Jon Daniels and the Texas Rangers have a decision to make concerning their starting rotation in 2016. It will involve what I think will be re-signing one starter and letting the other one walk away. I speak of course about one Colby Lewis and one Yovani Gallardo. Two pitchers for one spot in the rotation, sort of. Yu Darvish will not be back until the end of May, maybe later, so that leaves the first two months of the season with two open slots in the rotation. I know the Rangers have farm arms who have pitched in the majors like Chi Chi Gonzalez, Nick Martinez, and other starting prospects like Nick Tepesch and Anthony Ranaudo (started 21 games for Round Rock in 2015), but they are not the caliber of Lewis or Gallardo.
In 2015, Colby was 17-9 with a 4.66 ERA. He led the team in wins and did not (for some reason I still don’t understand) get a post season
start, even though he is the winningest pitcher in Texas Rangers post season history. Colby has won at least ten games in every season since returning to the Texas Rangers that he started in more that 25 games (every season except for 2012, where he only started 16 games. Colby is healthy and ready to go and really wants to re-sign with the Texas Rangers. The down side to Colby is that he is older than Gallardo, no one knows how long the hip is going to hold out, and he gives up a lot of home runs (at least 20 a season except for 2012).
Gallardo is 10 years younger than Colby, he is from the area, and he also had a good 2015 campaign. Gallardo was 13-11 with a 3.42 ERA. Gallardo has a career ERA of 3.66, which is much better than Colby’s career ERA of 4.81, and his ERA since returning to the Texas Rangers 
is 4.28, a half run better than his career average. Gallardo could have taken the Rangers qualifying offer but decided to refuse it, which is really no big deal as most players refuse their teams qualifying offer in lieu of a multi year deal opportunity. I believe that Gallardo also would like to return in 2016 and beyond to the Texas Rangers, but I am not sure how much the team would be willing to pay to have him back.
Both men are good pitchers, one is a veteran with his best years in Texas red white and blue, and one is in his late twenties with a lot of pitching left to do. The question now is which option do the Rangers want? Colby will be somewhere around $5.5 mm for a one year contract, and Yovani will not take (in my opinion) an one year deal and will probably cost somewhere in the ballpark of $14 mm a year for at least 3 years if not more.
So if you were Jon Daniels, which player would you like to keep? In a perfect world, you would say both, but this is not a perfect world. So who is it going to be? Gallardo or Colby? What should the Texas Rangers do? Either a rotation that includes Cole Hamels, Yu Darvish, Martin Perez, Derek Holland and either Gallardo or Lewis on paper looks pretty good.
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