Might circumstances hasten Glenn Otto’s big-league debut for the Rangers?

When the Rangers traded Joey Gallo to the Yankees, the bulk of the return value was expected to be in the A-ball infielders, and understandably so. The Athletic’s Jamey Newberg has revealed the first two parts of his most recent top 72 prospects list, and while Trevor Hauver is listed 24th, Josh Smith and Ezequiel Duran are nowhere to be found … yet.

Newberg’s No. 1-12 prospects will be revealed Monday.

But listed there at No. 25, between Hauver and recent call-up Nick Snyder, is right-handed starting pitcher Glenn Otto, who is (at least at time of writing) still a member of the Triple-A Round Rock Express. For Otto, the trade to Texas contained more than just the usual amount of upheaval that goes along with being traded. It was a return home for the native Texan, who pitched for Rice University before being drafted by the Yankees in the fifth round of the 2017 draft.

“I grew up just north of Houston in Spring,” Otto said earlier this month in Round Rock. “So the first thing that came to my mind was being close to my wife and friends and family here in Texas that have always wanted to come out and watch me and haven’t been able to because I’ve been playing on the East Coast. Scranton (Pa.) or Somerset, N.J., or places like that. So, being able to reconnect with my family and friends here has been a huge blessing … (it’s) also a great opportunity to join a great organization. I grew up watching the Astros a lot, obviously an Astros fan growing up, but watching the Rangers — Michael Young, Hank Blalock, Ian Kinsler — there’s a lot of really good players that have come through this organization, and left their mark on the sport of baseball. To be able to represent this organization and the great state of Texas, I’m very excited for what’s to come.”

Coincidentally, as the news began to break about the trade between the Rangers and the Yankees, the first name that was floated as part of the package was John King, another fellow Texan whom Otto faced in college. Concerns about the pitcher’s medicals eventually meant that Joely Rodríquez accompanied Gallo to the Bronx instead. Otto and King are currently teammates in Round Rock as the latter is on a rehab assignment.

Otto throws a four-pitch mix (“Fastball, curveball, slider, changeup,” he says) and for the first 11 games of the season, that mix looked to be devastating to opposing hitters. In 65 1/3 innings at Double-A Somerset, Otto struck out 103 and walked just 14, holding opposing hitters to a .197 batting average. Otto is self-aware about what makes him successful.

“I work hard to get ahead of every batter that I can,” Otto said. “Put them away with the breaking balls or an elevated fastball. I’m really just trying to sharpen those breaking balls out and make sure they remain two different pitches, two different movement profiles. Being able to throw all four of my pitches to both left-handed and right-handed batters is ideally where I’d like to be. I feel like I have four really good pitches there, when they’re right.”

But when he got to Triple A, there was an adjustment period. The strikeout-to-walk ratio was still strong — 12 punchouts and three free passes in 10 1/3 innings — but hitters seemed to see his pitches a little better, batting .311 against him before the trade. Upon arriving in Round Rock, his first two starts were fine, if a bit shaky. He allowed two runs on five hits with five strikeouts and three walks against Oklahoma City on July 31, and then allowed four runs on six hits in just four innings against Sugarland on Aug. 7, striking out four and walking one. It was a few days after that second start when I talked to Triple-A pitching coach Bill Simas about his new starter.

“He’s shown better characteristics on his fastballs in the past,” Simas said. “So we’re just trying to figure it out without tinkering, because he is a guy that sometimes likes to tinker, and we really don’t want to go down that road with him. So right now we’re just trying to get fastball efficiency back, and working the changeup in. Slider (is) obviously his swing-and-miss, we know that. Maybe trying to add the curveball back in. But No. 1 for us at the moment — and he threw a bullpen today — was fastball efficiency. If he can get that back, then the other pitches will come.”

It’s always interesting to see how baseball people define a phrase they use. In this case, I asked Simas to help me understand what “pitch efficiency” meant.

“The movement,” Simas said.”Get the spin down, to have the optimal movement, on the right axis. His arm (angle) has dropped a little bit as well, so he has a little bit lower release height. So we just kind of did some directional stuff (today); maybe move a little faster and be a little more aggressive through his move down the mountain. And when he does that, I think his hand will get in the right spot. So today was a very good day. And we’ll just continue to do that in little pieces at a time here for as long as he’s with me anyway. It won’t be long.”

