Elvis Andrus Speaks To Richard Durrett

— Richard Durrett shoots the shit with Mike Olt, and gets in-depth with Elvis Andrus in their one-on-one.

Basically, the abridgment of the Mike Olt conversation is:

+ Olt thinks he can handle the outfield just fine

+ He also thinks he needs to improve in all areas

+ He says the way to do that is through repetition

+ Offensively, he notes that new hitting coach Dave Magadan is “awesome”

+ Cliche, cliche, cliche

+ End of conversation

The abridgment of the Andrus conversation:

+ “Yes, my 20 year-old top prospect replacement is really good”

+ “Yes, he has a high ceiling”

+ Okay, he didn’t say either of those things; not exactly

+ Andrus said he’s excited to play for Venezuela in the WBC

+ He also says he loves the Rangers and their fans

+ As far as his contract, “we’ll see what happens”

+ He actually did say that

+ Cliche cliche cliche

+ End of conversation

Again, it all comes back to philosophy, the way you see the game. How you would spend your money. Elvis Andrus has an incredibly strong backing with the fan base. If fans didn’t latch on to Ian Kinsler or Josh Hamilton (because they’ve been on the team longer), then Elvis Andrus is probably the most popular player on the team.

If my intuition is clicking, then I believe Elvis Andrus would love to be a Ranger for life. I’m also convinced that the Rangers love him in return, just not enough to give him $150+ million over the next 7 or 8 years.

The real quandary is Jurickson Profar‘s existence. Why can’t he just play a different position? If Profar was not in the Rangers organization — or if he played any other position on the diamond — there’s a rock solid chance Elvis Andrus would have been extended longterm a long time ago.

If you are not familiar, the way contracts function is from a simplistic paradigm: the first three years of a player coming up from the minor leagues are essentially the league minimum (which right now is right around $500K), and the next three years are arbitration seasons. Every player coming up from the farm — in this case it’s Jurickson Profar — has 6 years of team control.

For #1 prospects, that’s an invaluable commodity to own.

In really comes down to basic math. Andrus makes roughly $11.5 million over the next two years, and in the same time Profar will be owed somewhere just under $1 million.

After those two years are up, Andrus will be a free agent, and Jurickson Profar will still be under team control for another 4 years. If Andrus receives the $17+ million a year he’s hoping for, that would be almost $70 million in four years. In the same span, Profar will have made probably closer to $10-$12 million — if he’s not already extended longterm.

All that said, I’d be curious for what you think of the Andrus/Profar situation from your perspective. So if you could do that, that’d be greaaaat.