Rangers Option Delino DeShields To Triple-A, Place Shawn Kelley On 10-Day IL
TODAY: Guzman has been officially activated, as per Rangers executive VP of communications John Blake (Twitter link). In another move, Texas has placed reliever Shawn Kelley on the 10-day IL due to an infection. Right-hander Wei-Chieh Huang has been recalled from Triple-A to take Kelley’s roster spot.
YESTERDAY: The Rangers announced following today’s game that they’ve optioned center fielder Delino DeShields Jr. to Triple-A Nashville. Jeff Wilson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram tweets that first baseman Ronald Guzman will be returning from the injured list in place of DeShields, though the Rangers won’t officially announce anything until tomorrow.
The decision to option DeShields to Triple-A likely means more playing time in the outfield for the revitalized Hunter Pence, who is hitting .344/.411/.656 with five homers, but it does leave Texas without a true center fielder on its roster. Joey Gallo has some experience there, and Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News tweets that today’s move could push Gallo to the position “pretty regularly.” Journeyman infielder/outfielder Danny Santana has 916 career innings in center field, but Texas has used him exclusively in the infield since bringing him to the Majors.
DeShields’ demotion to Nashville is just the latest downturn in a Rangers tenure that has been perpetuated by peaks and valleys. Selected from the Astros in the 2014 Rule 5 Draft, the former No. 8 overall pick and top prospect made Texas look wise in 2015 with a .261/.344/.374 batting line as a rookie. He then flopped at the plate in 2016 before enjoying a rebound campaign in 2017. While the organizational hope was that DeShields had begun to solidify himself with that effort, he once again struggled in 2018 and will now head back to Triple-A to try to sort things out.
To this point, the Rangers have spent nearly a half decade trying to harness DeShields’ considerable athleticism and turn him into a consistent, everyday player. However, the resulting .241/.327/.337 batting line (76 OPS+, 78 wRC+) in 1635 plate appearances hasn’t exactly given them much to show for those efforts. DeShields still has an option year remaining beyond 2019, so the Rangers can continue to exhibit patience with him. On the other hand, DeShields will turn 27 in August, so it’s not as if he’s particularly young anymore.
President of baseball operations Jon Daniels made clear following today’s demotion, though, that he still views DeShields as a viable long-term option in Arlington (Twitter link via Grant). “Delino is a valuable player,” said Daniels. “He’s a big leaguer. At this point, we are choosing to keep a deeper bullpen and didn’t want to cut ties permanently with anyone. Delino will play every day in Nashville, get himself going, and be ready to help us again this year.”
Any move that affords more playing time to a veteran like Pence at the expense of a younger option such as DeShields may at first seem counter-intuitive, given that they’re in a fairly transitional state. That said, DeShields’ poor play so far hasn’t left them with much of an alternative. He’s hitting just .182/.321/.284 through his first 108 trips to the plate. Beyond that, there’s an argument to be made that giving DeShields regular playing time in a lower-pressure environment is what’s best for him from a long-term standpoint. And while Texas isn’t in a pure rebuilding/tanking mode, they’re clearly taking a longer-term look at things rather than striving for a postseason berth in 2019.
For the time being, Gallo will get another opportunity to convince the organization that he can at least be a passable option in center field. He’s logged 158 innings there dating back to Opening Day 2018, and even being able to serve as an occasional option there in the coming years would be a valuable trait to have in his back pocket.
The aforementioned Santana could plausibly factor in there as well, though he’s unlikely to be a long-term piece for the Rangers. While he can technically be controlled through 2021, Santana’s .311/.358/.541 output doesn’t appear sustainable. That line is a close approximation of his excellent rookie season with the Twins, but like that 2014 campaign, his output to this point has been buoyed by a roughly .400 average on balls in play. Santana’s hard-hit rate, remarkably, checked in at 51.9 percent entering play Wednesday, so he’s definitely squaring up the ball well. However, that type of contact is the type expected from the league’s top sluggers — not a player who hit .219/.256/.319 in 735 PAs from 2015-18.
