Rangers Make Handful Of Roster Moves

With Thursday being the deadline for MLB teams to finalize their 40-man rosters -- to protect players from the upcoming Rule-5 Draft -- the Texas Rangers made a flurry of roster moves. Per John Blake, Texas have added catcher Jorge Alfaro, middle infielder Hanser Alberto, and pitchers Luke Jackson and Jerad Eikoff to the major league roster.

To create space on the 40-man roster, they traded outfielder Daniel Robertson, whom they acquired last season from San Diego, to the Angels for cash considerations or a player to be named later, and are in the process of selling RHP Miles Mikolas and LHP Aaron Poreda to Japan. According to T.R. Sullivan, the Rangers are looking to do the same with outfielder Jim Adduci. 

At this point most of you are already familiar with Alfaro -- one of Texas's vaunted trio of top prospects -- and RHP Luke Jackson, the hard-throwing righty who more likely than not is going to end up in the Ranger bullpen, perhaps as early as next summer. Hanser Alberto gets lost in the doldrums of all the infield talent currently in the organization, but from a prospect standpoint the only thing you really need to know is he has a slick glove and no real bat to speak of. Essentially he's a reasonable facsimile for Luis Sardinas, though he isn't the type of prospect Sardinas is. 

Eikoff is a bit of a lesser-known, but from what I can tell from his FanGraphs page he is a fringe-average prospect who is a healthy bet to make a couple spot starts next season. Nothing sexy to see here. 

What I find more interesting is how many players the Rangers are selling. I just did a quick Internet search but couldn't find anything worthwhile, but I'm genuinely curious to know how much money MLB teams get in return for selling players to Japan. From what I could gather, the average salary for professional Japanese baseball players is around $400K (US currency), so if the Texas are selling Mikolas and Poreda, and possibly Adduci, how much would they be getting in return? $200K a pop? If you know the answer, I'd appreciate it. 

Daniel Robertson isn't the type of player or prospect the Rangers could receive anything worthwhile for in return, so my best guess is they'll take the cash over the PTBNL. If they successfully sell the rights of those four players, my best guess is that they'll have another $1 million or so to play with. 

It's not substantial in baseball terms, but given that I can't think of another time the Rangers have sold this many players in one offseason, it sort of highlights what many have believed to be true all along: That Texas are actively pinching pennies this offseason.