The Rangers have signed left-hander Austin Gomber to a minor league deal, according to Aram Leighton of Just Baseball. Gomber’s deal includes an invite to MLB Spring Training next month.
Gomber, 32, was a fourth-round pick by the Cardinals back in 2014. He made his big league debut with the team in 2018 but was traded to the Rockies in the deal that sent Nolan Arenado to St. Louis and has spent most of his MLB career in Colorado at this point. At the time of the trade, Gomber had the look of a solid enough swing man who could potentially fit into a contending rotation. He posted a 3.72 ERA with a 3.89 FIP in his 104 innings of work for St. Louis, and at the time of his trade to Colorado the Rockies were surely hoping he could become a reliable #4 starter for the club alongside existing arms like German Marquez and Kyle Freeland.
The results of Gomber’s time in Colorado were mixed. His 4.53 ERA (good for a 106 ERA+) in 23 starts for the Rockies in his debut season with the club was perfectly solid, but he took a step back in 2022 and ’23 before creeping back up to roughly league average numbers in 2024. A big part of that step backwards was a drop in strikeout rate. Gomber punched out 23.2% of his opponents while walking 8.4% in 2021. Over his next three seasons, he’d manage to shave two points off that walk rate, lowering it to a tidy 6.3%, but that came at the expensive of a much greater dip in strikeouts. From 2022-24, Gomber struck out just 16.3% of his opponents, a nearly seven-point drop relative to 2021. Gomber’s ground ball rate also dipped from a strong 44.3% to a somewhat more pedestrian 40.5%.
While he’s struggled to live up to his solid 2021 season over the past few years, the wheels really came off in 2025. Gomber’s strikeout rate plummeted to just 12.5%, his ground ball rate dropped to 33.2%, and his barrel rate reached an untenable 14.5%. That left the southpaw to get shelled across 12 starts for the Rockies, and he surrendered a 7.49 ERA with a 6.50 FIP across his 57 2/3 innings of work. It was a disastrous display and led the Rockies to release Gomber back in August. He signed with the Cubs on a minor league deal for the stretch run and looked good at Triple-A Iowa for the club, posting an impressive 0.47 ERA in 19 innings of work across four outings (three starts).
That late season success in a new organization creates some reason for optimism, though Gomber was never going to land more than a minor league pact given the 2025 campaign he had at the big league level. That pact has now come in Texas, and Gomber should provide some much-needed rotation depth for a Rangers club in clear need of it even after trading for MacKenzie Gore. A rotation that could feature Gore, Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, Jack Leiter, and Kumar Rocker looks incredibly strong on paper, but Eovaldi and deGrom both come with substantial injury risk while Rocker has yet to prove himself as a capable MLB regular.
This spring, Gomber could compete with Rocker and swing man Jacob Latz for the fifth and final spot in the Rangers’ rotation. Gomber appears to be the least likely choice to emerge from that camp battle with a rotation spot, and other pitchers could be brought in who would further complicate matters. Even so, however, Gomber still appears fairly well positioned to enter the season with a real shot at breaking into the rotation, whether that comes by way of beating out other potential fifth starters or due to an injury creating an opening at some point during the season.