CHICAGO — If you’d watched the Rangers at all in the last week and thought that they’d need a spark, well, they wouldn’t have disagreed.
They made an aggressive move to go find one.
The Rangers promoted outfielder Alejandro Osuna to the major league roster Sunday morning after he’d played just eight games for Triple-A Round Rock. The 22-year-old native of Mexico began the season at Double-A Frisco and, on Sunday, made his big league debut in a 5-4 win vs. the Chicago White Sox at Rate Field.
Osuna, the club’s seventh-ranked prospect according to MLB Pipeline, started in left field, hit sixth and reached base via a full-count walk in his first plate appearance.
“Wherever I am,” Osuna said Sunday inside the Rate Field visitor’s dugout, “I just try to help my team win.”
His plate discipline, speed and plus defense are the more tangible tools that can help a team. His relentless energy and passion — both of which he exhibited during his month-long stay at major league camp this spring training — might be more necessary now to a Rangers team that hasn’t found its footing a third of the way through the season.
“Those guys are always good for a ballclub,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said. “He’s just smiling, loves baseball, you love the way he plays with that passion.”
Osuna learned of his promotion Saturday night after Round Rock’s win against the Charlotte Knights. Rangers development coach Josh Johnson tracked Osuna down in the visitor’s clubhouse and told him that manager Doug Davis was “very mad” with something he’d done. Osuna, in disbelief that he’d done anything wrong, was worried until Davis informed him that he’d join the team in Chicago for Sunday’s game.
He first called his parents, Roberto and Guadalupe, before he phoned overseas. His brother, who’s also named Roberto, is a former All-Star pitcher who now plays for Japan’s Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. Osuna’s call was so frantic that his older brother thought something was wrong.
Quite the opposite.
“Brother,” Alejandro told Roberto, “I’m going to the big leagues.”
Osuna, the organization’s reigning minor league player of the year, said that he truthfully didn’t consider whether he’d reach the big leagues this season. The Rangers’ brass did, though, and even Bochy identified Osuna as a future big leaguer during his breakout spring training run.
“He’s up here,” Bochy said Sunday. “He’ll be playing.”
Where, exactly, may be situation dependent. Bochy started Osuna in left field Sunday because he wanted to give incumbent Wyatt Langford a shot in center and called the alignment “our best defense.” He wouldn’t commit to the trio of Osuna, Langford and right fielder Adolis García on and every-day basis, though, and expects to rotate starts based on who’s hot and who’s in need of time off.
Osuna’s perk is that he can and has played all three outfield positions. He was named the organization’s best defensive outfielder by Baseball America last season and won the system’s first defensive player of the month award this year. He showed why in the fifth inning of Sunday’s game when he crashed in on a Chase Meidroth blooped into shallow left and made a diving catch to end the frame and strand the tying run at second base.
“Osuna, he’s a good defender, and he had to go a long ways to catch that ball,” Bochy said. “He might’ve been a tad deep but he made it up with his legs. That’s a run there so that saved us again another run.”
Osuna’s promotion is another reflection that the Rangers will reward performance. The decision to designate Pillar for assignment was also an act of meritocracy. Outfielder Sam Haggerty, also a non-roster invitee this spring, had simply outplayed Pillar since the Rangers selected his contract from Round Rock two weeks ago.
Haggerty has slashed .256/.310/.436 in 13 games and is plenty quick enough to fare well at leadoff whilst the Rangers continue to morph their lineup. He’s a switch hitter with better splits vs. left-handed pitchers, which is Pillar’s specialty and the key reason why Texas kept him on their opening day roster in the first place, and the different between each’s center field defense has been negligible.
Pillar’s .152/.152/.182 slash line in his last 15 games, which partially may have been impacted by a lower back injury, might’ve been the tiebreaker anyways. The Rangers, at this juncture, do not have the luxury or time to give utility players a runway to to figure it out.
Especially not when they believe an energetic, toolsy prospect is ready to play behind them.
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