Rosenthal: Rangers, Elvis Andrus Close On Eight-Year, $120M Deal

Per Ken Rosenthal:

Sources: Andrus, #Rangers close on eight-year deal, believed to be for $120 million.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) April 1, 2013

Assuming this deal comes to fruition, this deal would, by average annual value, make Elvis the fourth-highest paid shortstop in baseball ($15 million per year), behind Jose Reyes, Derek Jeter, and Troy Tulowitzki. 

It would also solidify Elvis's place as the Rangers' shortstop of the present and future, with this contract either replacing the two years remaining on his current deal -- which would secure his age-24 through -31 seasons -- or adding onto those two remaining years, which would secure his age-26 through -33 seasons. It would, one would think, leave Jurickson Profar slotted for either a long-term role at second base or the trade market, with Ian Kinsler's longer-term role at second base also being plunged into some doubt.

More as details become available.

The Rangers Are 0-1

Yeah but no that about sums up Opening Night.

Rangers Gameday: 3/31 Vs. HOU

Three months. It's been three months. I don't harbor any illusions about the fact that vanishing from the grid -- and then false-starting everyone a couple of times -- did my credibility as a blogger no favors. I do appreciate that MJH spun gold on a few occasions to compensate at least a bit in my absence, and readily acknowledge that for BBTiA to continue to survive, the roster will need to open up significantly within the next month. That's my intention.

And, of course, I'll need to be around. Which I also intend on being the case. Do excuse me if it takes more than one day to fully get back into the groove of this, though.

Camps

I am not entirely sure of the year.  It was March, probably 2004. Maybe 2005. Jamey Newberg and I were hanging around the back fields in Surprise as morning activities were winding down and what had already been an awkward and tension-filled early session was just about to get worse. 

The morning got off to a rocky start when Buck Showalter had Jason Botts (whose Rangers pedigree dated back to the Doug Melvin era) back to the clubhouse to lift - god knows, he needed to lift some more - because he came out with all blue socks, showing no white. Old School Buck sent a message that Old School Socks were not to be tolerated in his camp.

A couple of hours later, John Hudgins was moving from one activity to another as he jogged past a golf cart in which sat director of player personnel Dom Chiti and another member of the Hart "camp" of the front office, the identity of whom I cannot remember as I sit here today.  As Hudgins - a member of the Grady Fuson-controlled draft class of 2003 - trotted by, Chiti said loudly enough that anyone near him, including Hudgins, could hear: "There's $600K we'll never get back."

Hudgins was a highly accomplished college arm out of Stanford with serious CWS skins on the wall, but he was not blessed with remarkable physical gifts.  He was a "pitchability" selection, where guile, smarts and strike-throwing ability was privileged over raw upside. He signed for a $600K signing bonus. Clearly, Chiti did not agree with the selection. 

About an hour after that, as the last of the players had left the fields for lunch, there stood Jamey and I, who were just standing around probably trying to decide where to go to lunch, New York Pizza or New York Pizza?  There weren't a lot of choices in Surprise back then. Fuson stood near home plate of one of the four minor league fields and launched into an empassioned diatribe about Chiti, minor league field coordinator Mike Brumley and Showalter in front of an audience of about a half-dozen instructors and coaches. Fuson was buying the groceries. Chiti, Brumley and Showalter were tasked with cooking the groceries and they hated the groceries. And Fuson was not happy with how the groceries were being treated by the chefs.

This was a front office with little direction and an organization with a lot of factions pulling against one-another. It's what happens when a meddling owner forces a part-time GM to work with a "GM in waiting" who is not on the same page with the GM or his people and then throws a control-freak Manager on top of that combustible structure.

Part of the problem, I have always thought, was the weakness of John Hart and whether that weakness was the result of the  meddling owner's thirst for attention and credit or Hart's lack of desire to immerse himself in his job is not really the point anymore. The point - as we sit here today - is that nobody knew who was in charge and there were several people, each with their own followers or "camps" who thought they were the ones really running things and were scrapping to fill the leadership void.

Jump forward a few years. Hart is out, the "GM in waiting" Grady Fuson is long gone. Thirty-one year old Jon Daniels is three years into his tenure as GM.  After a rough first year on the job, Daniels is starting to find his footing and things are coming together. The 2007 draft was a boon and he had parlayed Mark Teixeira into Elvis Andrus, Matt Harrison, Nefti Feliz and Jarrod Saltalamacchia. 

It was the fall of 2008, with one season of Daniels - Ryan in the can (Ryan came on in the spring of 2008), I had the chance to sit down with Daniels in his office at the Ballpark for about three hours for a lengthy Q&A for the DMN (it's no longer available online, or anywhere else). One of the things I was most interested in talking to him about was the way in which he had put together his front office / scouting and development team.

In those very dark years of the early-to-mid aughts where there the infighting amongst the "camps" in the front office and scouting & development departments were crippling the franchise, Daniels rejected the notion that anyone should belong in any camp other than the "Rangers camp."  

“First off," Daniels told me, "it never made sense to me that there could be factions in the organization, but there was some dysfunction. I didn’t pick sides because in my mind there weren’t any sides to pick. My loyalty was to John Hart because John Hart was the GM. He was the man in charge and that was it. But I was close with Grady too and we’re still friendly. For whatever reason, I was able to maintain relationships with everyone involved, and that probably helped me."

Elaborating, Daniels explained:

What we've been able to do here recently is get everyone in the organization completely committed to only one thing and that is to make the Texas Rangers organization as successful as it can be. It comes down to communication, respect and checking egos at the door. The people here now, whether they started off with Doug or John or if they have a connection to Grady or if I brought them in, are people who think about 'we' instead of 'I.'

