ARLINGTON -- Let’s talk about “optics” for a minute.

On Wednesday night, free-agent-to-be Yu Darvish was making another quality start Wednesday night. His GM, Jon Daniels, was on the other side of the world, in Darvish’s home country of Japan, watching a different Japanese pitcher.

What’s that look like to you?

How’s this for an answer: Very possibly the future.

The Rangers are considering a future in which they don’t have Darvish, in which they possibly become trading-deadline sellers and then pursue the next big arm to come from Japan, right-hander Shohei Otani as a way to accelerate the rebuilding process.

Daniels, assistant GM Josh Boyd and two Japanese-based Rangers evaluators, spent Thursday in Japan watching Otani, 22, go through a workout. They could not watch him pitch. He's been out for the last five weeks with a thigh/hamstring strain. He suffered the injury running the bases, which he does regularly as he's one of Japan's brightest hitting stars, too. He is considered the "Japanese Babe Ruth," and was featured on 60 Minutes this spring.

"The only thing I know about him is what I saw on [60 Minutes]," Rangers manager Jeff Banister said Friday. "Inside [the show], they showed a tremendous athlete with a big arm who could really hit and hit it a long way. This is a premier athlete that's a baseball player. He looked like a special person who really loved to play the game. Big fastball. He can really hit them."

Oh, hey, one other thing about Otani: He’s expected to come to the majors for 2018.

And the Rangers appear to be all in on him at the moment. It explains why Daniels watched him up close, rather than Darvish.

With the Rangers off to a rough start and Darvish a potential free agent at the end of the year, the Rangers need to have as clear a picture of the Otani situation as possible. They can’t negotiate with him now, nor can any team, but there are plenty of back channels to pursue and plenty of due diligence to do. In short, the Rangers need to know sooner or later just how realistic their chance at landing Otani is, should he opt to come to the U.S. this winter.

If the chances are significant and the Rangers don’t climb into the AL West race, it will provide Daniels with a green light to get aggressive with other major league clubs about a Darvish trade.

If the chances are not so great, it might push the Rangers to redouble their efforts to re-sign Darvish to a long-term deal, sooner rather than later. If they get a sense they can re-sign Darvish, he would be more attractive than any free agent that will hit the market this winter. Other than Otani, that is.

Even if the club falls out of the race, it might make more sense to try to keep Darvish long-term rather than deal him at the deadline. He’s an established ace-caliber pitcher. The Rangers are thin on pitching. They aren’t going to get a Mark Teixeira-type haul for a rental pitcher. Even if they did, it took another two years after that deal for the Teixeira deal to start to pay real dividends. I don’t get the sense this team is willing to fold its hand this season and sit out the next two, as well.

The circumstances are different than they were nearly six years ago when the club won the rights to Darvish in the posting process. By outbidding other clubs in the closed-bid posting portion of the process, the Rangers won exclusive negotiating rights to Darvish. There will be no exclusivity this time around. The posting process has changed. Any team that submits the max bid of $20 million will be able to negotiate with Otani. That group will include some of the most deep-pocketed, iconic, big-market teams in the game. You can figure out the names.

The Rangers are likely doing all of the same relationship-building they did with Darvish before the posting process. Joe Furukawa, the club’s coordinator of Pacific Rim scouting, is along with Daniels on the trip. Furukawa built a strong relationship with Darvish and served as his interpreter for his first season in the U.S. But relationship-building is likely to take a slightly-lower profile this time around when real negotiating takes place. Nevertheless, the Rangers have become major players in Japan.

So, when Daniels and company walked into the workout Thursday, even though they explicitly did not make contact with Otani, it made front page news in Japan. It’s all about the optics.

The optics suggest Shohei Otani is the Rangers’ top pitching priority.

Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant