With sixth contract, Jon Daniels is being charged with the task — for the second time — of reversing Rangers’ fortunes

Jamey is a lifelong Rangers fan who has been blogging for nearly 20 years at newbergreport.com and traces his fandom back to the days of Bump Wills, Bert Blyleven, and the powder blues.

When Texas elevated Jon Daniels, then 28, to the post of General Manager of a franchise that was coming off its fifth losing season out of six, he was the youngest GM in the history of the game.  And the job was clear: Change the way the Rangers were doing things and turn the program around.

Nearly 13 years later, he has signed his sixth contract as the Rangers’ GM, with a resume that includes four division titles, the Rangers’ first playoff series win (and three more after that), their first two pennants, a seven-year run that tasted 162+ six times, and, since 2010, more post-season games than 26 of baseball’s 30 franchises and the fifth-highest winning percentage in the game.

But this latest contract extension, which locks Daniels in at least through the year the team opens its new ballpark in 2020, comes with a similar mission: Reverse the club’s recent fortunes.

There’s nothing Daniels could have done to give Nelson Cruz a split-second better jump or to prevent Lance Berkman’s ducksnort or to find a way to score more than nine runs on 15 hits in the kind of elimination game you dream about.  Perhaps if he were able to orchestrate even one of the above, this latest extension wouldn’t even be a story.

Ray Davis, whose ownership group purchased the Rangers two months before the first of the club’s two World Series, said Thursday after the Daniels extension was announced: “Our future is bright.”  The decision could have been made, after a disappointing 2017 and a worse start to 2018, to allow Daniels to hit his own free agency this winter, but Davis and his group believe they have the right man leading the organization. A man who constructed a team that was twice the American League’s last team standing, who was twice a strike away from having put together a world champion, and who, at 40, didn’t forget how to build.

“Our ownership group trusts Jon’s judgment and respects his experience and skill as well as that of his baseball operations leadership team,” said Davis in a prepared statement released by the club on Thursday.  “[ . . . ] Jon and his group understand the challenges ahead and are working diligently to build a major league team that will be competitive for years to come.  We are fortunate to have Jon leading our baseball operations as we enter into what will be a very exciting time for the Texas Rangers franchise.”

What are the most important tasks that face Daniels, the “challenges ahead” that Davis referred to?

The answer starts and ends with people.  It’s starting pitchers and outfield prospects and coaching staffs and baseball operations officials.  Will Daniels trade Cole Hamels and Adrian Beltre over the next two months?  Will he listen on Nomar Mazara and Joey Gallo?  Can he capitalize on Shin-Soo Choo’s current run and find a team willing to take on a third of his remaining contract, freeing up payroll space and at-bats for Willie Calhoun?  Will the Rangers get all of their first 10 draft picks signed, and will they make another splash internationally on July 2?

Is this the right coaching staff to take the young nucleus of the roster forward?  Is scouting and player development where it needs to be?  Will there be change and growth on the analytics side, particularly on the pitching side, where the Rangers have had a Director of Pitching Research & Development (Todd Walther) for three seasons and are reportedly looking into the idea of a relationship with the cutting-edge Driveline program?

Does the culture need a recharge?  Has it become stale?  Does the team play with the energy and the swagger that winning teams have?

Under Daniels’s watch, a franchise that had floundered for a lifetime evolved into one of baseball’s most successful on the measure of wins, losses, and post-seasons.  A winning GM doesn’t lose his fastball before middle age, but players do.  And that happened in Texas.  As did the eyes-wide-open cashing out of a farm system when there were opportunities to go for it, to capture that elusive title that cleared Nellie’s futile outstretch and that bled off Berkman’s bat.

A small but vocal faction of the fanbase that still equates Nolan Ryan’s tenure in management with the ultimate success of the franchise on the field likely would have complained had Texas hoarded its prospects over the last half-decade and fallen just short.  Winning playoff games is the objective, not winning farm system rankings, the detractors would have said.

