With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.<\/p>\n
Today we are looking at reliever Phil Maton.<\/p>\n
The life of a useful but not great major league reliever is a life where you don\u2019t put down roots. You\u2019re a vagabond, going from city to city, rarely staying in any one place for very long.<\/p>\n
Take Phil Maton, for example. He first appeared in the majors in 2017. He\u2019s made at least 30 major league appearances every year since his debut, other than in 2020, when he appeared in just 23 games, for obvious reasons. He has appeared in at least 63 games in each of the past five seasons.<\/p>\n
Per B-R, Maton has accumulated eight years and 47 days of major league service time. In accumulating those 8-plus years of service time, he has played for seven teams. Barring something unforeseen, he will chalk up a major league appearance for his eighth team \u2014 the Chicago Cubs, who signed him to a two year plus option deal this offseason \u2014 in roughly two-plus weeks.<\/p>\n
He was traded by the San Diego Padres, where he started his career, and for whom he pitched for two-plus seasons, to Cleveland in 2019 for international bonus slot money. He was traded two years later in a deadline deal to the Astros, along with Yainer Diaz, for Myles Straw.<\/p>\n
That had to have hurt, having a team not just trade you for Myles Straw, but have to include another player in the deal because you aren\u2019t, on your own, good enough to be traded straight up for Myles Straw.<\/p>\n
Maton was purchased in July, 2024, from the Rays by the Mets, which is probably worse than being traded for international slot money or as part of the acquisition price for Myles Straw, since it was an instance of a team just wanting another club to take him off their hands.<\/p>\n
And of course, Maton was traded again at the deadline in 2025, to Texas. Texas gave up Skylar Hales, Mason Molina and international bonus slot money for him, and I\u2019m wondering if he\u2019s the first player to be traded twice in deals for international bonus slot money.<\/p>\n
Maton had pitched well for the Cardinals, and the package the Rangers gave up was fairly light. Neither Hales nor Molina are currently listed among the Cardinals\u2019 top 30 prospects per BA. Hales is a reliever who got hammered while pitching for Frisco and Round Rock before being traded, and then got hammered while pitching for Memphis post-trade. Molina is a pitchability lefty starter in A ball who the Rangers got for Grant Anderson the previous winter. Neither is likely to do anything of note in the majors.<\/p>\n
In his first five games for the Rangers post-trade, Maton allowed one run in five innings over five outings. In his final 16 outings, he allowed three runs over 15.2 innings over 16 appearances. That\u2019s very good!<\/p>\n
The two appearances Maton made between those stretches, however, are probably what Rangers fans will end up remembering him for, as they involved him taking the \u201cL\u201d in two of the most gut-wrenching, stomach-punching, devastating losses the Rangers experienced all year.<\/p>\n