So Chris Woodward wasn’t the future. Why did Rangers choose now to fire him?

ARLINGTON, Texas — It wasn’t a blindside-style surprise when the Rangers relieved manager Chris Woodward of his duties. Ownership invested over a half-billion dollars in free agent talent last offseason. Whether it was fair or not to expect the team to be better than 12 games below .500, that was, in retrospect, clearly the expectation. Managers are often the first casualty of a season that doesn’t go how the decision-makers expected, no matter how many preseason predictions suggested a playoff chase was unlikely.

But that doesn’t mean the timing was expected. If the Rangers were within the range of expected outcomes, why fire a manager with 48 games left in the season? After all, it’s not as if the front office had wildly different expectations than the prognosticators.

“When you make these decisions, it’s always (about) where you’re at, relative to expectations,” Daniels said Monday. “We’ve been pretty straightforward with our fan base and the media that we did not — as a leadership team, CY (general manager Chris Young), myself, ownership — we did not come into the season thinking we had put together a championship roster. We thought we had taken a major step forward in talent from where we were a year ago (and) we’ve certainly had aspirations to overachieve some and still do have those. But we were, and continue to be, realistic about where we are.”

So why now?

“We do think that we can be better than our record and better than the way that we’ve played at times and so that kind of leads to making a decision now, rather than waiting til the end of the year,” Daniels continued. “We think we have an opportunity to begin addressing some items with a change in leadership style. We’re talking about how we prepare, style of play, the structure in which we would put together our pregame that ultimately leads to how are players take the field and what our fans see every night.”

In short, it wasn’t the number of losses, but the way the team got to that number that mattered the most.

“I think it’s just the overall structure, the environment,” said Young. “It’s not necessarily the content of the preparation but the way it’s utilized. The way we utilize meetings, the way we utilize different resources throughout the day, creating a structure that’s really tailored towards winning a game every single day when we come in. We felt like, at times, that got a little loose. But ultimately, I think that Beas will be the right person to get the best out of our staff and our players moving forward for the last 40 games.”

“Beas,” of course, is Tony Beasley, who has been the Rangers’ third-base coach since 2015 and has at times served as the infield coach and outfield coach. Beasley is well-respected both in the clubhouse and around the league and has been known in the past to have difficult conversations with under-performing players.

“You’re better than this,” Beasley once told shortstop Elvis Andrus after an error-filled collapse in the playoffs that ended the 2015 season. “This is not a good shortstop, but this is not who you are. This is what you’re doing; it’s not who you are.”

“In the beginning, when he talked to me, I got a little angry,” Andrus acknowledged in 2018. “But that’s the good thing about growing up — sometimes it’s true. Sometimes, you need to do more, do better. He was a big help for me to make me realize things that I need to put into perspective and change.”

The 2022 Texas Rangers, it seems, needed more of those tough conversations. There was a growing sense that perhaps Woodward was a bit too “cool” when it came to holding players accountable if the performance didn’t match up to expectations. Woodward insisted that those conversations happened behind closed doors, and it’s true that the media isn’t privy to every conversation. But the general sense was that the players were underperforming when it came to the little things.

“We want to see improvement in our fundamentals,” Young said of his expectations moving forward. “I think we haven’t executed those at the level we need to, to become a championship team … and then just from a teammate aspect, making sure that we create an environment where our players, our staff, all of us, as an organization, bring out the best in one another.”

The other factor brought up often was the Rangers’ record in one-run games. They’re currently 6-24 in those close games, an abysmal record. To some extent, one-run games can be the result of bad luck. But Daniels said while that wasn’t the sole factor, it played a part in the decision.

“There’s an element of luck,” Daniels said. “I think there’s also an element that you make your own luck. And some of the small things that we are alluding to — there’s rarely one element, when a game is close, that is the reason why the game has been won or lost. What CY touched on earlier — when we’re talking about an impact in one-run games — is the process, the attention to detail, the fundamentals that lead up to those games, where hopefully, every time you do something right in a game, you’re slowly moving the odds a little bit more in your favor.”

One could point back to the Baltimore series in early July as an example of how quite a few small things went just wrong enough to cost the Rangers an entire series. But the timing was still surprising, and not just because the Rangers had won Woodward’s last two games as manager. There was also the matter of the comments made by the front office after the trade deadline.

“We’ve been in the draft room and trade deadline here for the last three weeks,” Daniels said at the time. “So probably if at any point, we’ve been a step away from the big-league club, it’s right now. We are where we are in the standings, but that is not a reflection of any one person or any one group. Ultimately, that’s really on the two of us (himself and Young) more than anybody else. And I think Woody and the staff are working tirelessly and doing everything they can do to continue to develop this group and push forward. But as far as evaluating individual departments or individual people, it’s not something that I want to do right now.”

That was certainly the first indication that Woodward’s job was not as secure as it had been. But that was only two weeks ago. Asked today if the decision was based on an assessment that had happened in those two weeks or if it had, in fact, been happening all along, Young was brief and to the point: “It’s been an ongoing evaluation.”

Ultimately, the front office saw more value in addressing the issues now rather than waiting until the offseason.

“I think most importantly, we want to build momentum into 2023,” said Young. “I think there are some really positive things that are happening. We like some of the things that we’re seeing. But we recognize there are things that we need to address moving forward. And we could either wait until after the season, or we could get ahead of that and start addressing those things now and creating momentum into next year. And we chose to do the latter in that regard.”

(Photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)