The Rangers on Friday announced that they’ve agreed to a multi-year contract extension with general manager Chris Young, who’d been in the final season of his previous deal, which ran from 2021-24. The team did not specify the length of the new contract. Young was also promoted and now holds the title president of baseball operations.
“Chris Young’s impact on the Texas Rangers organization has been immense over the last four years,” managing partner and majority owner Ray Davis said within today’s press release. “His leadership and vision were instrumental in helping bring a World Series championship to Arlington for the first time, and he is passionate about producing a consistent winner on the field year in and year out for our fans. Our baseball operations group, from scouting and player development to the Major League team, is in great hands with CY at the helm for many years to come. I look forward to continuing our work together.”
Young, 45, joined the Rangers’ front office in Dec. 2020 after spending two seasons working in MLB’s central office as the league’s senior vice president of on-field operations, initiatives and strategy. Given his background, he was a somewhat out-of-the-box hire, but the Rangers weren’t the only club with interest. Mets owner Steve Cohen also spoke to Young about a potential baseball operations leadership role, but Young removed his name from consideration for that post. Just weeks later, he accepted the title of GM with the Rangers. As a Dallas native, it was a homecoming for Young and helped to explain why he quickly withdrew from consideration for the Mets post.
At the time of his hiring, Young was second on the Rangers’ baseball ops hierarchy to then-president of baseball operations Jon Daniels. Daniels had helmed baseball operations in Arlington since 2006, but Young’s hiring proved to be a portent for a changing of the guard. Less than two years after tabbing Young as the general manager, Daniels was fired in Aug. 2022. Young took over baseball operations and, in his first full season steering the ship, saw his club defy all preseason expectations by bringing home the first World Series title in franchise history.
The success can hardly be attributed to Young alone, of course. Daniels’ fingerprints were all over the 2023 Rangers, whether in the form of prior free agent signings (e.g. Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Jon Gray), previous trades (Adolis Garcia, Nathaniel Lowe, Mitch Garver) or homegrown contributors (Josh Jung, Leody Taveras, Jose Leclerc). That said, it was Young who was leading the front office when Texas signed Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, Robbie Grossman and others. He also oversaw the acquisitions of Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Chris Stratton and Aroldis Chapman (admittedly paying what now looks like an excessively steep price of Cole Ragans). This past offseason’s slate of modest, payroll-limited moves included fruitful signings of Kirby Yates, David Robertson and Michael Lorenzen.
The 2024 season hasn’t at all been the followup to last year’s title that ownership, Young, the rest of the organization and fans of the Rangers envisioned. It was well known heading into the year that Texas would have several key arms on the shelf (Scherzer, deGrom, offseason signee Tyler Mahle), but the hope was that last year’s juggernaut offense would help keep the team afloat until those big arms returned to the fray.
That didn’t happen at all, however. Seager was injured early (and recently returned to the IL due to a need for sports hernia surgery). Jung missed considerable time for a second straight season. Garcia, Lowe, Taveras, young outfielder Evan Carter and catcher Jonah Heim have all taken significant steps back. Top prospect Wyatt Langford, last year’ No. 4 overall pick, broke camp with the team and has picked up steam since a slow start. However, he’s still sitting on a roughly league-average batting line and hasn’t broken out into immediate stardom like many hoped after a torrid spring training.
The result has been a 71-76 record that’s left the Rangers 7.5 games out of both the division lead and the Wild Card chase. Texas hasn’t technically been mathematically eliminated from postseason play yet, but short of a miraculous scenario where they win out for the rest of the season, they’re not going to get there. Some of that is reflective of moves that haven’t paid off and missed opportunities elsewhere. Some is indicative of the manner in which ownership’s unwillingness to spend amid concern about their television revenue effectively tied Young’s hands last winter.
Regardless of this year’s poor results, it seems ownership remains convinced that Young is the right voice to continue guiding the franchise moving forward. The Princeton grad has long been touted as one of the game’s brightest and most inquisitive minds, and he sees the game differently than many of his peers, given his 13-year career as a pitcher with the Padres, Mets, Mariners, Royals and very same Rangers he’s now tasked with constructing.