The Rangers are on the verge of adding a familiar piece to their rotation, agreeing to a three-year, $75 million deal with veteran righty Nathan Eovaldi at the Winter Meetings on Tuesday night, a source told MLB.com's Mark Feinsand. The club has not confirmed its agreement with Eovaldi, who spent the past two seasons in Texas' rotation.

Eovaldi, who will turn 35 in February, became a free agent when he declined his $20 million player option, which vested when he reached 300 innings combined across 2023-24.

The option was part of the two-year, $34 million deal Eovaldi signed with the Rangers as a free agent in December 2022. He had a 3.72 ERA with 298 strikeouts over 314 2/3 innings in the regular season over the life of that contract.

“Our ownership has done a great job of giving us the resources we need to win,” president of baseball operations Chris Young said on Tuesday morning. “We’re very confident that we're going to be able to put a winning team out on the field and a team that's capable of competing for the division and hopefully a world championship. We've got a lot of good things happening right now.”

Eovaldi is a pretty good thing.

The Texas native also stepped up in the 2023 postseason, going 5-0 with a 2.95 ERA over six starts to help the Rangers win their first World Series title. It was the second World Series ring for Eovaldi, who won his first championship with the Red Sox in 2018 and owns a 3.05 ERA over 79 2/3 innings in his postseason career.

Young has said all offseason that bringing back Eovaldi was the priority for the Rangers. The right-hander was the de facto ace of the staff during his two years with the club, stepping up when Jacob deGrom was sidelined after Tommy John surgery in June 2023, and serving as a leader both on and off the field.

The addition of Eovaldi makes a notable difference in the depth of the Rangers’ rotation, which is eight deep as it currently stands: deGrom, Eovaldi, right-hander Tyler Mahle, right-hander Jon Gray, left-hander Cody Bradford, right-hander Kumar Rocker, right-hander Jack Leiter and right-hander Dane Dunning.

It became clear ahead of the Winter Meetings that starting pitching -- Eovaldi or any other quality option -- would come at a steep price. The Rangers were clearly willing to pay for it.

“Good starting pitching is expensive,” Young said on Monday. “It's just the reality of it. It never goes down. It's consistent, I think, with what we expected. It's just the state of starting pitching today.”

The depth in the rotation is clearly important for obvious reasons, but also because six members of that eight-deep rotation have significant injury history. The other two -- Rocker and Leiter -- have a combined nine big league starts.

Eovaldi specifically has been bitten by the injury bug often during his big league tenure, undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2016 and reaching the 30-start plateau just twice (2014, 2021) over 13 seasons in the Majors.

However, the right-hander’s performance has gotten markedly better since he hit his 30s. Although he doesn’t throw quite as hard as he did in his youth, when he regularly touched 100 mph, Eovaldi has recorded an ERA between 3.63 and 3.87 in each of the past five years. He has notched a collective 3.75 ERA with a stellar 4.29 K/BB ratio in that span.

Eovaldi had a 4.30 ERA with a 2.42 K/BB over his first eight seasons, getting traded three times and spending time with five organizations -- the Dodgers, Marlins, Yankees, Rays and Red Sox -- during those years.

The Rangers will likely continue to add on the pitching side, but could potentially shift their focus towards the bullpen. The Texas bullpen posted a 4.41 ERA in 2024, but losing Kirby Yates (1.17 ERA) and David Robertson (3.00 ERA) is significant. They’ll even potentially be without José Leclerc (​​4.32 ERA), who is entering free agency for the first time after spending his entire professional career with the organization.

“There's a lot of different ways to piece it together,” Young said of the staff. “So we're open to all those. We've had a number of conversations and some long nights evaluating it, but we're open to a number of ways to try to compete to win.”