Glenn Otto Solid in Rangers Spring Training Debut

Glenn Otto struck out five, walked one and gave up a home run as the Texas Rangers lost to Kansas City.

Glenn Otto knows what he has to work on this spring. It hit him right in the face in the first inning of the Texas Rangers’ 6-5 loss to the Kansas City Royals on Friday.

Otto gave up a first-inning home run to the Royals’ Vinnie Pasquantino, a two-run shot that came as the result of, well, one of those things that Otto has to work on this spring.

“Fastball up, you know, 2-0 (count), good hitters hit bad pitches and, again, you fall behind the guy and he’s going to do his job and put it where it’s supposed to go,” Otto said after his two-inning start.

Otherwise, Otto was impressive in his first real outing of the spring. In his two innings, the Pasquantino home run was the only hit he gave up. He walked one hitter, but five of the hitters he retired were on strikeouts.

Overall, he was happy with his performance.

“Pitching from behind is a lot harder than pitching from ahead,” Otto said. “So that’s what we talked about between innings. The guys I got ahead of, I got out pretty handily. The guys I fell behind I made it a little harder on myself.”

He also made things a bit harder on himself with a pickoff move that led to an error on his throw. He said that had nothing to do with pressure related to the rules changes about how much pitchers can throw to bases for pickoff moves.

“I just had to get that out of the way, right?” Otto said. “I just yanked it a little bit, being too aggressive.”

Otto is in an odd position entering this spring. The Texas Rangers invested nearly $100 million for the 2023 season in veteran starting pitching, six of them in fact.

The Rangers are intent on building Otto as a starter this spring, even if it’s unlikely he’ll end up in the Major League rotation, assuming everyone stays healthy.

Otto pitched his first full season of Major League baseball last season, going 7-10 with a 4.64 ERA. Otto ended up winning as many games as Jon Gray, the Rangers’ top free-agent pitching acquisition last offseason.

Otto showed improvement in one key area at the end of last season — walk reduction. He closed out his final seven starts by walking two or fewer in every start. In fact, he struck out 33 and walked eight in that span. His opponent batting average of .236 was a 100-point drop from 2021, when he only started a handful of games.

So, as he finished with five strikeouts to one walk on Friday, he carried that momentum into the spring.

Rangers manager Bruce Bochy was looking forward to seeing Otto pitch in a live game going into Friday’s opener.

“He’s got great stuff,” Bochy said. “But, you know, he has to be around the strike zone and throw quality strikes. He’s got to have a good tempo with the clock and be comfortable with it. He’s like all of them. He just has to go out there and compete.”

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You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard

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