Tired of Losing: Can Rangers GM Chris Young Build a Winner?
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“He’s tired of losing.”
Chris Young is tasked with easing the frustrations of both Rangers principal owner Ray Davis and a fan base that is six years into a streak of losing seasons that now stands as the longest since the franchise came to Texas.
Davis was pointed about his criticisms of where the Rangers were when he fired Jon Daniels in August. Installing Young as the team’s chief baseball decision-maker is supposed to be a paradigm shift that will jar the Rangers from the doldrums of looking up at the Houston Astros and the Seattle Mariners, who start their American League Division Series on Tuesday.
Davis clearly expected more from the 2022 Rangers, especially after the team shelled out $500 million for shortstop Corey Seager and second baseman Marcus Semien. Both had solid seasons. Their biggest deficiency was that neither were starting pitchers.
That is, of course, a broken record for the Rangers as an organization, with some brief, notable exceptions.
Young has been tasked with changing that. He’s been given increased payroll to do it. He’s also talked of trading some of the young, talented pieces in the minor-league system to make it happen, too.
Hiring a manager is Young’s first major decision. The second is how to approach this offseason. He’s two years into a job that was supposed to be a partnership with Daniels. Before joining the Rangers, he worked for Major League Baseball. Now, he calls the shots for the first time in a Major League front office.
One has to ask the question if he’s ready for this?
“It’s people management,” Young said recently. “It comes down to relationships, communication, establishing systems processes and clear standards of expectation.”
That’s a little too corporate for most tastes. Sure, decision-making in an organization like the Rangers is collaborative, and to this point Young has made few changes to the team’s scouting department. Given how stocked the organization is at the moment, those sorts of changes seem unnecessary. MLB.com has the organization’s minor league system ranked among the best in baseball.
But the expectation is to contend and all the talent in the minors probably won’t change that next season. The Rangers have admitted they fell short of where they had hoped to be in 2022. With 68 wins, Young said the team fell about 10 games short of what they expected. They had hoped to win at least 78 games, which would have been 16 more than the 60 they won in 2021.
For the record, all of the Inside the Rangers staffers that provided predictions before the season all predicted at least 72 wins. So the Rangers fell short of the staff’s expectations, too.
Young admitted last week that he hasn’t really had time for self-reflection. You’d be hard-pressed to find that time when you’re two months into running the show by yourself. What was interesting is that he talked about remaining disciplined to what he believed in as a baseball person.
“I know that with the opinions of a lot of others and the wisdom around me that we're going to make good decisions,” Young said. “I’m convinced in what I believe a winning team should look like, what the environment needs to look like. We're gonna stay disciplined to that.”
He knows what he wants. But is it the right thing for the organization? That knowledge only comes with time.
Remember back in 2007 when the Rangers traded Mark Teixeira for a boatload of prospects? Sure, in hindsight that traded worked out gangbusters for the Rangers. It made Daniels’ bones as a GM for years. But it easily could have worked out much differently.
That’s the vague area of baseball and player development. The player we say is a can’t miss player sometimes does miss. The guy taken in the 62nd round because a friend asked the team’s manager to draft his son, like Mike Piazza, becomes a Hall of Famer.
Young says he’s casting a wide net. That’s good to hear if you’re a Rangers fan. But the Rangers have struggled luring big-time pitching to the organization. And this is a free-agent market that could be filled with big-time talent. Just how much more payroll is Young getting?
He needs enough to give the Rangers a stop-gap in the rotation. The talent on the farm isn’t ready yet. And Young was right last week when he said player development wasn’t “linear.”
But Davis is “tired of losing.” Young gets it. But Young also knows the goal isn’t just to win next year.
“The goal is that when we when we start to win, we win for a long time and that's important to get right on the front end here,” Young said.
So, this is the front end? Mark the date and file it away. We’ll see.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard
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