Texas Rangers: Jake Odorizzi Rumors Unlikely at Best
By David Dickey
Reports surfaced Sunday that the Texas Rangers have engaged the Tampa Bay Rays in discussions about the availability of starting pitcher Jake Odorizzi. Preliminary reports suggest the Rays have inquired about the Rangers’ willingness to part with marquee young position players, including Jurickson Profar, Joey Gallo, and Lewis Brinson. The odds of Texas dealing any of the aforementioned are remote at best.
Gallo and Brinson, each 22 years old and amongst the game’s top 20 prospects, figure prominently into a competitive Rangers future. Profar for his part has already made an impact in Arlington, and is being lauded as a plausible future face of the franchise.
Yet the Rays, quickly falling out of contention in 2016, are justified in floating such a prodigious asking price. The market for starting pitchers this July is rather barren compared to recent seasons. The relatively small number of sellers, and even smaller number of sellers with a marketable rotation arm, is helping things shape up to be a seller’s market. Outside of Julio Teheran it may well end up being that Odorizzi is the most high profile name available. Things could change in the event the A’s look to shop Sonny Gray, the Padres dangle Drew Pomeranz, or the White Sox begin considering the bounty they could receive for their top of the rotation arms. Any number of unlikely or still unforeseen things could happen, but it currently seems more believable that the majority of moves executed in the coming weeks will be more reminiscent of the Dodgers recent acquisition of Bud Norris.
Odorizzi also has three more years of club control. Once seen as the secondary piece in the James Shields–Wil Myers trade, now 26, he’s considered a serviceable mid-rotation piece with the potential of still developing into a legitimate number two. The Rays are in no rush to move him, but with their steady stream of young pitching seemingly never running dry, they’ll certainly do their due diligence in listening to lopsided offers from teams in win-now mode.
The Rangers, however, are unlikely to be that team. While they are definitely in need of long-term answers at the top of their aging (think Colby Lewis) and injury riddled (think Yu Darvish) rotation, the rotation as a whole hasn’t been a particularly weak spot for them in 2016. Their competitive window appears to be open multiple years into the future. Furthermore, despite possessing the AL’s best record entering Tuesday, both the eye test and the analytics suggest teams such as the Indians, Red Sox, Jays, O’s, and of course the two-time defending AL champs from Kansas City may be more formidable near-term AL contenders. In other words, there’s very little incentive for them to mortgage so much of a bright future for something they hardly need in a year where they are far from distinguished members of the competitive pack.
All of this underscores just how unlikely the brokering of a deal between these two clubs is. Still, it’s something to keep an eye on; something we in the internet media are more than want to do. Should the asking price come down, or other circumstances shift such that the Rangers come to see this as an impassable opportunity, something could get done. Still, it’s hard to forecast just how the market, and Odorizzi’s potential place within it, will shape up. Soon enough we’ll know.