July 21st, 2012: I was wearing a particularly ostentatious green and yellow shirt from Diamond Supply Co. — which was a thing back then — while in Anaheim CA attending a Major League Baseball game between the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Yu Darvish started for Texas, striking out 11 batters and allowing just two runs over 7 innings of work, Mike Napoli hit two homers, and future Hall-of-Famer Adrian Beltre added another, en route to the Rangers winning the game 9-2.
I was there with my mom and dad. It was rare thing for us — to be together, I mean. Usually when the Rangers (my favorite team) were in Southern California my mom, who got premium seats from her season-ticket-holding boss, would go together. On this particular date we somehow were able to drag my dad into the fold — likely due to the fact it was a Saturday and he was not working — and so the three of us had a day where we acted like a real family.
Fairly early on in the game I looked a couple rows over, because I cannot stress enough how goddam good these seats were, and saw Texas’s General Manager — Jon Daniels — sitting next to the team’s assistant GM, Thad Levine. (Levine later served as GM for the Minnesota Twins from 2017-’24 and, coincidentally enough, now works for the National League Champion Brewers.) Never have I been a starstruck kind of dude, because to me people are just people, but when I saw Jon Daniels I was chomping at the bit to talk to him. Or at him. Whatever.
So around the middle of the game, when already the Rangers were killing the Angels and I was a few beers deep, I got up out of my seat wearing my dumbass T-shirt and walked over to where Daniels and Levine were sitting. By the time I reached them I realized I was the dog who caught the postman: I knew I had to say something, but when I finally got there I didn’t have a goddam clue what it was.
So I got down on a knee (because standing would have obstructed both their views of home plate), I shook Jon Daniels’s hand, and all I could muster was: ‘Cornell?’ Total dipshit thing to say. Cornell was, after all, the college Daniels attended. Why did I know that? I knew that because I knew everything related to Texas Rangers baseball. I knew the whole roster. I knew where the whole roster came from, whether homegrown or signed in free agency or internationally. I knew the college the GM went to. I was 22 years old.
And Jon Daniels, magnanimous in that moment as he was, replied, ‘Yeah, you too?’ I’m such a son of a bitch that I actually told the man, ‘No… Virginia Tech,’ as if I was approaching him to have a discussion about historic universities on the east coast, or something. He responded with this or that — I can’t recall — but that’s when I got my mind right. In that moment I was so anxious that I couldn’t help but feel I was wasting his time (which I was), and that was the last thing I wanted to do. He was just trying to watch his boys play, and I wanted to pour my heart out.
I was happy that I did get my mind right, though. Because I was able to tell him, Jon Daniels, that is, how grateful I was that he was the General Manager, and how much I appreciated him for turning the Rangers into a winner. My childhood team. The Texas Rangers. He brought them from absolutely nothing and made them into something. Ken Rosenthal around that time described the Rangers as the ‘standard-bearers’ of the American League. I will never forget that. And so I had to give my love to this man.
For how fruitful the 2010’s decade was for the Rangers — two American League pennants (leading to two World Series appearances), four American League West titles, and five playoff appearances — never under the leadership of Daniels were they able to procure their elusive first-ever championship. By the turn of the 2020’s, the Rangers became a middling franchise in MLB. They were good enough to not be truly bad, but not good enough to be a real contender.
It was not at all the fault of Jon Daniels, however. He did not suddenly lose his proverbial fastball over the years. In the late-2000’s and early-2010’s he was at the helm of arguably the most cutting-edge franchise in the sport. The Rangers spent tons of money — illegally at some points — on international talent. Two of his assistants, the aforementioned Levine with the Twins and A.J. Preller with the Padres, became GMs in their own right. Daniels made clever trades for players such as Josh Hamilton and Mike Napoli, were deft in the free agent market, most notably in signing the aforementioned Adrian Beltre, and the result was assembling a powerhouse that ultimately made back-to-back World Series appearances in 2010 and ’11.
But as the years moved ever closer to the 2020’s the Rangers opened a new stadium, and ownership decided to cut payroll with the classic billionaire excuse that the team was not profitable. Daniels then had to go bargain-hunting on the free agent market, and Texas was never able to compete with the usual suspects (such as the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, etc.) for talent. As a consequence, Daniels’s star started to dim.
Texas’s billionaire ownership group, following the Covid-shortened 2020 season, decided suddenly to turn over a new leaf. With the threat of a work stoppage — when the last collective bargaining agreement expired in December, 2021 — the Rangers committed a half-billion dollars into two players: Shortstop Corey Seager (10 year, $325 million) and shortstop-turned-second-baseman Marcus Semien (7 years, $175 million), signaling a new day for Texas Rangers baseball.
