It was the final question of the final Zoom media availability before the Texas Rangers boarded a plane from Arizona to Texas. It’s a spot usually reserved for a quick follow-up or a clarification on a minor detail. The question — Is Rougned Odor definitively on your team? — could have been that.
Instead, it provided perhaps the most curious and potentially impactful answer of spring for the Rangers.
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“I don’t think we — we haven’t made our final roster, so I can’t definitively say that,” manager Chris Woodward said. “I will say he’s done a lot of really good things. He’s played really well at third base, and he’s done a lot of things on the offensive side, from a buy-in standpoint, so … I can’t definitively say. A lot of these guys, just because they’re on the roster doesn’t mean they’re necessarily on the Opening Day roster. So I can’t say that right now.”
Well, all right then.
In retrospect, that was a tough question for a manager to have to navigate if the team isn’t planning on keeping Odor. He could have lied, but that would cost him a fair amount of credibility and lead to a lot of “What happened over the two games against the Brewers that cost Odor his job?” questions.
One lie tends to lead to another, of course. Kudos to Woodward for not taking that route. But when the topic is a player with the history of Odor — who is still owed $27 million over the next three years, if you include the $3 million buyout after the 2022 season to avoid paying him $13.5 million in 2023 — anything less than an affirmative answer is a story.
Surprising as it was, however, it’s not as if it came as a huge surprise if you look at the big picture. Woodward has signaled before that Odor would not have unlimited chances with the team, going back nearly two years. On previous occasions, Odor has been able to make enough adjustments to keep his starting job at second base in the immediate interim or — over the past offseason — at least remain the front-runner for a new job starting at third base.
This seems like the end of that road, all things considered. Is the team going to see something in the remaining two preseason games against the Brewers that will tell them something about the player that they don’t already know after seven years at the big-league level? If Odor was on the team, Woodward would have said so.
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So … what happens now?
Option No. 1: Odor is traded
On one hand, the market for Odor is probably not exactly burning up. While he did acquiesce to a move to third base this spring, by all accounts performing at an above-average level at the position, he has also hit .200 with an OPS of .700 — an unusually low set of numbers for a player who historically torches Cactus League pitching. Woodward has hammered home the point on a number of occasions that “at-bat quality” is far more important during spring training than things like batting average and OPS (see: Nate Lowe and Jonah Heim, both of whom won jobs on the Opening Day roster), so it’s not wise to put too much stock in spring-training-sized samples.
But it’s hard to quantify the quality of Odor’s bats with so few games on television this spring and no Baseball Savant chase data for spring games. We can paint a better picture by looking at strikeouts and walks (eight and four, respectively, over 35 at-bats), but the truth is we might have to lean a little more heavily than we’d like on a logical fallacy — in this case, circular reasoning.
Woodward said that Odor’s defense was good and it would be at-bat quality that determined whether or not he made the team. Ergo, if he doesn’t make the team, it’s because his at-bats weren’t high quality. We know his at-bats weren’t high quality because … he’s not making the team. It’s not ideal, but we’re all doing the best we can under the limited access the pandemic has foisted upon us. But the ability (or inability) to accurately pinpoint the issue isn’t going to change the decision at hand.
So, a trade?
Sure, if you can find a partner. Who needs a second or third baseman? Maybe the Orioles — they always seem up for taking a flyer on former Rangers and Odor has enough change-of-pace potential to outrank Pat Valaika and Ramón Urías. The Nationals? They’re in the middle of sorting out their second- and third-base situation right now, maybe they’d accept Odor’s change-of-scenery potential.
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Regardless of who could accommodate him on their roster, the point remains: The return is going to be disappointing for Rangers fans. The first disappointment will be when you find out how much of Odor’s salary the Rangers are going to have to pay. I would estimate it to be approximately all of it, save for the league minimum. The second disappointment will come when you find out the name of the lower-level prospect the Rangers got back. It will almost certainly be a name you’ve never heard of.
