The parade has officially ended for Texas Rangers president Chris Young
The Texas Rangers are 2 1/2 games out of first place American League West, or one fewer game than the New York Yankees trail the Tampa Rays for the top spot in the American League East.
The state of Major League Baseball assures a large swath of teams are “around it,” including those that if you watch the games will tell you they’re not close. That includes the Rangers.
The Rangers are currently “Rangering.” They were swept by the worst team in baseball, the Anaheim Angels, and followed that by being no-hit by a bad Houston Astros team on Monday night in Arlington.
Team owner Ray Davis and the ownership group deviating from their philosophy of being a top-10 payroll team is partly to blame, as is the guy who assembled the roster. Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young has no choice but to wear the dunce cap on this.
The rise and fall of Chris Young
Few people in Chris Young’s position have ever set themselves up “to fail” like he unintentionally did.
Hired by former team president of baseball Jon Daniels in December 2020, Young was groomed to replace Daniels at some point. That transition happened in August ‘22, when Davis fired Daniels and replaced him with Young.
Fourteen months later, Young was celebrating the team’s first World Series trophy. Daniels deserves credit for that team, but Young was the one who convinced manager Bruce Bochy to come out of retirement, as well as several other moves that resulted in a title for an organization renowned for losing.
That team was his. So are the next two and counting. He’s a former big league pitcher who before he came to the Rangers’ front office worked in the commissioner’s office. He knows how this all works.
Davis’ vision and plans of this team winning multiple World Series, which he said multiple times after they won their first one in 2023, was justified; it is also playing out like a figment of an active imagination. That memorable and fun October was not a sign of future falls but a one-off with an expiration date a little bit longer than your average gallon of milk.
The window for that 2023 team to compete for the World Series should have been four to five years; turns out it was one.
Young’s trust of the team to come around in 2024 was not rewarded, as they faded and finished under .500. Some key performers last season didn’t perform, and he stayed too long with outfielders who didn’t produce as the team finished exactly .500.
He has not adequately retooled a lineup that through the first two months of the season has been one of the worst run-producing clubs in baseball, as the team is five games under .500.
Every World Series winner goes through these transitions. No one expected it would happen to the Texas Rangers five minutes after the parade ended.
Where do the Rangers go now?
Wait. Hope. Trust. Hope some more.
The MLB trade deadline is not until Aug. 3. No one blows up a team on June 1.
Young has been adamant that given the market size of DFW, this club should never have to go through the Godforsaken rebuild.
Entering Tuesday, the team has played 53 games. That’s enough to know what a team is, and not enough to make the type of decision that could cripple a season, destroy a team’s morale and end any hope of selling more tickets.
The type of decision that results in the trade of a player like pitcher Jacob deGrom. Or pitcher Nathan Eovaldi. Third baseman Josh Jung. Or shortstop Corey Seager.
Young said in the offseason the Rangers were not looking to trade Seager, dismissing reports that said the Rangers would do just that. That type of decision would require Seager waiving his no-trade clause, as well a long visit with the ownership group.
The Rangers have good players, but this is not a good team.
A team that Chris Young built.
When the Rangers won the World Series, Young deserved to party. Now that they are nowhere close, he can’t run from the other “party,” either.
