The Rangers’ Understandable But Ill-Timed Firings

This week’s Five-Tool Newsletter also gets into the Little League World Series.

It’s not hard to find a reason for the Rangers’ midsummer firing spree: The team is looking at a sixth consecutive losing season, which does not exactly scream “job security,” especially not for a manager or a top executive. And so it was not entirely surprising that skipper Chris Woodward was axed Monday and president of baseball operations Jon Daniels followed Wednesday.

But it is hard to find a reason for the timing.

These are the kind of moves you typically expect on the first day of the offseason. They represent the end of one era and the beginning of another. Sometimes they come a bit earlier to make a statement—late, or maybe mid-September. But as early as August? It feels rather jarring. It only feels more so when you remember that Daniels announced Woodward’s dismissal, answering questions about the direction of the team at a press conference, presumably under the belief his own job was safe, only to get fired himself two days later. And it gets weirder still if you zoom into the particulars of the team’s situation.

The Rangers have been losing for the better part of a decade now. But the last two years have seen them pull off an obvious change in direction. They’ve embarked on a clear, focused rebuild—one that was being led by Daniels. After all, the Rangers are only a few months removed from the big, bold choice to sign Corey Seager and Marcus Semien: half a billion dollars in the middle infield for years to come. They’re only a few weeks removed from the similarly bold choice to take Kumar Rocker with the third pick in the MLB draft. A significant amount of groundwork has been laid—quite recently!—for the future of this team. And ownership has decided now is the right time to make a change.

So … why?

Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo

Daniels’s firing doesn’t make sense as a rebuke of the recent organizational direction. If that were the case—wouldn’t you have expected him to be fired before he was given free rein to sink half a billion into long-term contracts? Or an offseason or two later, perhaps, if it became clear he was struggling to build around them? Either option there might feel sensible. An option that does not is the one in the middle—less than a year after the aforementioned big signings, in a season when the team was not reasonably expected to contend, before there was a chance to build out any further. The club was fine with Daniels’s big-picture direction as of last winter. (Rangers majority owner Ray Davis said as much in his press conference Wednesday: “We accepted the plan on a rebuild, yes.”) But leadership was somehow much less fine with it by August.

It’s true, of course, that Texas fell short of expectations on the field this year. While it never made sense to hope this team would really contend in 2022—there was simply too much ground for them to make up—there was reasonable hope that they might take a meaningful step forward. They haven’t. (Although it’s worth noting their 53–63 record includes an unusually dreadful 7–24 mark in one-run games—a sign of unsustainable bad luck more than anything else.) But this season was never really about this season. It was about laying developmental groundwork for next season and beyond. Or, at least, it seemingly made sense to view it this way from the outside: That ownership reacted so strongly to the team’s struggles indicates they perhaps saw it differently.

“The bottom line is we're not good,” Davis said Wednesday. “And we haven't been good for six years. The bottom line is to be competitive going forward, I felt that we needed to make a change.”

That’s the core rationale for just about every regime change and while this one comes with some unusual, confusing timing, it’s not hard to see why it might have felt relevant. Daniels spent almost two decades on the job for the Rangers. He was the youngest general manager ever in MLB when he was hired at age 28 in 2005. Now, there isn’t much notable about an exec in his late twenties, and Daniels’s own front office sparked the careers of several who went on to lead their own teams (A.J. Preller and Thad Levine). He’s been in place long enough to see the club rise (World Series trips in ’10 and ’11) and fall (the last half decade) and try to plot its next rise (right now). He’s built the greatest success in the history of the franchise and he’s also struggled to sustain it. Notably, he’s had difficulty building much through drafting and development. Meanwhile, the club already has a successor lined up in former pitcher Chris Young, who has been working under Daniels as GM since December ’20 and will now take over his duties. It doesn’t make much sense that now is the time for that change. But it does make sense that a change might be of interest.

Anyway, some perspective is useful. The Rangers’ decision makes for a natural comparison with the other August executive firing in MLB: The Tigers’ choice to get rid of general manager Al Avila. Here, too, was a floundering team that axed a leader who had been with the organization for decades. But while Texas’s next exec will be tasked with figuring out how to finish a rebuild that someone else started, Detroit’s will be tasked with something far more demoralizing: How do you (re-)build out of a rebuild that never really got off the ground? There’s that perspective: It could always be worse.

Have any questions for our team? Send a note to mlb@si.com.

1. THE OPENER

Fernando Tatis Jr’s suspension for a positive PED test was announced last Friday after we sent out this newsletter. And because that is still the most consequential news to happen since our last Five-Tool edition, we wanted to recirculate Tom Verducci’s column from late Friday night about what this means for the Padres.