We get everyone together a couple of times a year. The scouts and the developmental folks have regular contact. They aren't in separate camps.  We're far from perfect in this regard but we're getting better.   We flooded our minor league affiliates with our own scouts this year. Scott Servais and A.J. Preller have a strong relationship.  

An example of what we're trying to build is Mike Anderson moving from pitching coach to pro scout -- that has a lot to do with the relationship of the heads of those departments.    Scott had a couple of years of experience as a scout so he can appreciate how the other side operates.  Hoppy [Ron Hopkins, director  of scouting and Grady Fuson refugee] is a big part of that too. He's all about the kids and the organization. He's a scout's scout.

Everyone is pulling in the same direction, including the big league club. I mean,  we joke about this sometimes, but if for some reason we were out west and  the big league club couldn't post and we told Wash that we needed him to take on Anaheim with the Bakersfield club, he'd embrace it and expect to win.  That's what we're trying to get to -- everyone on the same page with a level of trust in each other.

Most, but not all casual Rangers fans understand the remarkable job that the Daniels-led Rangers did in  rebuilding  the talent inventory in the organization, but far too few know that perhaps even more importantly -and arguably even more impressively - the young Daniels eliminated the divisiveness and infighting from the system and, as Jamey Newberg has thoroughly chonicled in his e-book JD: Building the Team That Built a Winner, created a cohesive front office / scouting development where everyone was on the same page in just a few short years. 

Perhaps most impressively, he did it with people with pedigrees that traced back to each of the old camps.The scouting and development team came from all over the place. There were holdovers from the Doug Melvin / Reid Nichols era like Mike Grouse, Kip Fagg and Keith Boeck. Grady Fuson's choice as scouting director, Ron Hopkins stayed on and presided over several decidedly non-Fuson-like drafts. Guys long-connected to John Hart such as Rick Adair, Mel Didier, Mike Daly and Tom Giordano played key roles, and then there were guys like A.J. Preller, Thad Levine and Scott Servais who were connected to the Rangers only through Daniels and finally, super scout Don Welke who was a Preller mentor in Los Angeles (and long a key component in Pat Gillick's successes, wherever he went).

Having seen the division and dysfunction of the Hart era up close and personal, I - like Mr. Newberg, I think it is safe to say - have come to believe that the cohesiveness and single-minded  purpose of everyone employed by the Texas Rangers during it's ascendency during the Daniels era has, as much as anything, been the secret sauce that turned this train wreck of a franchise into a model franchise.

And now I fear that it is slipping away.  We are once again hearing about "camps."  The Ryan camp vs. the Daniels camp (but not, it should be noted, Ryan vs. Daniels).  Who should get  the credit? Who has the "power"?  

The Ron Washington who came in as the guy who would go to war against the Angels with the Bakersfield roster and expect to win has become the guy who pulls Showalter-style protests against the front office by refusing to play the personnel given to him if they don't meet with his approval. 

Another thing that bothers me about what has gone on over the last several months - dating back to Washington's refusal to play Profar and Olt as the first visible sign that maybe the days where "everyone on the same page with a level of trust in each other" were over- is  the old, tired and absolutely asinine notion  that the two "camps" that have emerged in the Rangers organization can be defined by the "stat guys" (Daniels camp) and the "scouting guys" (Ryan camp).  

That's complete bullsh.  

I tweeted the other day: "I'm not sure how many people bought & read @NewbergReport 's e-book "JD: Building the Team That Built a Winner" but clearly not enough."

I wasn't kidding.  Read that book and you will know that nobody has greater respect for great scouts than Jon Daniels does and that he puts more emphasis on scouting than on stat-based analysis, though he has probably mastered understanding the relationship  between the two as well as or better than anyone else in the game.

As I read comments on the mainstream media sites and Rangers Facebook page from the sort of casual fans who don't know about the likes of BBTiA, Newberg Report or LSB (or who don't want to know any more than they do), it is clear that this notion of Daniels and his camp being anti-scouting is fairly well rooted in the collective consciousness of the casual fan. These are the people who don't know or care to know that the transformative moment in the history of this franchise from a player personnel standpoint came in 2007, before the great Nolan Ryan appeared on the scene.  

The simplest way to explain something is to create binary relationships, false or not. It is a great shortcoming of American culture that we has been trained to see the world in an either / or sort of way.  But it's easy. Easy to (mis)understand and easy to "explain."  But it is rarely productive.  I am not saying that the local media at-large has perpetuated the notion of a false binary here between the two "camps" and I am not saying that there aren't two "camps."  

In fact, I think that there is something to it: I have a hard time believing that Washington could pull the stunts he pulled last year, thumbing his nose at Daniels by refusing to use the players he was given, if he didn't perceive that he could get away with it because somebody else other than Daniels had his back on that decision.  I don't  argue with the binary of the two "camps" but I do take issue with the simplification of how the two "camps" can be neatly separated into those who are nerdy, anti-scouting computer geeks and those who are real baseball people.  

Outside of Newberg's book, there has been far too little said about Daniels' management philosophy or his philosphy on evaluating personnel allowing much of the public to come to believe that the division between the camps is based on Daniels' hostility to scouting or old-school baseball ways, which it is absolutely untrue, as anyone who has covered the Rangers closely over the past decade can tell you if they are telling you the truth. To some extent, it appears, the public is being used as pawns in the power struggle - if indeed  there is one - by some who want to create a false perception of Daniels (or simply encourage a false perception that exists among the ordinary fans).  

