It’s one thing for a team to miss the playoffs the season after winning the World Series. It’s quite another for a team to bomb as monumentally as the Rangers have this year. 

So, now the task is rebuilding to championship quality, or at least playoff caliber. It’s time to start looking at the free agent class. By all accounts, it’s a very talented crop of free agents, led by the bats of Juan Soto, Pete Alonso, and Anthony Santander, and the arms of Corbin Burnes, Blake Snell, and Max Fried.

But in all the free agent lists, there’s one name that doesn’t get mentioned. He’s not a hitter. He’s not a pitcher. But he should be the most important free agent on the Rangers radar.

It’s their general manager. Shockingly, Chris Young is a free agent at the end of the season. He won a World Series in his first year at the helm. Yet, surprisingly, his contract was not immediately extended. Nor was it extended in the ten months since then.

That seems peculiar. 

It makes you wonder what Rangers ownership is thinking. Are they taking the Marlins approach and tearing it down after winning a World Series, which the Marlins did twice? If they don’t retain Chris Young, does Bruce Bochy stay? After all, it was Young who talked him out of retirement.

This is a franchise, and an ownership group, that has a history of wondering through the wilderness, having endured six consecutive losing seasons before Young took over. It suffered fifty-two consecutive championship-less seasons before Young took over.

And he could walk at the end of the year.

If that’s the case, this is year one of another long, dark period in Rangers history. Get rid of Young and Bochy, and the aimless wondering will return. 

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TODAY’S GAME: