Put up or shut up.
Do or die.
Sink or swim.
This time two years ago, those hackneyed forks in the road were staring down Jon Daniels like the barrel of a loaded gun. He was 29 then, and only in his second season as the Texas Rangers GM, yet the luster had long worn off his once incandescent star.
Bad trades will do that to you. You flip an All-Star second baseman (Alfonso Soriano) here, a couple wunderkind prospects (John Danks and Adrian Gonzalez) there, with nothing to show for it, and soon the same baby face that once got you branded a young genius begets labels such as “naïve” and “overmatched.”
Ahead of the July 31st, 2007 MLB trade deadline, Daniels had an opportunity to redeem himself – or destroy his career for good. He was dangling Mark Teixeira and Eric Gagne, the best available position player and relief pitcher respectively, and badly needed an infusion of prospects to stimulate a barren farm system.
For the next two weeks, Jon Daniels would be trading for his job. But more than that, he would be trading for his image, his reputation, his legacy. He would be trading to put his career on a fast track down one of those forks in the road.
Make or break.
Kill or be killed.
Theo Epstein or Paul DePodesta.
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Today, the Rangers are on their way to becoming the darlings of baseball. They boast one of the best offenses in baseball – no surprise there – but also feature Baseball America’s top farm system, stocked to the brim with promising minor league arms that could potentially slake the franchise’s eternal thirst for quality pitching.
No less than four established every day players – Ian Kinsler, Josh Hamilton, Nelson Cruz, and Elvis Andrus – are core guys on the right side of thirty, with team leader Michael Young capable of providing solid play at third base for another three to four years as a complementary player.
The bullpen runs five deep in quality arms, including baseball’s statistically best 7-8-9 combo in Darren O’Day, CJ Wilson, and Frankie Francisco.
Even the rotation has improved by leaps and bounds under the tutelage of pitching coach Mike Maddux, unearthing a potential long term building block named Scott Feldman while slowly developing uber-prospect Derek Holland.
All of that with nary a mention of the individual star-caliber talents lurking in the minor leagues, and for good reason; even a brief synopsis includes enough names to warrant a completely separate column.
For the first time in a long time, the Rangers have a plan; patiently acquire long term assets, build through the draft while aggressively pursuing Latin American talent, curb spending in the free agent market, and trade any non-essential assets while they have peak value.
Even more important than the plan itself, though, is the franchise’s commitment to it. Over the past eight years, the organization’s pendulum has swung back and forth from trying to buy a team through free agency (think A-Rod and Chan Ho Park), to developing from within (Hank Blalock and Mark Teixeira), back to buying a team through free agency (Kevin Millwood), back to developing from within (the ballyhooed trio of John Danks, Edinson Volquez, and Thomas Diamond – none of whom experienced success in a Ranger uniform), with a few meek attempts at balancing the two approaches in between.
None of it worked.
Not even close.
Yet here they are, on the right track and for once, showing no signs of veering off the road.
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All of this can be traced back to July 31st, 2007, Daniels’ day of reckoning. It’s the day that changed everything, a line in the sand that created “before” and “after;” “then” and “now;” “B.C.” and “A.D.”
By the time the trade deadline had passed, Daniels turned Teixeira, Gagne, and Kenny Lofton into nine players. Already, four of them (Andrus, David Murphy, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Matt Harrison) have become big league regulars, while three more (Neftali Feliz, Max Ramirez, and Engel Beltre) rank among the team’s top ten prospects. An eighth, Kason Gabbard, made a half season’s worth of starts before eventually being jettisoned.
The immediate impact was akin to a meteor’s in that it was big, and easy to spot; 3 trades, 3 wins, and quickie-remodel of the farm system.
But the ripple effect was even greater, and the team has ridden the wave of momentum ever since, and they have Jon Daniels to thank for it.
Post D-Day 2007, the man just can’t seem to miss. Fresh off striking out in his courtship of Torii Hunter, Daniels turned around and flipped Volquez to Cincinnati for Hamilton, who instantly filled the voids in center field, the middle of the batting order, and as the face of the franchise.
He brought in Milton Bradley, fresh off the worst year of his career, and watched him have his best one. Milton might be gone now, but the two first round picks he brought as free agency compensation certainly will not be forgotten.
He turned others’ trash into his treasure, plucking key relievers O’Day and Jason Grilli, each of whom sports a sub 2.00 ERA with the team, off waivers, as well as coaxing 15 home runs and counting from Andruw Jones, last seen decomposing in Dodger blue.
Most important of all, he shelled out for pitching coach Mike Maddux. Maddux has gotten a young pitching staff to be aggressive by trusting their stuff and the team’s much improved defense. Simply put, it’s working; the Rangers currently 12th in the majors in total pitching after finishing dead last in 2008 with an atrocious 5.37 ERA.
For two years and counting, Daniels has been building something special. It’s no longer a question of ‘if’, but rather a declarative of ‘when;’ soon, very soon, the Rangers will be a force to reckoned with.
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‘When’ was supposed to be 2010, or at least that was the plan. Daniels said so himself during spring training, citing that as the date when some of that young pitching would not only trickle into the majors, but also begin to pay dividends.
