Before we get to talking about Joey Gallo and the future of the Texas Rangers, let's talk about Yu Darvish and the present of the Texas Rangers.
Which, yeah, is not a particularly pretty picture.
It was announced last week that Darvish will miss the 2015 season recovering from Tommy John surgery. Like that, the Rangers will have to make do without an ace with a 3.27 ERA and 11.2 strikeouts per nine innings over his three seasons.
It felt like a devastating blow for a team that was on the "maybe" pile of contenders to begin with, and the projections now bear that out. Baseball Prospectus figures the Rangers can win 78 games without Darvish. FanGraphs has them pegged for 73.
It doesn't look like 2015 will be a step in the right direction for Texas after the 95-loss, injury-riddled debacle that was 2014. And if there was a sense that the Rangers were perilously short on sturdy building blocks in 2014, it could be even stronger in 2015.
Next to Darvish on the list of Texas' highest-paid players are guys like Prince Fielder, Shin-Soo Choo, Elvis Andrus, Yovani Gallardo and Matt Harrison, who have been compromised by age, injury and/or declining performances. Adrian Beltre is still awesome, sure, but he's also nearing his 36th birthday.
In the search for sturdy building blocks, that leaves Derek Holland, Leonys Martin and Rougned Odor. Clearly, that isn't much of a list as long as Holland continues to be plagued by injuries, Martin continues to be a speed-and-defense-only player and until Odor shows his ability can translate to the majors.
From a baseball perspective, this is not an ideal position for the Rangers. And it might be even worse from a business perspective.
Given that Rangers fans got awfully used to winning between 2010 and 2013, it's not surprising they didn't show up in 2015. The club's TV ratings took a massive hit, and attendance declined by over 5,000 fans per game.
It's no wonder Maury Brown of Forbes thinks the Rangers could have the largest attendance decline of any team in baseball this season. Last year's turnout suggests that's a reasonable conclusion, and the Darvish gut punch is another reason to believe it.
All told, the Rangers have the look of a team that's going to need something in 2015. Call it a kick in the pants. Call it a beacon of hope. Whatever it is, it'll need to be something big.
Which brings us to Joey Gallo.
If you want to know where to find Gallo, you can either check Surprise Stadium in Arizona or in the top 20 of MLB.com's, Baseball Prospectus', Baseball America's or ESPN.com's list of baseball's best prospects.
And for all of them, the main reason why he's there is becoming less of a secret every day: Gallo is a very, very, very powerful man.
It's universally believed that the 21-year-old third baseman from Las Vegas packs 80-grade power from the left side of the plate. He's shown as much in the minors, slugging 104 home runs in only 296 games between rookie ball and Double-A since the Rangers drafted him 39th overall in 2012.
But enough words. Let's see it in action, starting with a 442-foot blast that he hit at Petco Park as a mere high schooler back in 2011:
And let's continue with the moonshot that proved to be the difference in last year's Futures Game at Target Field:
That looks (and sounds) like 80-grade power, alright. Storybook power, even, if Rangers Triple-A hitting coach Justin Mashore is to be believed.
“When you see him hit something, you won’t forget," Mashore told Grantland's Ben Lindbergh. "You’ll tell your grandkids about when you saw him hit those home runs that everybody talks about.”
Gallo's power makes him out to be quite the attraction, and even more so once you consider the venue.
Globe Life Park in Arlington is obviously well known as a power-hitting haven, but FanGraphs can vouch that it's an especially welcoming place for left-handed power hitters. It's not hard to imagine Gallo hitting a lot of homers there and exploring never-before-visited regions of the upper deck in right field.
But we wouldn't be having this discussion if power was the only tool in Gallo's toolbox. If it was, we'd be talking about a player who was only capable of being a star attraction during batting practice. Bringing up a player like that wouldn't do the Rangers any good.
That we are having this discussion, however, is a testament to how Gallo has made himself more than a power-only player.
Though Gallo hit 40 homers and slugged .623 as a 19-year-old in rookie ball and Single-A ball in 2013, he also only hit .251 with a .338 on-base percentage. That's less-than-awesome consistency, and there were good reasons for it.
One was that Gallo didn't take his walks as much as you'd like to see in a slugger, as he walked only 10.7 percent of the time, per FanGraphs. An even bigger problem was his huge swing-and-miss tendency, as he struck out a staggering 36.8 percent of the time.
But Gallo turned things around in 2014. In 126 games, he hit .271 with a .394 OBP, upping his walk rate to 16.2 percent and lowering his strikeout rate to 33.3 percent. He's continued to pile on in spring training, hitting .292 with a .370 OBP and only four strikeouts in his first 11 games.
For his turnaround, Gallo credited changing both his swing and his approach. He told Lindbergh:
My swing last year was way longer, so I’d miss pitches that were thrown 88 miles an hour down the middle just because I had so much movement going on. Now, I really don’t miss too many of those pitches. And it’s a little bit of knowing what a pitcher’s mentality is and how a team’s going to pitch to you. Now I kind of have a plan of what this guy’s best pitch is, what he’ll throw, and am a little smarter than last year. So that helps putting balls in play.
The caveat with Gallo's breakout in 2014 is that his strikeout tendency did balloon after he was promoted from High-A to Double-A, going from 26.0 percent to 39.5 percent. In light of that, MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus aren't off-base in thinking that Gallo won't be ready for the majors until 2016.
That's not the consensus, however. Having shown that he's more than just a power-only hitter, Lindbergh, FanGraphs' Kiley McDaniel and B/R's own Mike Rosenbaum figure that a 2015 debut is a possibility for Gallo.
All the Rangers have to do is turn that possibility into a reality. And though that would likely involve them being aggressive with Gallo's timeline, they're going to have proper incentive to do so.
Between his whiff-happy 2013 and his strikeout-laden time in Double-A in 2014, Gallo has shown he needs time to get his bearings when the competition gets tougher. If the Rangers' 2015 season goes as poorly as expected, promoting him would allow for the best of both worlds: valuable on-the-job training but without the added weight of having to make it count in a pennant race.
Now, the Rangers could go for it by installing Gallo at designated hitter. On the other hand, they could install him at third base and try to get a sense of whether he can handle the hot corner at the major league level. That's a good question given that his arm tends to get much higher marks than his glove.
For now, of course, Beltre is standing in his way. But if Texas' season does indeed go poorly, the Rangers will have little incentive to keep him. He's still a very good player and under club control through 2016, so he has some trade value. But because he's also pushing 36, his trade value is on borrowed time. ESPN.com's David Schoenfield is right that trading him being a good idea.
Lastly, given what we know about the Rangers' current fan interest, there's also the business perspective for the Texas front office to consider. Throwing a bone to the club's fans by promoting Gallo wouldn't completely repair the club's attendance or TV ratings, but it would certainly help. Rangers fans would get to revel in his power bat in the short term and have something to be excited about for the long term.
If Darvish was still healthy, this plea wouldn't exist. A healthy Darvish might have been able to push the Rangers into 85-win territory in 2015, which is as far as you need to go in the era of two wild cards. In a season like that, Gallo's timeline would have been a secondary concern.
This is no longer the case. The Rangers don't have much hope of contending in 2015, much less of appealing to fans who turned away in droves last season. If the Rangers want to see what they have for the future while also giving fans a glimpse of that future, Gallo's their guy.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted/linked.
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