James Shields Reportedly Drawing Interest
TODAY: Shields says he has also given a look to scouts for the Yankees and Orioles, as Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reports (subscription link). To this point, though, Shields says he has yet to receive a “formal offer.”
It’s hard to believe that no teams were willing to sign Shields to a minor-league deal; reading between the lines, it may simply be that they didn’t bother based upon the indications given by his reps at PSI Sports Management. There does seem to be reason to believe that Shields is looking for a 40-man roster spot upon signing. His salary demands are not fully known. “I definitely am not asking for an outrageous salary,” he says, “but I would want to be treated fairly for what I do and bring to a ball club.”
YESTERDAY: Free agent righty James Shields is drawing increased interest, according to a report from MLB.com’s Jon Morosi. He has thrown recently for teams including the Tigers, Indians and Rangers.
It’s not entirely clear whether those three organizations maintain ongoing interest after watching the veteran hurler. But it seems all but certain that some team will ultimately pick up the durable and experienced 37-year-old.
Shields is obviously not the excellent rotation piece he once was, but he’s the type of steadying presence that could make quite a bit of sense for the right team. Still, his market has been quiet to the point of nonexistence thus far, at least in terms of public reporting.
Last year, Shields worked to a 4.53 ERA with 6.8 K/9 and 3.4 BB/9. Those are middling numbers, but it must be noted that Shields compiled them over 204 2/3 frames — a rather hefty tally in this day and age.
It’s possible to imagine a variety of scenarios making sense for Shields. Non-competitive teams may like the idea of slotting him in to gobble up innings and set the tone for younger teammates. And some contenders may even contemplate Shields as a gap-filler or limited-inning starter. He was hit hardest the third (.248/.310/.461 in 252 plate appearances) and fourth (.444/.474/.944 in 19 plate appearances) times through the order last year. Limiting that exposure, perhaps by pairing Shields with a lefty long man, could enhance his usefulness.
Rangers Facing Roster Crunch?
- Ronald Guzman (hamstring) is set to return from an IL stint on Thursday, leaving the Rangers with a 25-man roster question, Jeff Wilson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram writes. Veterans Danny Santana and Logan Forsythe have been two of the team’s better hitters, and designating either for assignment would create the risk of a claim from another team, plus Santana and Forsythe both have the right to reject an assignment to Triple-A. Perhaps the likelier option is that Texas demotes a reliever, as the Rangers are already working with an eight-man bullpen, or Delino DeShields is sent to Triple-A and Santana takes over in center field. One option that isn’t on the table is a Triple-A stint for the struggling Rougned Odor, as manager Chris Woodward expressed confidence that the second baseman would get on track. Even after a two-hit performance today against the Blue Jays, Odor is hitting only .141/.221/.244 through 86 PA this season.
Rangers To Activate Drew Smyly On Sunday
- Texas will activate southpaw Drew Smyly from the IL to start Sunday against Toronto, Rangers executive vice president of communications John Blake announced. The oft-injured Smyly, who missed 2017-18 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, has been on the IL since April 20 because of mid-arm nerve tightness in his left arm. While the 29-year-old seems to have dodged a serious ailment this time, his return from TJ surgery has been a struggle thus far. Smyly has averaged fewer than four innings a start across four tries and posted a 7.80 ERA with six walks per nine and a meager 26.7 percent groundball rate.
Rangers Sign Seth Maness
The Rangers have agreed to a deal with righty Seth Maness, the club announced. It’s a minor-league arrangement.
Maness, 30, carries a 3.21 ERA in 247 career relief innings at the game’s highest level. Though he managed only 5.7 K/9 in that span, he succeeded by carrying a strong 59.0% groundball rate and limiting the free passes (1.7 per nine).
