Grading Chris Young and the Texas Rangers front office at the season’s midway point

In his third season as the team’s general manager, Chris Young has the Texas Rangers atop the AL West. They hit the season’s halfway point Thursday night at 49-32 and five games in front of the defending World Series champion Houston Astros.

The intriguing thing about the Rangers rise is not what they’ve done, but rather how Young has done it. With particular reference to his personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 season, the Rangers are holding steady in first with virtually no help from their chief executive.

Grading the Texas Rangers at the midway point of the 2023 season

What follows is a mid-term assessment of Young’s personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the Rangers’ performance.

The standard of measurement in Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by Young impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.

A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:

1.       By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.

2.       By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.

3.       By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.

4.       By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.

5.       By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.

Here’s how Young stacks up by those five yardsticks.

Acquired or traded

There is a recurring theme to Young’s approach to making the Rangers a winner in this season’s first half, and it is his fascinatingly hands-off approach. Granted, there have been one or two headline moves, and we’ll touch on those below. But for the most part the Rangers would be doing what they’re doing this season if Young had spent the 2022-23 offseason in hibernation.

That’s nowhere more true than in his interactions with other teams, which have been few and far between. Young made one swap of note over the offseason; it brought Jake Odorizzi in from Atlanta to bolster the pitching staff. The Rangers placed Odorizzi on the 60-day IL at the end of spring training with a rotator cuff strain; he hasn’t pitched a regulation inning for them yet.

The cost to get Odorizzi was pitcher Kolby Allard, who had injury problems of his own before debuting just Thursday night.

How could Young get away with so little activity in such a key area as team-to-team swaps? The answer is that he had already built the team. The Rangers’ 2023 success to date is built on holdovers from previous years, several of whom Young brought in and others of whom he inherited.

That characterization applies to virtually all the Rangers’ high-performing stars: Adolis Garcia, Jonah Heim, Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Nathaniel Lowe, Dane Dunning, Jon Gray, Leody Taveras and Ezequiel Duran.

The lesson is pretty straightforward: if the talent’s already on hand, you don’t have to go out and get it.

Free agency

The attention-getting offseason move, of course, was Young’s successful courting of free agent pitcher Jacob deGrom. He signed for $222 million through 2028 and then did what deGrom always does … he went on the IL six appearances into his tenure.

Perhaps deGrom’s fragility was why Young also signed Nathan Eovaldi, a free agent pitcher who has been reliable. Eovaldi is 9-3 in 16 starts with a 2.82 ERA, good for a +1.6 WAA. Travis Jankowski was a low-budget afterthought pickup who is batting .306 as the regular left fielder. That’s good for +1.4 WAA.

If Eovaldi and Jankowski were all there is to the picture, Young’s score in this area would be looking good. But it’s not. He also signed Robbie Grossman (.219, seven homers), Martin Perez (4.28 ERA in 16 starts), Andrew Heaney (4.38 ERA  in 15 starts) and Ian Kennedy (7.20 ERA in 11 games), every one of them a statistical liability.

Sandy Leon came in as the backup catcher to Heim, hit .146, and was released last week.

Put the whole thing together, pluses and minuses, and it works out to an inconsequential -0.1 impact on the Rangers’ fortunes. This, then, is an area where Young actually applied himself to improving the team, but didn’t do it, and it hasn’t mattered.

When things are going that way for you, life is good.

Farm system

Far and away, the most impactful farm system product has been third baseman Josh Jung. He got a significant call-up at the end of 2022, but at 102 plate appearances, that call-up fell short of disqualifying him for rookie consideration.

This year, Jung has plugged a hole at third base with a .274 average, 16 home run and 48 RBI, all of that equating to a +1.1 WAA.

Young has called on a half-dozen other rookies for lesser levels of production but, almost without exception, they’ve been liabilities. Of the six, only two remain with the big team; two have been sent down and the other two are no longer on the roster.

The two survivors are pitchers Grant Anderson and Cody Bradford. Both are lower-level bullpen hands.

Anderson has pitched 18 innings with a 3.06 ERA, while Bradford has worked 19 innings with a 5.59 ERA. The sum total of their impact on Ranger success adds up to -0.2 WAA.

At least they have role models. If there’s one thing Young’s system has produced in his first three seasons, it’s bullpen arms. Brock Burke, John King and Joe Barlow all came up through the system, and all are presently laboring in the Rangers bullpen.

Position players Duran and Taveras are also graduates of Young’s farm system.