Why? Put yourself in the shoes of another team. Your options are: give up a low-level prospect and agree to pay the league minimum to ensure that you’re the one who gets Odor, or wait until he hits the open market and sign him for the league minimum. The prospect is the cost of ensuring he doesn’t sign with another team. I’m not sure there’s a big enough bidding war out there to escalate the market into the “names you’ve probably heard of” echelon.
Option No. 2: Odor is designated for assignment
Let’s start by acknowledging: Texas could still pull off a trade with another team during the 10-day period after the designation, so it’s possible that a scenario exists where Option No. 1 and Option No. 2 both happen.
But if a trade could happen either way, why would the Rangers do this? First, it would create a 40-man roster spot immediately (allowing Texas to add, say, Charlie Culberson to the 40-man roster). Additionally, it would put a deadline on trade talks rather than letting them drag on into the season.
Beyond that, there are technically two reasons, but one of them is completely unreasonable: Another team could claim Odor on waivers and take on his remaining contract. The chances of this happening are almost precisely the same odds that I would give an egg of surviving a three-story drop. Could a large bird swoop in at the last minute and pull a superhero maneuver? I cannot definitively prove that to be an impossible outcome, mathematically speaking, but … it won’t happen. It just won’t.
The last reason the Rangers might try the DFA route would be if the front office thinks that a stint in Triple A could fix whatever ails Odor like it did in 2015. Assuming no team claimed him on waivers and no trade was worked out, they could try to outright him to Round Rock and see how it goes. But it looks like the Rangers have a solid second baseman in Nick Solak, with Andy Ibáñez, Culberson and Brock Holt available in the event of an injury and names like Justin Foscue, Davis Wendzel and Luisangel Acuña not far behind. Third base is no less crowded, with Josh Jung looking more and more like a long-term cornerstone and Wendzel and Sherten Apostel waiting in the wings. If the Rangers send Odor to Triple A, who does he jump ahead of, if all goes well?
Also, there’s one more hitch. Since Odor has more than five years of service time, he could refuse, meaning the team would have to either add him back to the 40-man roster or …
Option No. 3: Odor is released
These are the triggers a front office can only pull once in a while: letting the owners know that they will be paying $27 million over the next two years, and in return, they will be getting absolutely zilch. There’s not enough chocolate syrup in the world to make what you’re eating taste like anything other than what it is. This is the option that feels the most like a kick in the gut, and it’s probably the second most-likely option. I’d put a trade slightly ahead of this option, since there are still teams for whom a revitalized Odor could present an upgrade.
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Of course, there’s always …
Option No. 4: Odor makes the team
As of Sunday afternoon, right up until that last question of the manager’s Zoom meeting, this seemed to be the most likely option. But managers don’t say things like Woodward said on Sunday if the plan is to keep Odor. Woodward’s answer felt an awful lot like trying to delay officially announcing that the team is cutting ties with the player.
As I said before, it’s not like there’s going to be a revelation in the next two games that changes the team’s opinion of Odor. The unwillingness or inability to give a vote of confidence is the sort of thing that makes a future relationship tricky, at best. The player has to know at this point that he’s not the first option, so even if he’s on the team, it would feel a lot like he’s only there as a placeholder until Jung’s arrival.
But what happens if Solak or Holt is injured in one of the next two games before the Rangers have to make final roster decisions? All these factors considered, Odor probably represents a better option to step in and start a few weeks’ worth of games than Ibáñez, considering the utter failure that a release would represent.
But even if that happens, the writing is on the wall. Odor would know that an injury created a spot for him on the team. Nobody wants to feel like a backup option, and for a team that is leaning hard into a youth movement, that’s certainly not the sort of uneasy partnership you want looming over a clubhouse.
If Odor is still a Ranger by the end of this week, it seems now that it would only be because something changed and not because the team views him as a long-term solution.
His time with the Rangers appears to be coming to an end.
(Top photo of Rougned Odor: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)
