In March of 2017, just over two years ago, the Texas Rangers finalized a six-year, $49.5 million contract extension with second baseman Rougned Odor. The contract, intended to keep Odor in a Rangers uniform through at least 2022 with a $13.5 million team option for 2023, made sense at the time.

Odor had just finished his age-22 season, hitting 33 home runs to go along with a .271/.296/.502 clip. It was his second straight season to post an fWAR of 2.5. So on the face of it, Odor was set to cost the Rangers approximately $8.25 million per season through 2022, assuming the Rangers decided at that point to exercise the $3 million buyout rather than the $13.5 team option. If the team were to elect to exercise the option, the total contract would end up being a seven-year, $60 million deal with an average annual value of around $8.57 million. The Rangers were able to buy out Odor’s arbitration years, and for Odor, he obtained some financial security with the possibility of raking in an even larger payday before he turned 30.

I bring all this up because in the grand scheme of the future of the Rangers, Rougned Odor’s contract doesn’t hinder the organization much if it doesn’t work out. Odor could be a perpetual 2.5-WAR player and provide excess value beyond his contract. This isn’t a piece intended to beat the “Rangers should have never signed him to that contract” drum.

The contract did — and still could, moving forward — make a ton of sense for a young player who seemed to be a few improvements away from being a very solid contributor.

Of course, as is the way baseball goes sometimes, Odor proceeded to have an abysmal season in 2017 following his big contract. For the 2017 season, Rougie was the worst everyday hitter in baseball, posting up a .204/.252/.397 line in 651 plate appearances. He played in every single one of the team’s 162 games, and his reward was a baseball-worst wRC+ of 58 — meaning he was 42 percent worse than a league-average hitter — and an fWAR of -1.2.

Things proceeded to get even worse to begin the 2018 campaign. Through the month of May, his wRC+ was 42 before he proceeded to turn things around June-August, then fall off a cliff again with a wRC+ of 33 over the final month of the season. The fact that he ended the year at 97 — just three percent below league average — while also playing Gold Glove caliber defense at second base was a minor miracle considering how awful the season had started.

Coming into this season, the hope was that the worst days were in the past, and the Rangers would have the version of Odor they could slot in the middle of the lineup and count on for steady run-production. That hasn’t quite been the case, and no one seems entirely sure why. Odor’s wRC+ of 43 is basically in line with his awful start from a season ago, and for every time he has a game or two in which it looks like he might break out of his funk, he has four more in which he looks completely hapless. He is, once again to begin the first two months of a season, the worst everyday hitter in baseball.

So… what’s the deal?

In short, no one seems quite sure. Other than citing some instances of Odor working on the timing of his leg kick, there hasn’t been much in the way of detailed information coming from the Rangers, which I think is to be expected in this type of scenario. The overwhelming sentiment has been that Rougie appears to be struggling to hit fastballs.

For starters, I wanted to look at Odor’s wOBA — his weighed on-base average, which attempts to measure a player’s overall offensive contribution per plate appearance — compared to his expected wOBA, which attempts to remove defense and ballpark in order to account only for the skill level of the player at-bat. Generally, if you have a player with a significant gap between the two, you can expect some sort of regression or improvement.