Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections are a good measure of what to expect from players in the upcoming baseball season. We'll take a look at the Rangers' projections on a position-by-position basis. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Today we'll look at the projections for the Rangers second baseman. Last year saw a roller coaster campaign for 21-year-old Rougned Odor, which started with tons of promise, flamed out miserably and then came back to be one of the team's leaders over the final four months of the year.
Odor: 607 plate appearances, 26 doubles, 10 triples, 20 home runs, 78 RBIs, .273 batting average, .324 on-base percentage, .415 slugging percentage
These numbers are beautiful if you're a Rangers fan and exactly what you want to see from one of your best young players. The batting average projection is 12 points higher than his .261 mark from a year ago, and that number was skewed because of his awful first six weeks that led to his demotion. Double-digit doubles, triples and homers is huge but not at all out of the realm of expectation considering he had 21 doubles, nine triples and 16 homers despite spending a month in the minors.
If Odor has this type of season, he will be an All-Star very soon, possibly next season as he already began to build up a reputation over the second half of the 2015 season.
