Chris Martin runs it again with the Rangers

If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, you know that this week, the week after the Winter Meetings, is a week for roundups. Will the Rangers make some moves on Friday? I’m bundling them into one cozy article. Will there be a passel of lefties coming off the board on Tuesday? Michael Rosen arranges them into a neat bouquet. A few teams talk themselves into believing they could be the ones to find out Jos Bell And Adolis Garcia? Michael Baumann will repeatedly bang his head against the wall for our entertainment. That’s how it goes.

On Wednesday, Chris Martinthe big, 39-year-old middle reliever from Texas, signed up for one final rodeo with his hometown Rangers. As with many small deals, no one has reported how much Martin will be paid for the 2026 season. The news almost seemed destined to take up a quarter of the reliever roundup, but I’d like to give Martin some single billing here, because I don’t think we performed well enough to celebrate how good he’s been. Let’s start at the beginning.

Martin is 6-foot-4, and while many pitchers that size take a while to figure things out, his journey has been considerably more winding. The Tigers selected him out of Arlington High School in the 18th round of the 2004 draft, but Martin attended McLennan Community College in Waco instead. The Rockies took him in the 21st round as a draft-and-follow in 2005, but he tore his labrum in his second season, so they declined to sign him. In 2007, he tried out for the Fort Worth Cats, an independent team, but didn’t stay long. His shoulder “just wasn’t ready to go yet,” he said later told reporters.

Martin had surgery, found a job in the warehouse, and that was that, at least for a while. Three years later, he tried out for indy ball Grand Prairie AirHogs. He made the rotation, posted a 1.96 ERA and signed with the Red Sox. From 2011 to 2013, Martin posted a 3.12 ERA and 2.96 FIP in the minors, throwing more than 70 innings per season and peaking at Triple-A. The Red Sox traded him to the Rockies after the 2013 season, and he debuted for Colorado in 2014 before being sold to the Yankees before the 2015 season. Through the first two years of his career, pitching for the Rockies and Yankees, Martin owned a 6.19 ERA despite an FIP of 3.71. He seemed to be having a lot of bad luck, but the Yankees released him. At the age of 30, he started pitching for the Nippon Ham Fighters in NPB. Martin was undefeated in Japan and posted a 1.11 ERA in the 2016 and 2017 seasons. Despite an ankle injury, he struck out 29% of the batters he faced and walked just 4%. That means he walked 13 batters over two seasons and 89 1/3 innings. That’s good enough to get you home.

The Rangers signed Martin to a two-year contract for $4 million. “Martin’s signing is, all things considered, pretty easy to ignore,” Jeff Sullivan wrote at the time. “I can’t promise anything. I don’t know what Martin might be capable of. But I almost feel obligated to try to cheer him up. This seems like a forgettable deal, but Martin seems to have a big advantage.” In 2018, Martin again significantly underperformed his FIP, but in 2019 things finally turned around. How well did they go?

From 2019 to 2025, Martin has thrown 311 innings with an ERA of 2.84 and an FIP of 2.88. During those seven seasons, he put up 6.5 WAR as a reliever. That’s the eleventh highest total in baseball. The 10 players in front of him have names like Class, Hader, Diaz, Williams, KapmanAnd Jansen. We’re talking about the best relievers in baseball. Martin has a better ERA than six of them. He also has a better FIP than six of them. But every player ahead of him has at least 86 saves, compared to Martin’s 15. That’s understandable. Martin doesn’t look like a closer. He doesn’t have one unhittable throw. He throws a lot of different ones. His fastball hovers around league average in terms of velocity. He doesn’t collect many scents. His greatest skill is avoiding walks. But he does strike out a surprising number of batters, and he keeps the ball on the ground; that combination allowed him to be one of the best relievers in the game into his late 30s.

Martin’s ability to strike out hitters without causing a whiff is truly an outlier. As I’m sure you know, the relationship there is extremely linear. Players who miss bats score strikeouts. Here is a graph showing every pitcher who has thrown at least 250 innings over the last seven seasons. Martin is the pink dot with a strikeout rate much higher than it should be.

But that’s only been in the last six years. We select Martin’s best seasons. We have numbers going back to 2002, and even including his strange, ugly first three Major League campaigns, he still stands out from the rest.

How on earth does Martin do that? How does he get so many strikeouts without getting so many whiffs? It can’t be earned through tons of called strikes. Of the 1,145 pitchers in that chart, his 16% so-called strike rate puts him in the 34th percentile. Martin retires all those batters in an even less sexy way. He causes tons of foul balls. Over the course of his career, when batters swung at Martin’s pitches, they fouled the ball 42% of the time. Since 2008, 857 different pitchers have induced at least 2,000 swings. Among them, Martin’s error rate of 42% ranks 13th. That’s six spots below Mariano Rivera. All told, Martin has earned strikes on 51% of the pitches he’s thrown in the major leagues. Over the course of the pitch-tracking era, that puts him in the 97th percentile, right in between Garrett hook And Max Scherzer. I swear to God.

When he finally stuck in the major leagues, Martin bounced around, going from the Rangers to the Braves (with whom he won a World Series), the Cubs, the Dodgers and the Red Sox. After 2024, he indicated that he would like to end his career with a final season with the Rangers. He signed up for one year and a $5.5 million birth tax credit. Echoing Jeff Sullivan eight years later, Michael Baumann wrote, “Martin is neither a workhorse nor a knockout stuff guy. His career high in innings is 55 2/3, his fastball is in the low to mid 90s, and he doesn’t have a breaking ball worth talking about.”

Everything Baumann said was true. Martin throws two fastballs and a changeup, and leads with the error-causing cutter. The most intimidating thing about him is his size, and things weren’t going so well in 2025. Shoulder fatigue forced him to go to the IL in May, and a calf strain did the same in July. Scariest of all, his season ended a few weeks early due to thoracic outlet syndrome. But for once, luck seemed to be on Martin’s side. Because he gave up a few more home runs and walks than usual, his 3.58 FIP was his highest since 2015. However, he finished with a 2.98 ERA over 42 1/3 innings.

So what should we expect from Martin in 2026? I guess I have to be the latest in a long line of FanGraphs writers to temper your expectations. There’s no way to know what to expect from Martin at this point in his career. He will be 40 years old in June. Last season he had to deal with several injuries. He will be dealing with thoracic outlet syndrome, which could end his career at any age. His fastball has been solidly below average in terms of velocity over his last few outings, and he ran his slowest groundball rate since 2020. But I’m not going to count Martin out just yet. DRA- still loved him in 2025. Stuff+ quite liked all his throws (and loved the sweeper that he never actually throws). The Rangers clearly still think he has something left in the tank. He deserves at least one more chance.