Fernando Tatis Jr.’s Steroid Suspension Costs the Padres Their Dream Season by Tom Verducci

They had every star lined up—until a little Clostebol blew up their plans.

2. ICYMI

Let’s run through some of our other great SI baseball stories from this week.

The Six-Man Rotation May Be MLB’s Next Evolutionary Step by Will Laws
Among other MLB teams, the Astros, Padres and Angels are prime examples of what star pitchers can produce on five days’ rest.

Buehler’s Injury Seriously Dents the Dodgers’ World Series Hopes by Nick Selbe
He has pitched more postseason innings than anyone else since his playoff debut in 2018. Los Angeles will be hard-pressed to replace him.

SI:AM | Taking Stock of the MLB Playoff Races by Dan Gartland
With only seven games left in the regular season, things are getting heated.

Blake Snell’s Dogs Support Him Through Thick and Thin by Sarah Vasile
The Padres’ pitcher and Cy Young winner says his pets brighten his days and connect him to fans.

MLB Power Rankings: Cleveland’s Surge Shakes Things Up by Will Laws
Thanks to the Guardians, each division has at least one top-10 team.

3. WORTH NOTING from Matt Martell

Don’t look now, but Blake Snell is suddenly pitching better than he ever has: His last five starts have been the best five-game stretch of his career. In those 28.2 IP he has a 0.94 ERA, with no more than one run allowed in each start. He’s begun throwing his curveball much more and his changeup much less, and it’s paid off, helping him rack up 39 strikeouts to just five walks. After a rocky start to the season for him, it’s surely a relief for the Padres, who need everything they can get in this wild-card race.

He starts tonight against the Nationals at 9:40 p.m. ET.

4. W2W4 from Nick Selbe

Of all the weekend series on deck, the World Series rematch between the Astros and Braves is undoubtedly the headliner. Friday’s opener will match up Lance McCullers Jr.—who looked extremely sharp in his season debut earlier this week with six shutout innings against the A’s—with Atlanta’s Kyle Wright. Both teams are coming in hot, with Atlanta having won nine of 10 and Houston coming to town having just put up 21 runs against the White Sox. Hopefully each team can maintain its top form and make for a juicy showdown.

On the other end of the competitive spectrum is the Angels’ trip to Detroit. Normally, matchups between teams who are a combined 56 games under .500 don’t merit a mention here, but this is a rare exception because Friday is the expected, long-awaited return from the injured list by Mike Trout. Trout hasn’t played since July 12, when the Angels were 38–50. They’ve gone 13–17 since then and continue their steadfast commitment to the bit of wasting the talents of their talented superstars. That’s unlikely to change with Trout’s return to the lineup, but at least the three-time MVP’s presence makes the team a skosh more watchable.

5. THE CLOSER from Matt Martell

Marc Vasconcellos/USA TODAY NETWORK

Hello, from South Williamsport, Pa., where I’ve been reporting a Little League World Series story (keep an eye out for that next week). So, The Closer this week will be an LLWS-MLB combo. Sunday night marks the fifth annual MLB Little League Classic, played at Bowman Field in Williamsport, with this year’s game between the Red Sox and Orioles. Unlike the Field of Dreams game—which is intended just as much for fans watching at home as it is for the players and those lucky enough to buy tickets—the Little League Classic is meant for the Little League players, coaches and their families, the Williamsport community and the MLB players. For many of the Little Leaguers, this is the first and only MLB game they ever get a chance to see in person.

Meanwhile, the big leaguers get something out of it, too. It breaks up the monotony of the 162-game schedule, and it reminds them why they started playing baseball in the first place—to have fun with the kids they grew up with.

“It's such a neat experience for the kids,” says Stephen D. Keener, the president and CEO of Little League International. “And quite frankly, the first year the Major League guys had no idea what they were walking into. But after that, and once they got here, they were fine. They were like kids themselves.”

Many of the MLB players follow the LLWS before they get into town, so they already know and become fans of some of the Little Leaguers by the time they meet them Sunday morning at the Little League World Series complex. The pros take in the LLWS games from the stands and pal around with the Little Leaguers who aren’t playing. They swap autographs and share stories.

Says Keener: “The folks at Major League Baseball tell me that the teams start calling them to say, ‘We want to go to Williamsport. We want to play in that game.’”

That’s all from us today. We’ll be back in your inbox next Friday. In the meantime, share this newsletter with your friends and family, and tell them to sign up at SI.com/newsletters. If you have any questions or comments, shoot us an email at mlb@si.com.