground ball rate.
Chargois will presumably be one of the pitchers being looked at for a potential role in the major league bullpen, and I’d think that if you were ranking NRIs based on likelihood of making the team, he’d be pretty high on that list.