Nonetheless, The entire notion of "camps" in an organization is antithetical to Daniels' beliefs about organizational management. Getting rid of "camps" and getting people - no matter what their pedigree - to come together for a single purpose, putting egos aside for the greater good of the organization is how Daniels built this thing. And this is not  to say that he wants to be surrounded only by "yes" men. 

Back in the fall of 2008, Daniels explained to me that he valued diversity of opinion, outlook and even dissention, but he also valued loyalty and that the latter gave heft and credibility to the former:

There can be paralysis by analysis with so much information coming in at times. I've become more comfortable with the people and the system in place and have a better handle on what I'm hearing from them. Continuity in the organization is critical - critical - to that. We've been fortunate...to get the right people and keep them here all throughout the system. You look at all of the good organizations - the organizations that sustain success - and they've got that continuity. When it comes time to make decisions, there's an openness. Arguments are good. Constructive. Honest.

But that only works when everyone in the organization is pulling in the same direction and it seems to be Daniels' belief that an egoless organization in which everyone is on the same page, working hard for the common purpose of making the company - in this case, the Texas Rangers - the best it can be is for everyone to feel like their contribution is important to the ultimate goal.

As Newberg wrote in an prologue to his book, in the spring of 2006, Daniels... 

sat down and wrote a letter intended for every employee in the organization, and personalized each copy with a handwritten note conveying a message of trust and empowerment and the concept of team. 

“Everything we are facing is a competition,” the letter said. “How are you going to help us win today?”

I fear those days are over. "Camps" are back. Concern with who gets the credit and who has the power instead of a system-wide myopic focus on building the best organization possible is back. I don't know who to blame. Based on what I know of Jon Daniels' track record, his organizational philosophy, his words and his deeds, I find it very difficult to believe that he is happy with this development and because I have seen his way work so well, I do not want to see it changed or modified to accommodate an ego.

If you have two quarterbacks, you don't have any.  Co-head coaches?  I don't think any of you want to see that.  A head coach who is really just a puppet for a higher authority whose attentions are often and necessarily diverted to other enterprises and issues?  I think  you've seen how well that works. There has to be one person who is ultimately in charge of making executive decisions.

My hope is that this Nolan-centric mess came about because Bob & Ray are astute enough as businessmen (and I think it's fairly safe to assume that they are quite astute) that they, somehow, came to understand that part of what went "wrong" in 2012 was the emergence of "camps," a confusion amongst the employees as to who is really in charge and that they sought to fix it by clarifying the issue. They didn't handle it very well, but it had to be done.

I do hope that they have the strength of conviction to carry out that mission, if in fact that is the mission.  In the past, the Rangers could simply get rid of anyone who placed their own interests above those of the organization as a whole or anyone who sought to subvert the authority of the man in charge who was and remains Jon Daniels. Whether or not that is what Ryan is doing here, I don't know. Based upon the reporting of the one journalist to whom Ryan seems to want to tell his story, that appears to be the case. And if it is, then - obviously - he is the rare malcontent who cannot be discharged for insubordination. 

If in fact Ryan is insisting on having "power" over baseball decisions and protecting the interests of those in his "camp" (even if it is out of an otherwise admirable sense of loyalty) and part of the compromise by his employers is to give it to him, I fear that the Rangers will have forfeited the thing that made them successful in the first place. 

Titles

I never would have guessed that a Title means more to him than Titles. But that's where we are, it seems.

On February 7, five years ago, I wrote a piece about the advent of the Nolan Ryan era with the Texas Rangers after Tom Hicks comically explained why he was handing over the reins of his crumbling organization to one of the most venerated men in modern Texas history: "I don’t think there would have been anyone else besides Nolan that I would have done this for. Nolan’s the biggest hero we’ve ever had.”

I didn't grow up in Texas or as a Rangers fan.  When Nolan Ryan came to Arlington the first time as #34, I was in Baltimore watching the O's and I grew up in Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska as a Royals fan. I never thought of Ryan as a Ranger until he became an executive with the club. Astro? Yes. Angel? Yes. Ranger? Not really. I didn't see Ryan as any more essential to the Rangers identity than Gaylord Perry. I didn't think that Ryan had some sort of mystical power that many old school Rangers fans seem to think he had - and still has.

Still, I was aware of what a model of post-baseball life that Ryan had become, that he was a man of integrity with what certainly seemed to be an exceptionally shrewd instinct for business and that he was likely to bring a lot of credibility to an organization, especially an executive suite, that had very little left. 

Notwithstanding the asinine notion that Hicks was doing Ryan some sort of favor at that point, it seemed clear to me then that Hicks had opened the door to eventual Ryan ownership / control of the franchise:

It takes a ton of heat off of [Hicks] who, I think by now, has had all of the heat he can take.   Ryan is now the de facto "owner" of the Rangers with "ultimate authority" to run the organization as he sees fit.

In other words: 

Why didn’t the Rangers sign Barry Zito?   Ask Nolan.   

Why is payroll so low?  Ask Nolan.   

Why are ticket prices going up?   Ask Nolan.  Ask the Hall of Famer.  Ask Mr. Baseball in Texas.  Ask the man with the statue in center field. 

Ask G-d.    If you dare.   It’s out of my hands.  The great Nolan Ryan is calling the shots.

And for this — for consenting to take the heat — I expect (despite words to the contrary) that Ryan ends up with a piece of the club, which has to be what he really wants.  That, I think, is ultimately what Hicks is doing for Ryan.

