As I pulled into the parking lot on the Rangers’ half of the complex at 15850 North Bullard Avenue for what has become a nearly annual trip to the club’s Fall Instructional League camp, a sight I had looked right past countless times stopped me in my tracks.
It’s not that anyone would have expected Chris Young to be in Surprise, Arizona, for Fall Instructs. His major-league roster is still playing games, even though there won’t be as many this year as last. He had one young pitching phenom to see make his Rangers debut in Seattle. Afterward, Young jumped on a plane to go see another one two years younger and 4,800 miles away, perhaps imagining that player’s own Rangers debut.
So it was OK that Chris Young’s parking space was empty. It wouldn’t have been OK if the sign had changed.
Mainly because of how much else might have changed with it.
It was announced on Friday that Rangers owners Ray Davis and Neil Leibman and their group had extended Young’s contract to lead baseball operations. Young also got a title bump, from General Manager to President of Baseball Operations. The news came a day after Young was on hand for Kumar Rocker’s debut and two days before he watched Roki Sasaki take the ball just north of Tokyo. More importantly, it came a little more than a month before Young’s original front-office deal with the organization would have expired.
There were no details on the length of the extension and no word on what sort of raise Young is getting. Not that either data point matters. If Young weren’t happy with the length of the deal or with the dollars being offered, he could have walked away from the table and would have spent about an hour unemployed, or as long as he felt he needed to weigh competing offers to take over somewhere else.
Is Chris Young the best general manager in the history of baseball? I suppose that can’t be ruled out, but it’s probably more likely to suggest there are others capable of getting a major-league baseball team to the World Series and winning. Others who would eagerly accept the job, too, given that this is the last major-league baseball team to get to the World Series and win it.
As hard as it is to repeat as champions in Major League Baseball, it’s not exactly easy to win the title that makes a repeat possible in the first place. It took the Rangers 52 seasons to get it done. It was the result of a lot of things going right, a minimum of things going wrong, and some surprise performances—all true of just about every championship season in this league.
But for Texas, it was also a culmination of a lengthy process in a sport with a complex infrastructure and development arc—and, not to be overlooked in the Rangers’ case, a measure of stability and continuity that’s worth jealously guarding. Young didn’t arrive until after the 2020 season and only took over the top spot on the baseball side late in 2022. But many of his advisers and other baseball operations officials have been around for a decade or more, along with so many in player development, scouting, coaching, analysis, and medical and mental performance. Some date all the way back to the franchise’s pennant winners in 2010 and ’11.
That plays a role in why my four-day visit to Fall Instructs looked much like it has most years. Although the roster of prospects invited to the season-ending camp largely changes every year, most of the coaches in charge of designing days—sometimes drills and workouts, other times games against other teams, occasionally an Olympics-style Competition Day—have been in their player development positions for years. They bring along the Josh Jungs and Wyatt Langfords, the Cody Bradfords and Kumar Rockers. They work to keep the pipeline producing and a winning cycle in place. I’ve covered the Rangers for more than 26 years and have never seen as much stability in the organization’s key player-development positions as there has been the last five or six seasons.
Is this way the only way? No. But there’s a system in place: a set of principles and a culture that are emphasized as soon as 16-year-olds from Venezuela and 21-year-olds from the SEC arrive. They are cultivated all the way up the chain and to Arlington, where they are reinforced, not introduced. That’s the plan, at least.
Maybe a new GM would have promoted the exact same core values the Rangers espouse: dominate the fundamentals, compete with passion, be a good teammate. Maybe he or she would have been just as insistent on signing a targeted, undrafted college infielder not only to add organizational depth but also to room with the next Sebastian Walcott and make sure he continues to do the right things off the field. (Yes, this is me manifesting the concept of there being a next Sebastian Walcott.)
Of course, it’s not as if a new GM would have cleaned house. Certainly not in wholesale fashion. But a new leader bringing in a bunch of people he or she has a history with—which you would never blame him for—would potentially cut into the continuity. It could potentially stall progress, too. New systems take time to implement, and the men and women in charge of executing them must learn the changes in direction themselves before they can impart them with conviction to the coaches and ballplayers in their charge.
As it stands, when a pitcher is handed off from the Dominican Summer League to the Arizona Complex League, the objectives are consistent. As a hitter graduates from the South Atlantic League to Double A, the same approach at the plate is preached. When a late-inning defensive replacement is summoned from the upper levels of the system to the big leagues, the acclimation to the clubhouse and to the way Bruce Bochy likes to do things is seamless. As it should be. There’s enough to learn at the major-league level without piling on things to unlearn.
Would all of that have been threatened had Young moved on (especially if a head of baseball operations were hired from the outside and brought in his own people and his own ideas)? Would Bochy have considered how badly he wanted to finish out his three-year contract if the man who hired him, who had coaxed him off his Nashville couch, had departed? Would the next frontline starting pitcher on the market have been as inclined to consider Texas if the 13-year big leaguer Young were not around to make the pitch and push the vision?
We need not worry about those questions now.
That’s not to say Young won’t be under pressure to turn things back around in 2025. Self-imposed, if nothing else. It’s been a highly disappointing 2024, an underachieving season that has forced the question of how much of an overachievement 2023 might have been. There might be facets of the organization’s directives that get rethought and revised, from the top down—on the field, in methods of instruction and analysis, and in peak performance programs, both physical and mental. That’s healthy. Simply banking on bouncebacks isn’t a great game plan.
We may never know the details of the contract Young signed to continue as the president of baseball operations for the reigning world champions, but that’s beside the point. What matters is Young did not declare a stalemate as this extension was being negotiated, and neither did the ownership group. They’re both good with the deal. We all should be, too.
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