Simas might have been right. In the two starts since, Otto has pitched a combined 11 innings, allowing just two hits to go with three walks and 10 strikeouts.

Meanwhile, as the Rangers traveled from Boston to Cleveland on Monday evening, there was a problem: The team flight was missing at least four players. Upon arrival in Boston on Friday, Charlie Culberson was added to the COVID-19 IL. On Monday, as the result of the team continuing to do testing and contact tracing over the weekend, Brock Holt, Mike Foltynewicz and Drew Anderson were also added to the COVID-19 IL. Minutes before game time, Jonah Heim was pulled from the lineup; further updates on Heim were not given by the team after the game.

The likely move, Rangers manager Chris Woodward said on Sunday, would be to add a pitcher. The team is already delicately balancing a staff that includes multiple pitchers — Dane Dunning and Spencer Howard, namely — who are being kept to fairly strict workload limits. Anderson, who primarily started in Round Rock this season, had been the long man. Wes Benjamin will likely take that role for the time being, but it’s not a stretch to suggest that Otto could be in line for a call-up soon, and not only based on his pitching coach’s assessment that “it won’t be long.”

On the day of the trade, president of baseball operations Jon Daniels was asked if it was likely that Otto would be in the big leagues this year.

“Uh, yeah,” Daniels said. “We want to get him in and kind of get him acclimated here first; he’s going to go to Round Rock and jump into that rotation. But we did make the trade with that in mind, that he was a real option to get a look here down the stretch. He’s 25 years old; he’s already at Triple A. Eligible for the Rule 5 (draft) this winter, and we will certainly add him. So yeah, he’s a real consideration.”

Four Triple-A starts might not be what Daniels and the rest of the front office had in mind, but the roster juggle is real. They’ll certainly need to add at least one more position player if Heim is out — their bench consisted of Curtis Terry and Yohel Pozo on Sunday — and Leody Taveras would seem like an obvious choice, since Pozo can catch, and they have a glut of infielders with Nick Solak, Yonny Hernández and Andy Ibáñez to accompany Isiah Kiner-Falefa. But even so, they’ll also need another pitcher.

Here — I needed a chart to keep track, so perhaps you’d like to see it too.

A perfunctory glance at the Round Rock roster suggests that there aren’t a lot of “grizzled veterans” there. The Rangers just signed Buck Farmer. He or Hyeon-jong Yang might serve as grist for this season’s mill if needed. They could also bring back Kohei Arihara earlier than expected, and allow him to finish his rehab assignment, well, in the big leagues (he’s expected to return on Sept. 1).

But here’s what general manager Chris Young said on Monday morning about the plan for the rest of the season as the team nears the slightly expanded September roster period (teams can now have just 28 players on the active roster for the month).

“I think over the next few days, we’ll kind of have a better idea … players will go up and down to manage workloads, especially on the pitching front,” Young said. “We’ll probably get a look at some of the younger pitchers who have pitched well at Triple A, and get them in here, but (also) try to protect their workloads. So it’s going to be a little bit of a juggling act, to make sure that we protect these guys, but will also give them some exposure to the big leagues and (we’ll) get a chance to look at them. I think over the next week, we’ll work through that and figure out who the next guys to get called up and get a look are.”

Whether that means Otto right now or in a few weeks, the writing does appear to be on the clubhouse wall.

In early August in Round Rock, I asked Otto what he was trying to sharpen as he prepares for the call-up, whenever that might be.

“Just really trying to keep it simple,” he said. “There’s a lot of different numbers, especially nowadays, there’s a ton of analytics and numbers that you can kind of get lost in if you don’t know how to use them. For me, I like keeping it as simple as possible and just attacking hitters as much as I can, getting ahead as much as I can, and putting them away every chance I get. The game of baseball is going to bring us challenges; it’s not always going to be 1-2-3, right? But just equipping myself to be able to make adjustments the best that I can when things go off plan, and just continuing to be able to roll with the punches.”

If he has learned that, it couldn’t hurt to get him to the big-league club, where those punches are starting to pile up.

(Photo of Otto: Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press)