And that's pretty much exactly how it went down until Hicks had sucked the last dollar he could out of the franchise and drove it into bankruptcy where Ryan and Chuck Greenberg stared down Mark Cuban and Jim Crane in a Fort Worth Federal courthouse (as Bob and Ray stood in the hallway wielding their giant bank accounts) and walked away with an incredible asset on the rise. 

And that was it. I thought that Ryan got what he wanted: equity in the franchise. I didn't know a whole lot about the man, but I was pretty sure that he was smart enough to know that he didn't have the time or energy or possess the immense amount of information that was necessary to run the baseball operations. He would be the face of an ownership group that didn't really want to be public and the buffer between what he realized was an immensely talented management team and anybody who might aim to do harm to them.

He was really good at both of these things. 

From the beginning, back in February of 2008, Ryan's leadership has rarely been what most expected. The local medial, by and large, seemed to welcome the onset of the Nolan Ryan, CEO- era by cheering on what would certainly be an unmitigated extermination program, removing the decidedly un-Ryanlike Jon Daniels and his crew of nerds from the front office and replacing them with the geniuses whose vision created the Houston Astros that you know and love today.

Ever the contrarian, I expressed my hope for the Nolan Ryan era thusly:

Two years ago, Hicks hired an Ivy League-trained economist as the General Manager of his baseball franchise and what the economist has attempted to do since then is exploit market inefficiencies by selling off overvalued assets for undervalued assets.   He’s been wrong.   He’s been right.  By all accounts, he’s getting better.   He’s somehow sold Hicks on a plan that Doug Melvin tried to sell him on six years ago, which is to build the organization for the long haul from within.  It’s a plan designed to deliver long-term gains, but which doesn’t lend itself to the landing quick hit.  It requires a lot of patience. 

Given Hicks’s track record, the chances of Daniels having the opportunity to see his plan through are probably slim and none.   Hopefully, Ryan will bring some of that famous Texas hard-headedness to the table and allow Jon Daniels’ plan to play out a little longer.   

Much to his credit, Ryan did the hard thing.  Which was nothing.

About eight months before Ryan accepted Tom Hicks' self-proclaimed largesse, Jon Daniels had engineered a fifty-some day window during which he radically transformed the franchise. Ryan had the good sense to see that the kid had a plan that made sense - that was sustainable - and that he was well on his way to executing it.  Daniels stayed in spite of the fact that Ryan's old media cronies had already begun to pop the corks celebrating his dismissal.

The manager, who was similarly presumed to be shown the door in favor of someone with an Astros pedigree, stayed on and survived a monstrous personal and public relations disaster.  Ryan remained the steady hand. 

He was no graduate of Harvard or Wharton business schools. He never even attended a day of college. But somehow, Nolan Ryan seemed to understand organizational management and strategy a hundred times better than the well-papered CEO's of American Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Shearson, or any of the other scores of businesses that were going down the tubes in 2008.

One year before Ryan became the CEO of the Texas Rangers, the McKinsey Quarterly published a comprehensive piece on the role of the CEO in Transformation, citing some of the critical elements of successful CEO's in leading a company through change:

Making the transformation meaningful. People will go to extraordinary lengths for causes they believe in, and a powerful transformation story will create and reinforce their commitment. The ultimate impact of the story depends on the CEO’s willingness to make the transformation personal, to engage others openly, and to spotlight successes as they emerge.

Role-modeling desired mind-sets and behavior. Successful CEOs typically embark on their own personal transformation journey. Their actions encourage employees to support and practice the new types of behavior.

Building a strong and committed top team. To harness the transformative power of the top team, CEOs must make tough decisions about who has the ability and motivation to make the journey.

Through the first transformation of the Ryan era (aka the Daniels plan, which was well under way when Ryan arrived), the CEO seemed to embrace these philosophies. He stood behind Daniels & Co. when many were calling for their heads. He openly and publicly endorsed their plan. He led by example and he seemed to enjoy cultivating and protecting not only one of the best on-field franchises in the game, but one of the best front offices in the game (including protecting Daniels from one of his co-owners when he tried to go all early-Tom Hicks and cut a deal that the GM didn't approve of).

To the extent he got the credit, for any of this, he admitted the he got too much credit, implying that the credit belonged to Daniels, Levine, Preller, Washington, Maddux and a powerhouse scouting department as the ones who built the juggernaut rather than he who sat oh-so-visibly by the dugout - sometimes with his former boss and former leader of the free world - and enjoyed the benefits of using the ballclub and the ballpark to market and sell his beef.

And here we stand today in 2013 watching an organization going through another transformation, though not as dramatic as the one it was going through when Ryan stepped in prior to the 2008 season.  Back then, it was pretty clear to anyone who was thoughtful about baseball that the organization's best days were coming, probably sooner than later.   Today, it faces a challenge that might be more difficult than rising from abject mediocrity to relevance: turning the page and staying on top.

And now the CEO has abandoned ship, raising the question: "What's the point?"

As has been well documented, Ryan has never made personnel decisions, he doesn't negotiate contracts, doesn't spend countless hours on the phone talking to or texting with Byrnes, O'Dowd, Melvin, Shapiro, Cherington, Beane, Sabean, Dombrowski, et al. He has never been involved in the day-to-day rigors of gathering and synthesizing scouting reports. 

I sometimes joke that I can't really give the Cowboys' scouting department too much credit for finding Demarcus Ware, and that's sort of my feeling about the Rangers' acquisition of the great Mike Maddux. I suspect that Daniels was aware of Maddux's credentials and his availability. 