Unfortunately, elbow problems intervened. Maness earned a $1.4MM salary as a Super Two in 2016 but was non-tendered by the Cardinals that fall. He ultimately became the first big league hurler to undergo a Tommy John-alternative procedure to address damage to his ulnar collateral ligament.
Though he made it back to the majors in ’17 with the Royals, Maness received only an eight-game showing. He was not terribly effective during his post-surgical action at Triple-A, allowing eighty hits and 38 earned runs in 58 2/3 innings.
Since opting out of his deal with the Royals this time last year in hopes of finding a chance to work as a starter, Maness had not reappeared in the affiliated ranks. He’s back now with the Texas organization after evidently showing something in his brief time with the Atlantic League’s High Point Rockers. Maness will get the start tonight for Triple-A Nashville, the Rangers announced.
Craig Gentry Retires
Outfielder Craig Gentry, a veteran of 10 big league seasons, has retired at the age of 35, agent Bob Garber tells MLBTR. Gentry was with the Giants during Spring Training and signed a minor league contract with the Rockies last month. He played in only three games with Colorado’s Triple-A affiliate (and collected seven hits), however, before deciding to spend more time with his family rather than pursue a return to the Majors.
Though he was never a star or even an everyday player, the fleet-footed Gentry enjoyed a solid run as a defensive-minded platoon outfielder with the Rangers and A’s from 2011-14 — during which time he hit .278/.353/.355 with four homers, 35 doubles, nine triples and 75 steals. Paired with his strong glovework in the outfield, that performance checked in at 8.5 wins above replacement, per Fangraphs, and 9.6 WAR according to Baseball-Reference. Most recently, Gentry appeared in 145 games with the Orioles from 2017-18, hitting at a .265/.326/.362 clip in a familiar reserve outfielder’s role.
Gentry’s career will come to a close with a .262/.333/.339 batting line in 601 MLB games and 1402 plate appearances between the Rangers, A’s, Angels and Orioles. Defensive metrics were always bullish on him, as evidenced by a career +53 Defensive Runs Saved mark and a +31.9 Ultimate Zone Rating across all three outfield slots. The 2006 10th-round pick earned about $7MM in his playing career. Best wishes to Gentry in his post-playing days.
Rangers' Owen White To Have Tommy John Surgery
- Rangers 2018 second-round pick Owen White will miss the remainder of the 2019 season due to Tommy John surgery, writes Jeff Wilson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The right-hander joins 2018 fourth-rounder Mason Englert as the second Rangers prospect from last year’s draft to undergo the procedure in recent weeks. The pair of injuries comes in spite of the Rangers organization keeping both White and Englert from pitching last summer in an effort to help manage the workloads of young, recent draftees. Both White and Englert were slated to start the season in short-season Class-A and were already years from being options at the big league level, but the loss of a pair of high-upside teenagers for a full season before either even pitches for a minor league affiliate is undoubtedly maddening for a club that has already been snakebit by pitching injuries in recent years.
Rangers Remove Jose Leclerc From Closer’s Role
Rangers manager Chris Woodward announced today that he expects to remove righty Jose Leclerc from the team’s closer role, as Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News was among those to report. He’ll instead be utilized in low-leverage spots for the time being.
Leclerc, 25, has reverted to his command-challenged ways after a breakout 2018 season. He’s carrying an ugly 8.44 ERA with 11.8 /9 and 7.6 BB/9 over 10 2/3 innings. Leclerc has also been tagged for a whopping 53.3% hard contact, surrendering a pair of long balls among 14 base hits.
The worries run deep for the youthful reliever. Though he’s throwing harder than ever, and getting first strikes at a personal-best 62.5%, opponents seem to have figured something out. Leclerc is getting chases on just 21.2% of the pitches he throws out of the zone and giving up much more contact on those pitches than he has previously. He sits on an 8.2% swinging-strike rate — less than half the level he carried last year.
