How one key hire put the Texas Rangers down a path to a Game 7 in Houston
Chris Young insists that watching the Texas Rangers play in this postseason has been much easier, and more relaxing, than during the regular season.
“One hundred percent,” he said. “I was much more stressed in the regular season when we were fighting to get into the postseason. I’ve been way more relaxed and calm in the playoffs.”
Because, is the general manager of the Texas Rangers like any rational thinker who believes this team, once they reached the postseason, they have been “playing with house money?”
“That’s not it,” the Rangers general manager said after Game 6 of the American League Championship Series. “It’s my conviction in this group.”
Every single time the Rangers looked like they were out of it, and that “they were dead and done,” they consistently figured out a way.
“This is just who we are,” Rangers catcher Jonah Heim said.
The Rangers forced a Game 7 against the Houston Astros on Monday night in the ALCS. After winning 68 games in 2022, their sixth straight losing year, to reach this point one year later makes the entire season a win.
Young can’t say it, but once this team reached the playoffs it validated a series of big decisions this franchise made beginning in the winter of 2020.
The first decision was when then team president of baseball operations Jon Daniels hired Young away from the commissioner’s office to serve as this team’s GM.
Young was this rare cross breed of GM. He wasn’t part of the new wave of baseball GMs who were Ivy League educated and believed building a team is better done through a ruthless adherence to spreadsheets, numbers, and cost-benefit analysis.
He’s a former big league player, who pitched 13 big league seasons. But he also happened to attend Princeton, too. Don’t see a lot of big leaguers coming out of the Ivys.
At the time he was hired, he was well regarded in baseball circles as a potential GM, or perhaps a future commissioner.
At the time he was hired, the Rangers and Daniels had to do something. They were going bad, and whatever approach, and tweaks, Daniels and “his team” were trying were not working.
Young was given the role of GM, but he served under JD.
In December of 2021, the ownership group led by Ray Davis approved a plan to spend money like a crazy New Yorker, which now includes the signings of pricey free agents Marcus Semien, Corey Seager, Jon Gray, Jacob deGrom and others.
In August of 2022, the team fired manager Chris Woodward. Woodward was JD’s hire in 2019, and the former infielder fit the mold of the young ex-player turned manager. He was genuine, bright, sincere and it also was another move that wasn’t working.
A few days after he was fired, Davis fired JD.
“Bottom line is we’re not good. And we haven’t been good for six years,” Davis told the media the day move was made.
Young would have final say on personnel decisions.
The move ended one of the most successful, and polarizing, tenures of any major figure in DFW sports. Looking at this current roster, JD’s fingerprints are all over it. People don’t want to hear this, but he had a lot to do with the current success of this team.
Also, firing him was both rational and more than justified. Daniels likely knew it, too. He had been in the role as GM, or president of baseball operations, since 2005.
Everyone of note who was associated with the Texas Rangers team in 2011, the one that came within one one strike, twice, of winning it all but didn’t had to go. Teams that suffer such a traumatic loss never recover until everyone is elsewhere.
Everyone involved just needs to go away before thinking about coming back.
Young asking Bruce Bochy to come out of retirement to manage this club was not the type of move JD would have made. The same for asking pitching coach Mike Maddux to delay his retirement to serve in the same role again.
JD should never have been OK with Maddux leaving as this club’s pitching coach, after 2015.
And Bochy would never have accepted the job as manager of the Rangers the way they were run over JD.
Young is not some Doug Melvin-type baseball guy. Young embraces many of the new methods preferred by your standard “new” GM, but he also believes in the power of the manager, and their role in a clubhouse.
As a former player, he would “get it” in a way that, say, your normal Ivy League GM may not.
Not every single move Young has made has worked; the decision to hand deGrom a monster contract last winter has the look of a catastrophic bust. Approving the selection of Vanderbilt pitcher Kumar Rocker in the first round of the 2022 MLB Draft, despite an iffy medical report, doesn’t look great.
Overall, however, the results say everything.
Just look where the Texas Rangers were in 2022 compared to where they are in 2023.
“It’s been the opportunity of a lifetime,” Young said.
Safe to say he made the most of it.
This story was originally published October 23, 2023 at 1:09 PM.