Ryan's two chief contributions to the Rangers franchise were:

1) Correctly recognizing that Daniels & Co. were smart, talented people who were on to something and protecting them from the reckless whimsey of Tom Hicks for long enough that Daniels' plan could begin to result in pennants;  and

2)  Delivering the franchise - and more specifically Team Daniels - to Bob & Ray who, so far, appear to be exactly the sort of stewards of a public trust that a sports fan should dream to be at the helm of the franchise they follow.

Ryan brought the right management team together with the right ownership group, and what we have learned this week is that:  

1) The current ownership is committed to keeping not only Daniels, but his entire team here for as long as possible because they know that these young men have created a valuable, sustainable asset; and

2) The current ownership has correctly identified that Daniels & Co. and the work that they do is creating more value for them than whatever nebulous symbolic value Ryan brings to the table.

Whether Ryan stays or goes, it will make little difference structurally or functionally to the Rangers organization going forward, but that is not to say that he has not been immensely valuable in the past.

Without him, there is no Bob & Ray + JD, Thad & AJ = Great, Pennant Winning Franchise With A Bright Future.

If you are able to divorce yourself from the notion that Ryan - former Astros great, fromer Angels great, Hall of Famer Lynn Nolan Ryan, Jr. (who went into the Hall as a Ranger because Tom Hicks paid for the billboard space on the cap of his plaque) - is somehow Mr. Ranger and that this organization has no identity without him, I think that you can begin to realize what the Bob and Ray and the board seem to have recognized: Ryan is wanted here, he is welcome here, he is appreciated here, but his proper role is to do what he has always done best: protect and nurture his management team, highlight their successes, give them the opportunity for growth rather than deter it and be a role model. In other words, be a CEO. 

Ryan hasn't spoken yet, but by not speaking it is clear that he is now rejecting the role of CEO.  I won't pretend to know why he is rejecting it, but I do know that he is rejecting it. I doubt that there is a board of a single successful company in this country that would tolerate its CEO going into hiding at a time when the company, going through a transformation of sorts, is suffering through what is now a full week of public relations damage, allowing the public and the media to speculate ad nauseum about what caused this mess and who is to blame. In spite of his brilliance as an executive over the past five years, it's going to be very difficult to retain (or regain) his credibility in that role going forward given this week where he is so clearly and publicly putting his own interests over those of the franchise.

There have been titles here and there will be more whether or not Nolan Ryan is here to enjoy them or what his title is.

Untitled

... too much?

Nellie

Nelson Cruz is among nine professional athletes (including Alex Rodriguez) implicated in a Miami New Times story on a south Florida clinic said to be supplying athletes with PED's.  

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-01-31/news/a-rod-and-doping-a-miami-clinic-supplies-drugs-to-sports-biggest-names/

The New Times reports that they sought comment from the Rangers but received no response.

Rangers, Matt Harrison Agree On Five-Year, $55 Million Extension

According to Jeff Wilson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Rangers have agreed to terms on a five-year, $55 million contract extension with left-hander Matt Harrison. The deal includes a sixth-year option worth an undisclosed sum. Harrison reportedly passed his physical tonight.

More to follow. And, yes, it's nice to be back.

Friday Morning Open Thread

According to one source or another:

● Seattle came calling for Justin Upton dangling a package composed of Taijuan Walker, Stephen Pryor, Charlie Furbush, and Nick Franklin, and reportedly got the Diamondbacks to accept the deal, but Upton refused to waive his limited no-trade rights which allow him to block a trade to the Mariners;

● Texas made its last, best offer for Upton on Thursday before the Seattle/Arizona drama unfolded, and is believed to be moving on from the Upton pursuit;

● The Rangers are believed to be keeping Ian Kinsler at second base next season after all (in large part because Kinsler decided he didn't want to move from second to first base at this point in his career), meaning that Jurickson Profar will, in all likelihood, open the 2013 season at Triple-A Round Rock.

Discuss.

HOF

Just a short conversation piece in Joey's absence.  I'm a bit under the weather and lack the energy to come up with something meatier. I promised to post this morning, so here you go.

Later today, we will learn the names of the inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame, Class of 2013. And by most accounts, that means we will be told  that  there will be no inductees this year.  Or worse, undeserving players from the 80's like Jack Morris and Dale Murphy will make the cut while obvious choices who were in their prime a decade later will not.

Barry Bonds will not make it.  Neither will Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire or Raffy Palmeiro. Nor will Jeff Bagwell or Mike Piazza, neither of whom were ever implicated in a PED scandal of any kind but who are "guilty" by virtue of having produced prodigious power numbers in the PED era.

In case you don't know, the Hall of Fame ballot is created by MLB and voted on by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Thus, the reason that Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Piazza will not be declared Hall of Famers - as all four should be (I'm not sold on McGwire, Bagwell or Palmeiro) - this afternoon is that the writers who were there in the clubhouses every day, at spring training every year, and who had a professional obligation to report on the game are now pretending to be shocked and offended by what they knew was going on right under their noses for 15 years but failed to expose, choosing instead to mythologize the beastly numbers these guys were putting up and the men who produced them.

If the BBWAA is serious about continuing to ride their high horse, here is what I want to see from them:  I would like them to form a committee to research and identify every pitcher currently enshrined who was ever accused of doctoring a baseball and excommunicate him from the Hall (starting with Gaylord Perry, Whitey Ford and Don Sutton).  