What Daniels didn’t count on was the pieces coming together ahead of schedule. The Rangers are currently 54-42, good for 3.5 games back in the AL West. Given the sorry state of affairs that passed for a track record over the past decade, that would be impressive enough in its own right.
Yet it’s even more significant in how they’re accomplishing it. The Rangers aren’t playing out of their heads to get to this mark, nor are they even playing within them. If anything, the Rangers might be underachieving.
That’s the term I’d use when Kinsler, a career .280 hitter who raked to the tune of .320 in 2008, is plodding along at .244.
It’s the word that describes Josh Hamilton’s injury-plagued campaign; “Hambone” is hitting .228 with 7 HRs and 28 RBIs.
Chris Davis barely staying above the Mendoza line? The switch-hitting Saltalamacchia, formerly the best hitting prospect in the minors, re-defining mediocrity at .246 with 7HRs? Yeah, I’d call that underachieving.
Here’s the thing, though: these guys are way too talented – and in Kinsler and Hamilton’s case, too accomplished - to be this bad. Soon, they’re going to turn it around. Considering that the Rangers are currently in the thick of a pennant race, all the while fighting off a collective slump at the plate, there is certainly reason for optimism.
It’s also evidence that this season is no fluke. While the finished product is still a ways away, it would be foolish to dismiss the 2009 Rangers’ accomplishments as anything less than the beginning stages of contention. Contention that wasn’t expected this soon.
This brings us to Friday’s trade deadline.
Despite the dramatic improvement that Mike Maddux has coaxed from the pitching staff, it’s apparent that the starting rotation isn’t strong enough to hold up down the stretch of a pennant race, much less on the battlefields of October.
The nominal ace, Kevin Millwood, is best suited to be a second starter, with Feldman and Vincente Padilla as the third and fourth starters rather than their current lot as two/thirds of a playoff rotation. While Derek Holland’s talent is considerable, so too are his growing pains and at this stage of the season, he’s doing the team more harm than good during his starts.
Normally, these types of issues cannot be resolved until the off-season, when teams have time and energy exclusively devoted towards shoring up these shortcomings.
But these are not normal times. Not when Roy Halladay is available.
It’s been well-documented that the Toronto Blue Jays ace won’t come cheap, which is to be expected. Pitchers of his caliber are so rarely available, even less so when they still have two years on their contract remaining. At age 32, Halladay is the total package; in his prime, under control, dominant, and capable of inducing ground balls, an absolute must at Rangers’ Ballpark in Arlington.
Acquiring Halladay requires the Rangers to part with one of the organization’s three elite prospects – Holland, Feliz, or first baseman Justin Smoak – as well as three other high-level minor leaguers.
That’s no small matter, considering:
A. the team has invested so much in building the farm system;
B. these prospects project as upper rotation starters (Holland and Neftali Feliz) or middle of the order bats with Gold Glove chops (Smoak);
and C. the issue of cash strapped Tom Hicks having to take on the remaining $22 million on Halladay’s deal.
In this case, the risks are worth the reward. For all these prospects’ talent, their best case scenario is becoming Halladay. Best case. Worst case – there are exponentially more of these – they go any number of other routes including injury, failure, or not being good enough.
Nobody knows for certain what Derek Holland and Neftali Feliz will ultimately give the Texas Rangers. We certainly didn’t with Mark Prior and Doc Gooden, the epitome of “can’t miss” pitching prospects who did just that.
But I do know what Halladay will give them: a true ace, and the best pitcher to grace Arlington since Nolan Ryan was on the mound over 15 years ago. A rotation of Halladay, Millwood, Feldman, Padilla, and Holland or the emerging Tommy Hunter ranks among the league’s stoutest, and would make them the favorites in the AL West.
The farm system, while shaken, would still be overflowing with talent; in the words of Rangers insider Jamey Newberg, “Texas would have to make five blockbuster trades in the next six days to empty its system.” Moreover, when those young pitchers reach the big leagues, they’d find no better role model than Halladay, who was sent down from the majors all the way to A ball only to then remake himself into arguably the best pitcher in the game.
Trading for Halladay would be the perfect blend of trying to win now while working towards the future, an approach that they are so unaccustomed to succeeding with. Surrender the right mix of prospects, and the Rangers can probably get Toronto to foot some of the bill on Halladay’s salary too.
Yes, the Rangers are on the right track, but standing still nonetheless will get them run over.
Thus, two years after that eventful trade deadline, Jon Daniels again has the chance to change his team’s fortunes. Will he capitalize?
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So, no, this season wasn’t part of Daniels’ plan.
The thing with plans, however, is that they’re all projection. And projection only gets you so far in baseball, a sport where untold legions of tomorrows never see their day, yet teams still mar the present for a shot at such uncertain glory.
Sometimes, that’s fine. It was the right call two years ago, when the team needed a way out of baseball irrelevance. That time it worked, for everything that the Rangers are and will be stems from the decisions made during that week.
But it’s not now.
Not when the Rangers, for once, have a chance to win their division for the first time in over a decade.
Not when Texas, one of the great baseball states, is starved for a winner in the professional ranks to rival the success they’ve relished at the collegiate level.
Not when Roy Halladay is on the market.
Once again, Jon Daniels is staring down two paths.
Trade or stand pat.
Adapt, or stick to the plan.
Give it a shot, or wait ‘til next year.
Let’s hope he knows which one to take.
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