Fortunately for Leclerc, he inked an extension before the start of the season. Saves are a key statistic for arbitration-eligible pitchers, so even a temporary removal from the ninth inning would have impacted his bottom line.
The decision is disappointing for the Texas organization for the same reason. Paying up for Leclerc was all about locking in cost savings on a pitcher who was supposed to secure wins for the club for years to come. Instead, veterans Shawn Kelley and Chris Martin will get the late-inning chances while the team tries to help Leclerc rediscover his form.
Could Elvis Andrus Opt Out This Fall?
When MLBTR’s Steve Adams recently laid out the opt-out decisions that will await several players at the end of the season, he was only willing to go so far as to give Elvis Andrus “an actual chance” at holding enough value to punt the three years (2020-22) and $43MM left on his deal with the Rangers. Now, with a month of the season in the books, Andrus has out-WARred all but five other position players leaguewide. Is it time we upgrade the likelihood that he opts out?
When the Rangers inked the contract at the outset of the 2013 season, it was done in no small part on the club’s faith in Andrus’s ability to continue growing at the plate after two near-average offensive season. That did not come to pass. Instead, he limped to a cumulative .264/.317/.340 slash over three rough campaigns.
At that point, after the ’15 season, the Andrus contract looked to be well under water. But things have ticked up since. As Steve noted in the above-linked post, Andrus went on a healthy .301/.352/.459 run from the start of the 2016 campaign through the point last April when he suffered a fractured elbow. The 2016-17 seasons were by far his most productive offensively.
Unfortunately, Andrus struggled upon his return to action in 2019, finishing the year with a .256/.308/.367 batting line that looks more like his forgettable 2013-15 effort than his intervening turnaround. With the way things shook out, he unsurprisingly elected not to take the first of his two consecutive opt-out opportunities last falls.
Moving back to the present, we’re looking at the best version of Andrus that we’ve yet seen. He’s on pace to top his twenty-homer outburst from ’17 (his only double-digit-dinger campaign to date) and carrying a hefty .231 isolated power mark. Andrus has also swiped six bags to go with his five long balls, further boosting his contribution to what has been one of the game’s most prolific offenses in the early going.
Add it all up, and Andrus owns an eye-popping .361/.425/.583 batting line (164 wRC+) through his first 120 plate appearances. Sure, it’s based in no small part on a .425 batting average on balls in play, but that’s also a reflection of the fact that he’s stinging the ball.
Statcast unsurprisingly anticipates some regression down from Andrus’s stunning .436 wOBA, but still credits him with a sturdy .385 xwOBA for his work thus far. Though he’s swinging and missing more than ever before, with more strikeouts also resulting, the tradeoff has been well worth it. Driven by a more aggressive approach, Andrus is working at heretofore unseen levels in terms of exit velocity (90.3 mph) and hard-hit rate (39.8%).
So, we’ve got some evidence of an underlying change that is helping to spur the improvements. And we already know Andrus has a surprising power reservoir. He isn’t the first contact-oriented hitter to figure out a way to tweak his output. In this case, it’ll be interesting to see how the numbers begin to settle out over a lengthier sample. Andrus is putting one of every four long balls out of the yard, which won’t continue. But perhaps he can maintain an higher-than-expected homer-per-flyball ratio if he keeps punishing line drives. He’s sitting at a career-best 31.3% rate and has yet to produce an infield fly. Andrus’s average launch angle is actually down quite a bit from recent seasons (to just 6.1 degrees), but when he has put a bit of loft on the ball it has tended to travel far. That approach likely won’t lead to a huge number of home runs, but might enable Andrus to carry good power (with a healthy number of doubles and triples) while also maintaining quite a high batting average and solid OBP.