Likewise, every player who was ever accused of or admitted to taking amphetamines (Mike Schmidt, you are out) or turning his spikes into razor blades to deter middle infielders from defending stolen base attempts (Ty Cobb) must be ousted immediately in order to maintain the imagined purity of the Hall.  

Moroever, I would hope that when it come time to vote for any writers or executives who were active and "looked the other way" during the PED era (all of them), the BBWAA will refuse to vote for them too. They created and enabled the era as much as the players. 

This thing is either going to be pure or it's not. For the BBWAA to exclude recent cheaters after looking the other way for nearly a century is completely arbitrary and capricious. 

Liar

The touble with trying to write anything cogent about the Rangers during the winter is that I have come to realize that nobody - and I mean nobody - outside of the family knows what Jon Daniels is really thinking. I have significant doubts that anyone inside the family knows what Daneils is thinking either, until he is damn good and ready to let them know.  And that is usually at a press conference announcing a move that he made two days ago.

Any time I read a quote or a tidbit of any kind from "a Rangers source" I assume that it's at least 90% bullshit.  It's probably either deliberate, strategically-placed misinformation or someone talking out of his ass.  

I am glad that I am not among those who make a living by reporting on this team every day - or at all - during the hot stove season. It must be miserable.

Having said that, I would appreciate it if those who are paid to write about this team didn't do this in chopping up what did and didn't happen at the Winter Meetings:

The Rangers appear foolish, but worse yet, they also have come across as absolutely clueless, with some arrogance thrown in. Idiots? Yes, that, too....  What happened? I don't know.

Exactly. You don't know. And you never will.

As you know.

And we know you know this because three days before the unnamed columnist wrote the preceding opinion, he wrote this:

Daniels is never one to play the media game when it comes to game-planning on decision-making.  Going into the winter meeting, there were no leaks, or at least none I heard, coming out of Arlington about that Rangers game plan. Plenty of speculation, but no leaks. Daniels is almost paranoid about that kind of stuff, and it's a good kind of paranoid.

Three days: You acknowledge that nobody knows what the Daniels plan is and then when the unknown plan fails to materialize, he is suddenly foolish, clueless, arrogant and an idiot (for, it should be noted, NOT trumping two deals that most thoughtful baseball people think were bad deals).

This is what is known as intellectual dishonesty.

 

It is also known as lying.

 

What you have here is not merely a journalist forced to fill column inches or air time with content in an environment where your subject makes it almost impossible to get your hands on reliable information. I understand that.

I listen to a fair amount of talk radio and catch plenty of Rangers segements an a number of shows.  I read just about everything written about this baseball organization. And in the era of Twitter and blogs that can and must be updated several times a day, there is no getting around the reality that speculation has managed to rise to the level of news.  A nice juicy bit of speculation is disseminated throughout the cyber community of those who follow the subject and brings traffic. 

But that's not what this "journalist" is doing.  This journalist does not tweet. He writes one or two columns a week for a major newspaper.  He is a general columnist. He doesn't have to write about the Rangers at all.  In fact, for years I don't recall him writing much about them at all even during the summers unless it was to gleefully celebrate their failures while resorting to one of the lowest forms of discourse: name calling. 

I have sat down to try and write about the Rangers on several occasions since the season ended and every time I start, I feel stupid. I always feel as though I am 24 hours away from having the truth revealed to me and that to have drawn any conclusions about the health of this organization based upon what didn't happen yesterday - which I have come to "expect" based on nothing but speculation floating in cyberspace which I know to be baseless - is a fool's errand.  

So I try not to be a fool while feeling some sympathy for those of my friends in the media who really have no choice but to look like fools by attempting to generate content based upon what they can only speculate is happening behind closed doors in the offices on Ballpark Way.  

And I refuse to be a liar, but then again, I'm not DFW's senior sports columnist.

Monday Morning Rangers Notes: Rumors At 20,000 Feet

Well, I haven't actually taken to the skies yet this morning (waiting time in the terminal doesn't exactly qualify), but I couldn't pass up this reference:

● In a Justin Upton-related update that may or may not actually be an update, Ken Rosenthal says that the Rangers are among several teams who continue to engage the Diamondbacks on Upton, with their preference being to "build a package around third baseman Mike Olt ... [Texas] is willing to add a top pitching prospect and third quality piece to the package, sources say"; in addition, Rosenthal indicates that Upton-to-Texas talks only "recently revived" after a trade was nearly consummated at the winter meetings, then fell apart late in the game (FOXSports.com)

● In response to a weekend San Diego Union-Tribune report stating that the Padres had made contact with the Marlins on a possible trade for Giancarlo Stanton, Clark Spencer fired back from the Marlins' beat: "Simply put, the Marlins 'are not moving him,' according to a source I spoke with. They haven't even 'discussed' it internally. The team's plans calling for Stanton to start the season with the club and occupy the clean-up spot have 'not changed at all,' according to another source with knowledge of the Marlins' intentions." (Miami Herald)

● In reference to his past "bashing" of the Rangers (which probably had more made of it than should have been the case), Lance Berkman commented thusly: I'm prepared to let bygones be bygones, but I understand the fans remembering those comments. Ultimately, I had to eat some crow and I was happy to do that. I tend to share an unvarnished opinion and not everyone was going to like that answer. It was my honest opinion and I was proved to be incorrect in my assessment and it was not the first time I've been wrong. This is a different team and a different scenario and I'm happy to be a part of the Rangers organization. It's a winning team. Hopefully by playing well, I'll be able to win over some of those fans I ostracized by shooting my mouth off before." (Richard Durrett, ESPN.com)

● According to Jon Heyman, "[the] Rangers [are] still looking for more after adding Berkman ... Michael Bourn, Justin Upton, and Kyle Lohse could be in play" (Twitter)

Rangers Sign Lance Berkman To One-Year, $11 Million Deal

Well, it's been percolating out there on the hot-stove rumor wires for a few days, with Nolan Ryan being the primary driver of its possible actualization, and this afternoon it appears to be coming -- or have already come -- together, as FOXSports.com's Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Rangers are "finalizing an agreement" with free-agent DH Lance Berkman on what is expected to be a one-year deal. A second-year vesting option is possibly, though not certainly, in the offing.

