The last two nights have been about as painful as possible for the Rangers.
Ryan Dempster's was unimpressive again on Monday night while the Rangers offense couldn't solve the unimposing David Phelps/Derek Lowe combination. Hiroki Kuroda came pretty close to no-hitting them on Tuesday and the Yankees offense was able to make Matt Harrison work just hard enough that he had to leave the job unfinished.
Gut shots to be sure, and they feel all the more monumental because they came against the Yankees with the top spot in the American League on the line. Perhaps that's why Jean-Jacques Taylor of ESPNDallas.com is making a call for the team to bring 19-year-old Jurickson Profar up from Double-A right now.
That comes on the heels of Nolan Ryan's hint that Profar could be coming sooner than expected. On the surface, it seems like a perfectly good idea. Profar is the best prospect in the organization, he's been dominant at Frisco and the team's low energy looks like it could use a boost. So bring him up and set him free, right?
Well, not so much. Taylor's argument that the Rangers should only be concerned with winning and not the contract ramifications on breaking the seal on Profar right now is a straw man argument because 15 days of service time will make no difference if the Rangers put him in the lineup to start next season. It really loses steam when he starts talking about Profar being an upgrade on Alberto Gonzalez as the team's backup middle infielder.
That's true, but you don't win or lose because of your backup middle infielder. Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler are why the Rangers are going to win, so you'd be calling Profar up now simply to get him exposure to the major leagues. That can happen after rosters expand on September 1st without limiting Profar's playing time now or hurting his chances to be a better option than Esteban German was in the playoffs last season.
There's a caveat to that position. If the Rangers were to call up Profar and put Michael Young out of his misery they you've got an argument. They didn't do it with Mike Olt, though, and you get the impression that Ron Washington is so blinded by admiration for Young that even Willie Mays would have to sit behind a guy with a .643 OPS who hasn't hit a home run since Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes still had us believing that true love could happen in this crazy, mixed-up world.
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Winning now should absolutely be the Rangers' goal and it's hard not to want to catch some of that Bryce Harper/Mike Trout/Manny Machado magic for yourself, but none of those guys were called up to watch their new teammates. They were called up to play every day and that's not what anyone is suggesting with Profar.
As long as Washington is acting like Linus Van Pelt waiting for the Great Pumpkin and believing Young is "going to do something grand for this club," there's no reason for Profar to be in the major leagues because a bench is a bench no matter where you sit on it.
