The way the 2017 season played out, if you’d been told that Joey Gallo would make fewer than a quarter of the Rangers’ starts at first base in 2018, chances are you’d have assumed one of four things: Adrian Beltre got hurt, or traded, or Gallo himself had been hurt or dealt. What happened instead has put the Rangers in an even greater position of strength as far as their depth in young corner bats is concerned, and it sets up a very interesting off-season.
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It was an injury — to Elvis Andrus, not Gallo or Beltre — that accelerated Ronald Guzman’s Major League arrival. He’d been added to the 40-man roster following the 2016 season (after going unrostered and undrafted the year before) and had taken a bit of a step forward in 2017 at the AAA level, but even then there wasn’t a sense that Guzman was a player Texas was making specific plans for. Gallo started the club’s first 14 games at first base this season, but when Andrus joined Rougned Odor and Delino DeShields on the disabled list with a broken elbow, the decision was made to move Gallo to left field — and to bring Guzman to Arlington.
Less than five months later, Guzman has over 90 starts at first base, playing elite defense and hitting home runs at a greater frequency than at any minor league stop in his seven-year career. Whether his emergence has made it more likely that the Rangers move another corner bat this winter (Gallo, Nomar Mazara, or Willie Calhoun, all left-handed hitters like Guzman) is uncertain, but at the very least he’s made himself a potentially valuable commodity in that same regard. He was not that coming out of spring training.
First base doesn’t have quite the franchise legacy that catcher and third base hold in Texas, but for more than three decades it’s been a fairly steady position. After Pete O’Brien held things down for most of the 1980s, Rafael Palmeiro and Will Clark manned first base in Texas for most of a 15-year period. Mark Teixeira took over, and since his departure in 2007 a number of players (primarily Chris Davis, Mitch Moreland, Mike Napoli, and Prince Fielder) have rotated through. Gallo was the latest to claim the spot, and now it’s Guzman’s.
Two first basemen in the Rangers’ farm system have also had tremendous years. At Low-A Hickory, Tyreque Reed (Round 8, 2017) hit .267/.343/.503, finishing fourth in the South Atlantic League with 18 home runs even though he didn’t start his season until the second week of May. He got better as the season wore on, going from a .658 OPS in May to .716 in June, .938 in July, and 1.019 in August. One level below, Curtis Terry (Round 13, 2015) was named Northwest League MVP, hitting .337/.434/.606 (league-leading 1.040 OPS) in his third stint with Short-Season A Spokane, whose playoff run got underway last night.
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To be fair, both right-handed hitters are years away, and the lessons of Shawn Gallagher, Kelly Dransfeldt, and Mike Olt teach us to tap the brakes before carving out big league spots for either of them. They also don’t play defense at Guzman’s level. Few do.
No team had ever paid a Latin-American amateur hitter more than $3.15 million before the Rangers set new marks with 16-year-olds Mazara ($4.95 million) and Guzman ($3.45 million) on July 2, 2011. The size of the signings was questioned by at least one major publication, and through the 2013 minor league season, neither player had done enough to force a retraction.
Mazara then broke out with a tremendous age-19 season in 2014, hitting .271/.362/.478 between Low-A Hickory and AA Frisco, skipping the High-A level. By April 2016, he was in the Major Leagues.
Meanwhile, Guzman repeated at Hickory in 2014, just as Mazara did, but then saw his uninspiring numbers plummet to .218/.283/.330 in his encore as a Crawdad. Then, after the season, he was involved in a tragic auto accident in his La Vega, Dominican Republic hometown. A motorcyclist (found to be under the influence of alcohol) collided with Guzman’s SUV and died. The 20-year-old Guzman was not arrested and was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Though he was exonerated, it would be surprising if the experience didn’t affect Guzman in 2015, when his numbers crept back up in the hitter-friendly California League but not to a level that might have prompted Texas to put him on the 40-man roster that November. Any club could have drafted him the following month, and none did so.
Guzman started putting things together, however, in 2016 (.274/.333/.449 between Frisco and AAA Round Rock) — after which the Rangers rostered him — and then he took another step forward on his first option in 2017 (.298/.372/.434 with Round Rock), though his power dipped against more advanced pitching. He was earmarked for a return to the Express in 2018, and after an uninspiring spring training with Texas (3 for 24, six strikeouts) he was in fact with Round Rock for a week — hitting safely in each of his five games and drawing walks in four of them — before the Andrus injury led to his Rangers debut.
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Guzman isn’t going to shake up the Rookie of the Year race, and he’s going to have to bring his game up offensively to establish himself as an everyday big leaguer, but his season has been an unexpected success. He’s a player who wasn’t supposed to rack up a fraction of the 400 Major League plate appearances he’s approaching this year, and he certainly wasn’t expected to drive 14 balls out of the park (his minor league high was 16, in more than 100 added trips to the plate). Guzman’s OPS is .735, which is only marginally better than the .729 league average — but Mazara’s rookie OPS was just .739, in a year when that mark was exactly average for the league.
Granted, Mazara was two years younger as a rookie than Guzman is. But the measure isn’t whether Guzman is Mazara’s equal with the bat. It’s whether Guzman has made himself a potentially valuable piece of the puzzle, and he’s done that.
At this time a year ago, the Rangers were looking at a mix of Mazara, Gallo, and Calhoun while whiteboarding scenarios under which they could eventually get all three in the lineup, especially with Shin-Soo Choo (and possibly Adrian Beltre) still around. They now face the same question, only now third base no longer appears to be one of the musical chairs, Beltre or not, and there’s one more player in the room. Guzman may have the least trade value of the four young left-handed bats, but his presence could make it easier for Texas to get its arms around the idea of trading one of the other three for a more significant return.
It’s a sports-problem, but one that, in this year of disappointing results, the Rangers are happy to have.
EXIT VELO
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- Lefthander C.D. Pelham, who made his big league debut last night, was the only one of the Rangers’ five September roster additions without prior Major League experience. The club also added Calhoun, righthanders Austin Bibens-Dirkx and Adrian Sampson, and infielder Hanser Alberto. Texas isn’t necessarily finished expanding the roster and can make bring more players up this month, but club officials have said (as in prior years) that they don’t plan to add players unless there are clear opportunities for them to contribute. Among those most interesting omissions are outfielder Scott Heineman and righthander Chris Rowley, both on the 40-man roster, and lefthander Brady Feigl, who is not. Each finished the minor league season in AAA.
- Short-Season A Spokane is the only one of the Rangers’ six stateside farm clubs to have reached the post-season, after winning four straight to make up a two-game division deficit with five to play. The Indians jumped on 37-year-old big league veteran Hisashi Iwakuma for three runs in the first two innings of the Northwest League playoffs on Wednesday, ending his night, and kept hitting en route to a 7-3 win over the Mariners’ Everett AquaSox affiliate. Curtis Terry drove in four runs, while promising outfielder Julio Pablo Martinez had three hits. Emmanuel Clase struck out the game’s two final hitters, nailing down Spokane’s win in the opener of the best-of-three semifinals.
- The Rangers’ two Dominican Summer League clubs both reached the semi-finals of the 44-team league’s playoffs, with the Rangers1 club taking the Rays to a winner-take-all Game Five in the finals, only to lose, 8-1.
- AAA Round Rock unceremoniously ended its season, and likely its affiliation with the Rangers, with a rainout in Des Moines, Iowa on Monday that wasn’t made up. The Express has served as the Rangers’ AAA club for eight years. Among the AAA clubs rumored to be in consideration for a Player Development Contract with Texas are the Nashville Sounds — who will open their 2019 schedule in Round Rock.