[4:00 p.m. CST update: According to various reports circulating around the Twittersphere, Berkman's contract is structured so that he'll bank $10 million guaranteed in 2013, and will have a 2014 option of a still-unspecified value which will vest if he reaches 525-550 at-bats (or maybe plate appearances) in 2013. The buyout on this second-year vesting option is $1 million, making the total obligation either $11 million for one year if the option doesn't vest or the Rangers buy the option out, or $10 million plus his unspecified 2014 salary if the option does vest or the Rangers pick the option up anyway.]

Ryan, for his part, publicly confirmed the Rangers' interest in Berkman over the last 48 hours or so, and then told Houston TV station FOX 26 last night that the Rangers had formally tendered an offer to Berkman and were awaiting his response; Gerry Fraley, meanwhile, reported last night that Berkman wanted a guaranteed two-year deal, and while it seems that the Rangers may be close to successfully pulling off the one-year-plus-vesting-option deal that they seek, Berkman replied "not yet" to an inquiry this afternoon on whether the deal was finished. 

I suspect there's a certain inevitable amount of eye-rolling being undertaken by the fan base in response to the Berkman-to-Texas thing happening, tracing all the way back to his January 2011 comments about his belief that the 2011 Rangers would be an "average team" (they weren't), that their pitching wouldn't hold up (it did), and that the Adrian Beltre signing was something of a reach (it hasn't been). If that hacked you off then or still hacks you off to this day or gives you sufficient cause to hold a long-standing grudge towards Berkman, then, well, more power to you -- but the Rangers have a far greater interest in bolstering their ballclub by whatever means they deem necessary than worrying about a vaguely acrimonious exchange of headline-grabbing words from the past.

Berkman, who turns 37 in a month, is coming off an injury-shortened 32-game season where he threw up a .259/.381/.444 (125 wRC+) triple-slash line in limited action, and a 2011 season where he produced at a vintage mid-aughts level (587 PA, .301/.412/.547, 163 wRC+) for the eventual world champion Cardinals. Those numbers, in conjunction with his overall borderline Hall of Fame career, is what gives you some basis for dreaming on Berkman as a significant middle-order presence for Texas in 2013, with a healthy Berkman potentially being good for a 120-130 wRC+ as a median projection and something greater than that if you're supremely confident in Berkman's ability to rebound from an injury-marred season -- one where the primary issue was a troublesome right knee that eventually required surgery -- and his potential output at the Ballpark.

The downside here, though, is that Berkman is fairly old and exhibiting signs of injury-proneness, and while the Rangers presumably liked the outlook on his medicals enough to commit an eight-digit sum towards him for 2013, the reality is that old, injury-prone guys "tend to get injured." Looking at this from the Rangers' perspective, though, you take note of the fact that each of his DL-necessitating injuries from 2009-12 was a lower-half injury to a knee, an ankle, etc., and you probably operate off the assumption that utilizing Berkman almost exclusively as a designated hitter going forward will alleviate some of the physical risk that has turned off so many of his potential suitors this winter. 

I think the Rangers are also looking at Berkman and his injury history with the belief that if he's healthy, he's probably going to be productive, which may be enough to strip away some of the apprehension as far as his vesting option is concerned. Put another way, if Berkman actually does log enough playing time in 2013 to trigger his 2014 vesting option, there's a pretty decent chance that he will have hit well in 2013 enough for Texas to be okay with carrying Berkman at his guaranteed 2014 salary.

The other big issue here is that, okay, Berkman can mash (if healthy), and the Rangers are going to equip him with a role and a home ballpark which should assist him in effectively performing his one main function (to mash), but he's going to incur a significant value penalty by virtue of playing DH (-17.5 runs per 600 plate appearances), one which will probably limit his value on the wins above replacement scale to something around 2-2½ wins if he's reasonably healthy and amasses around 500-600 plate appearances. That's not a particularly impressive buy on the WAR scale (about $5 million per win, give or take $500,000 going either way), but it's important to note that:

(a) The Rangers wanted a probable source of consistent, quality offensive production to plug the middle-order holes left behind by Mike Napoli/Josh Hamilton, and after an off-season full of misses on that front they were likely a bit more eager to jump on an opportunity like this now than they would have been a few months ago;

(b) The Rangers were positioned to go into the season with a hodgepodge consisting of Mike Olt, A.J. Pierzynski, Nelson Cruz, David Murphy, and whomever else as their 2013 "solution" at designated hitter, and it's not hard to see why that held limited appeal for the organization (as did keeping Michael Young in that role);

(c) With Berkman's guaranteed $11 million obligation factored in, the Rangers' 2013 Opening Day payroll -- including their projected 25-man roster (with arbitration forecasts), Scott Feldman's buyout, Colby Lewis's and Neftali Feliz's respective salaries/forecasted salaries, and the $10 million they picked up on Michael Young's contract -- is projected at $124.4 million, which falls smack dab in the middle of the club's $120-130 million expected Opening Day payroll range, and still leaves some amount of payroll maneuverability.