And they would have been right.  That’s the mindset that Daniels and his group have taken, and the one they still have.  It hasn’t worked, as far as the definitive measure is concerned.  Championships aren’t easy.  But they can’t happen unless you get into the tournament, and by that barometer, Texas has been very successful the last decade.

Those four division titles came in the space of seven years.  Of the three that didn’t end with Texas atop the AL West, two others found the Rangers playing past Game 162.

That seven-year sequence was the culmination of a window-building process that Daniels engineered.

Because of attrition due to age and due to trades, he now faces a similar challenge.

Daniels has a track record of doing what is called for.  He offers a level of stability — which includes coordination with an organization full of baseball operations officials and scouting and coaching personnel — that only he can.  He brings the patience that wasn’t there when the Rangers tried surrounding Alex Rodriguez with declining veterans a decade older.

The young players here need to grow and get better.  More young players need to be added.  That’s not news to ownership or to Daniels, and they’ve decided to continue moving forward on that together.  It won’t happen overnight.  Overnight was the goal when a previous regime decided to surround A-Rod with Andres Galarraga, Ken Caminiti, Mark Petkovsek, Jeff Brantley, and Randy Velarde.  Trading Mark Teixeira and Eric Gagne seven disappointing years later was not in search of an overnight fix.  What followed took time, as will the process now facing Texas.

The Rangers had a middle-of-the-pack farm system when Daniels was handed the keys to the organization.  That changed.  For the better.

It needs to change again.

As players aged, opportunities to win remained, and prospects were traded.  Texas went for it.

It didn’t work.  In pro sports, it usually doesn’t.  You keep trying.

And sometimes in different ways.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean with different leadership.  It may mean different people and in some cases it probably will — players will be traded and acquired, and there could be changes off the field as well — but as this franchise looks to flip the momentum as the building a few hundred yards to the southwest goes up, it’s going to do so with the same leader calling the shots, and setting the tone.

There will be tangible change over the next two months as Daniels listens to offers for veteran players who don’t fit the club’s next window of contention, at least not nearly as well as the prospects that Josh Boyd and his team of pro scouts are out now filing reports on.  But there be will other changes made, too, some not so obvious as mid-season trades that dominate Twitter feeds and carry talk shows.

Ownership believes in the direction that Jon Daniels is in charge of setting, and believes he is the man to get the Rangers back to pennant-race relevance.  The focus is on reinforcing the foundation and resisting the pull of the quick fix.  Daniels is getting an extended opportunity, and with it will continue looking to do what he can to, once and for all, help deliver that final strike.

EXIT VELO

• Elvis Andrus is eligible to come off the 60-day disabled list tomorrow, but won’t.  He kicks off a rehab assignment with AA Frisco tonight.
• Righthander Jonathan Hernandez has been spotted in the Frisco dugout the past few days, suggesting he is on the verge of being promoted from High-A Down East.  The 21-year-old has dominated the Carolina League this season, scattering 37 hits and 17 walks in 57.1 innings while striking 77 out and posting a 2.20 ERA.  In 10 Wood Ducks starts, he’s allowed 11 extra-base hits.
• Texas swapped assignments for a couple of outfield prospects, moving Destin Hood down to Frisco and Hunter Cole (the return from San Francisco for Sam Dyson) up to AAA Round Rock.  After hitting a robust .330/.412/.515 for the RoughRiders, the 25-year-old Cole has jumped out to an even more productive start for the Express, going 10 for 24 with four home runs (.417/.440/1.000) in the first five AAA games of his pro career.
• Since his first appearance after being moved to the High-A Down East bullpen, righthander Michael Matuella has been sensational.  In his last three outings, he has allowed one single in four scoreless innings without a walk, striking out five.

• Short-Season A Spokane’s Northwest League schedule opens this Friday.  Righthander Hans Crouse, perhaps the organization’s top pitching prospect, leads manager Kenny Holmberg’s pitching staff.  The Rookie-level Arizona League starts a play a week from today.