Despite those two landmark signings, the franchise was still in such rough shape that their over/under win total heading into the 2022 regular season was just 74.5 wins. In other words, Texas was projected once again to be a losing team. During the preceding five-year stretch the Rangers went 78-84 (2017), 67-95 (2018), 78-84 (2019), 22-38 (Covid year) and 60-102 (2021), so it was not exactly anticipated that adding Seager and Semien would magically turn them into a contender. That year the Rangers won just 68 games.
On August 17th, 2022, Rangers ownership surprisingly fired Jon Daniels after 21 years with the club, and 17 as General Manager. It sent shockwaves through me as a fan, mainly because it seemed like Texas was only at the beginning of a new plan — having spent so much money the offseason before. What bothered me more than anything was how disrespectful it seemed that Daniels was fired midseason; most professional organizations do not make such rash decisions with integral members of their front office after the amount of service JD had put in. It seemed particularly shortsighted given that the Rangers weren’t even supposed to be any good in 2022.
Daniels was replaced by former player Chris Young, whom Daniels hired as a special assistant in December, 2020. Following the fledgling 2022 campaign Young made two splashes in free agency himself, signing starter Nathan Eovaldi to a two-year deal worth $34 million and former Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom to a whopping five-year $185 million contract. Atop the signings of Seager and Semien the year before, the Rangers were poised for a breakout in 2023.
Although they were projected in 2023 to be about average — just 82.5 wins — Texas won 90 games and caught fire at the right time en route to their first World Series title in franchise history, defeating the Arizona Diamondbacks. In a classy gesture, Chris Young said: ‘There was a foundation built by Jon Daniels.’
The great tragedy of Daniels’s tenure with the Texas Rangers is that he did, in fact, build from the ground up the best organization in baseball and, whether through bad playoff luck, or bad injury luck, never got the enjoy the fruits of all his hard work with a World Series title. Between 2010 and 2013 there was not a more powerful offense, or top-to-bottom franchise, in the entire sport.
And so it is ironic that all of the things that worked against the Rangers when Daniels was GM actually worked to their benefit just one year after he was fired. Texas was not the best team — and far from it — in 2023 (when they won the World Series). Their previously bad playoff luck turned good. The offense got hot, and the pitching was merely good enough to get the job done.
Chris Young happened to be the man in charge who inherited that championship. That was all. I do not find it terribly surprising that since Texas’s World Series in 2023, with most of the same roster intact, they have been below .500 for three straight years and have not been back to the playoffs. Semien has since been traded. Seager’s production has seemingly fallen off a cliff. Eovaldi has been on-and-off injured and deGrom, despite his sometimes-brilliance, is old and owns a contract that appears headed towards an albatross over the next couple seasons.
I said in a previous article that the Rangers are on the verge of a long and dark road to recovery. They have a post-prime roster and very little to work with by way of a minor league system, which ranks around 20th in MLB according to various scouting sites. The worst combination of factors a franchise has to deal with is having an old and expensive roster while simultaneously a weak minor league system. But alas.
For Texas to return to prominence, and later glory, god-willing, they are likely going to have to eat a lot of money in trading away players such as Seager, Eovaldi and deGrom, with hopes of procuring the kinds of prospects that will give the club the proper reset it needs. But even at that there are no guarantees, not only because none of those three players have the type of trade value they may have a couple years ago, but because the Rangers have had a rough time, generally, over the last handful of years drafting and developing their talent. What good are promising young players if the Rangers are unable to maximize their abilities?
Jon Daniels was rarely confronted with this issue, since his foundation with the Rangers was always focused on the future. He got baptized into baseball with a failed, and failing franchise, and thus his default setting was to pour resources into the farm system. Under his leadership the Rangers were consistently in the upper-third of minor league rankings, and he implemented those assets to better the major league team. It sounds so simple in retrospect, but really he just made a lot of really good gambles.
The date is currently October 25th in the year of our lord, 2026. The Milwaukee Brewers own a 2-0 series lead over the Tampa Bay Rays, having won each of the first time games by the slimmest of margins (3-2, and 5-4). For the Rays to execute a comeback in this World Series of ours, they will have to win four of the next five games. It is not impossible, but it is a deficit no betting man would feel particularly good about. It is akin to flipping a coin five times and expecting heads (or tails, I suppose) to come up eighty per cent of the time.
The moral of this story, however, really has nothing to do with the Rays and nothing to do with the Texas Rangers. It has to do with Jon Daniels, who a very short time ago presided over one of the most successful franchises in all of Major League Baseball. The 2010’s decade in many ways belonged to the Rangers — in spite of their playoff shortcomings — and baseball happens to be one of those sports where the General Manager, right after the players on the field, is the most important individual.
Still only 49 years old, the man Rangers fans such as myself used to call ‘JD’ is young enough to run his own show once again. If and when that opportunity arises, I will share a certain allegiance to wherever Daniels ends up — much in the same way I am rooting for the Rays to defy the odds and make a stand against the Brewers over this next week or so. And so it goes.
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