And, of course, there's the idea -- which I intend to expand upon further next week -- that the Rangers, with their projected high-80s win total for 2013, fall into a particularly sensitive area of the win curve where they should be willing to pay more for each additional marginal win above replacement than the supposed going rate of $5 million. If you're fairly high on Berkman and fairly low on what the amalgam of Olt/Pierzynski/Cruz/Murphy/Moreland/et al. would have been able to throw down at DH for the Rangers in 2013, then you're probably looking at this signing as a net addition of 1½-2 wins to their 2013 projected win total -- and in a tight AL West division where the on-paper talent margin between the Rangers and Angels is really small, it may be that the Berkman signing ends up being the difference between winning the division and being cast into another wild-card crapshoot ... or, for that matter, missing the playoffs altogether.

I'm still rather guarded in my praise of this signing, because you don't have to possess a particularly overactive imagination to envision how Berkman could end up being a bust for Texas, and $10-11 million guaranteed for a DH coming off major knee problems isn't going to be regarded as a coup by anyone, and, honestly, I don't love the signing ... but I do like it, and if the Rangers were going to pull the trigger on some open-market signing with a potentially meaningful impact at this point in the off-season, I'd prefer it to be Berkman at this contract length and price point over Adam LaRoche, Michael Bourn, or Kyle Lohse at the sums they're still expected to command.

New Year's Morning Open Thread

T.R. Sullivan has a story up this morning -- yesterday morning, actually, but who's counting -- with 10 questions facing the Rangers in 2013, including the standard-fare issues of the starting rotation and the Profar/Andrus/Kinsler conundrum, and this particularly interesting bit on the center field situation:

4. What stands between Leonys Martin and being the everyday center fielder?
Martin needs the confidence of his manager and the commitment of a front office that's not going to be lured into a lucrative contract for free-agent center fielder Michael Bourn. Skipper Ron Washington likes Martin's talent, but also sees him as being raw and unpolished, especially on the defensive end. Outfield coach Gary Pettis has put in long hours working with Martin on his game. Now the Rangers have to decide if they are going to let Martin loose, platoon him with Craig Gentry or find an expensive "sure thing" on the free-agent market.

We've heard the reports of disagreement arising between the front office and the manager's office as the 2012 season went on, with Washington refusing to acquiesce to the front office's wishes on matters of lineup construction (specifically, Michael Young, whom some in the front office wanted on the bench by August), and that relates closely to the speculation this winter on the front office/manager dynamic, with some believing that last season's poor finish gives the front office good reason to pull in the reins on the coaching staff and take on a larger role in dictating how the players on the roster should be used.

I don't know the extent to which the front office and Washington see (or don't see) eye to eye on Martin, but the Rangers don't seem particularly hot on Michael Bourn and, per Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projections, might very well have a 2.5-3 WAR platoon setup in Martin/Gentry, which certainly isn't lost on the decision-makers up top. If Washington views Martin as "raw and unpolished," though, and doesn't feel he can trust him, and, for those reasons, is reluctant to play him as often as the front office might prefer ... well, this is something I've been stuck on for several months now, and it will be interesting to see where it ends up going, as the handling of the center field situation could have significant ramifications for the 2013 season and beyond.

The 2013 Texas Rangers ZiPS Projections Are Out

Over at FanGraphs this morning, Dan Szymborski -- of Baseball Think Factory and ESPN.com fame, among other places -- has posted his 2013 ZiPS projections for the Texas Rangers, and you should go read it. Seriously, go read it. Or try to read it, I guess. I wouldn't recommend reading every cell in every row unless you're really, REALLY interested in Roy Oswalt's projection for the upcoming season (hint: you're not), but there's a wealth of interesting material here that, among other things, lends us some additional insight into the overarching question of just how good we should expect this team to be in 2013.

I may attempt a more thorough rundown later, but, in the meantime, here are a few things that jumped off the page at me:

● Adrian Beltre (.296/.334/.516, 4.8 WAR) is forecasted as being near-elite again. Yu Darvish (10.5 K/9, 4.0 BB/9, 0.7 HR/9, 130 ERA+, 5.7 WAR) is forecasted as being elite outright, with Matt Harrison (4.1 WAR) and Alexi Ogando (3.4 WAR) getting generous nods, and Derek Holland (2.7 WAR) faring well on the wins scale despite some foreseeably disappointing component projections.

● Two of the Rangers' top five projected position players are rookies in Jurickson Profar (.263/.331/.414, 3.2 WAR) and Mike Olt (.247/.331/.429, 2.4 WAR); it's unclear to me -- though likely -- that Olt's projection is derived from a scenario where he plays third base on a near-everyday basis.

● The Rangers' depth chart -- from which their projected win total is derived -- includes Elvis Andrus at shortstop, Ian Kinsler at second base, and Mitch Moreland at first base, with Profar and Olt both seemingly being excluded; meanwhile, the Gentry/Martin and Pierzynski/Soto tandems in center field and at catcher are each projected as being worth three wins above replacement, though that may assume an overly generous helping of platooning from Ron Washington.

● If you add up all of the positions on the projected depth chart, you get 43 wins above replacement. Dan has his replacement level set between 45-46 wins, meaning that, if you take these projections and this depth chart as gospel, ZiPS currently has the Rangers projected to win 88-89 games in 2013.