The offensive arrow is generally pointed upward, if perhaps not at quite as steep a grade as his actual output would suggest. Andrus only carries average foot speed, but he’s still a clear plus on the basepaths with a strong history of adding value there. Of course, future expectations (with the bat and on foot) are also tempered by the inevitable march of time. There are also legitimate questions about where Andrus’s glovework stands and where it’s headed. He has held a rather steady profile in recent years, floating in range of average by measure of both UZR and DRS. The latter sees a drop-off thus far (-3 runs), though it’s too early to weigh that much at all.
Market context is always a critical factor as well. With multiple prominent players signing extensions, the top of the 2019-20 market already looks quite a bit weaker than anticipated — and that’s before potential injuries and/or performance issues. It’s not a bad time for a middle infielder to reach the open market, particularly now that Xander Bogaerts has elected to remain in Boston. MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes ranks Didi Gregorius among the top ten potential earners at present, so there’s some possible competition, but the rest of the shortstop market fails to inspire and there are few certainties among second base candidates.
While there are some very good reasons to believe that Andrus could end up wanting to opt out, I still think it’s rather unlikely. While the Rangers haven’t secured all the value they hoped for in their deal with Andrus, they’ve done well enough. That’s due largely to the fact that he was so young when it was signed. And that attribute no longer holds. Andrus turns 31 in August of this year, meaning that he’d be shopping his age-32+ campaigns to prospective suitors.
The age element is of critical importance in a market setting in which teams are increasingly drawing back the length of the contracts they are willing to offer. It wasn’t long ago that a 34-year-old utilityman Ben Zobrist got a four-year commitment, but there’s good reason to think now that teams will be looking to cap off a deal at three or perhaps four seasons with a player such as Andrus. Plus, he’s not likely to command a super-premium salary. Despite heavy pursuit from multiple teams, Zobrist went for $14MM annually — just what Andrus is earning at present. Third baseman Justin Turner got a bit more ($16MM a year for four seasons) but was on a whole different level with the bat. Xander Bogaerts just took down $20MM AAV in an extension scenario on the heels of a monster 2018 season, but it would be surprising for the older and less offensively accomplished Andrus to reach that figure. Notably, that deal also only runs through his age-32 season.
If there’s a single, defining market data point for Andrus’s outlook, though, it’s the deal Zack Cozart signed with the Angels in advance of the 2018 season. The two players share quite a few characteristics. Cozart hit the market in advance of his age-32 season after posting an offensive outbreak. His showing was buttressed by some recent, quality offensive seasons but he had struggled at the plate previously in his career and had never previously approached his platform-season levels. Cozart had a significant advantage over Andrus in glovework, but was a bit older and had a more worrying health track record. He settled for a three-year, $38MM deal and had to move off of the shortstop position despite carrying some of the game’s very best leather.
Ultimately, even if Andrus sustains a compelling breakout all season long, it’s a bit difficult to see him commanding a deal that handily tops the three years and $43MM he already has in hand. Teams may be comforted by the fact that Andrus is a surehanded defender who could slide to second or third base at some point, but that sort of consideration won’t drive his market any more than it did Cozart’s. At most, opting out might mean chasing another year at a similar salary. That may not warrant the risk of entering free agency with qualifying offer-related draft compensation hanging over his head. Andrus could approach the Rangers in hopes of negotiating a new deal, dangling the threat of the opt-out, but the team doesn’t seem likely to bid against itself. If there’s an opening for Andrus to opt out, even after this phenomenal start, it’s a rather narrow one.
Rangers Shut Down Taylor Hearn For At Least 3 Weeks
- The Rangers will shut left-hander Taylor Hearn down for at least three weeks, per Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News. The 24-year-old went on the IL on Friday with elbow tightness, though Grant notes an MRI didn’t reveal any acute structural damage – just inflammation. Hearn made his major league debut Thursday against the Mariners, who teed off on him for five runs (four earned) on three hits and four walks in just a third of an inning. Still, Hearn ranks as one of the Rangers’ best prospects, so it’s no doubt a relief for the team that he has appeared to dodge a ruinous injury.