Texas Rangers President of Baseball Operations Chris Young joined The Dallas Morning News’ SportsDay Rangers podcast with longtime beat reporter Evan Grant and Rangers senior advisor and team historian John Blake.
They discussed some of the frustrations to the Rangers’ up-and-down 2025 season, Nathan Eovaldi’s impact and what Bruce Bochy’s messaging has been down the stretch of his contract year.
Here are some highlights of the conversation, edited lightly for clarity.
You can listen to the full conversation here.
Rangers
Where do you see the club at the moment after a fantastic homestand?
Chris Young: It’s one of the perplexing aspects of this season, specific to this club, because there are moments where we play so well, and you see what the club is capable of against really good teams. I put Cleveland in that category, and we’ve had series against the Yankees and Houston and Detroit. I thought we played the Dodgers really well early in the season, but then we have moments where we just don’t play well against some teams that we feel like we should beat. I just, in my heart, do not believe that we’ve played our best baseball yet. My hope is that is still to come, and if it is, given where we are right now, there’s still the possibility that we can make a push and make the playoffs, and that’s what I’m expecting, that’s what I’m hoping for. But the reality is we have to go do that. But to answer your question, right now we’re a .500 team because we haven’t been able to put together the consistency that good teams do
Do you have any theories as to why this team seems to have different personalities at home versus on the road?
Young: I really don’t. It’s a really hard thing. Normally you would think over the course of a year or two, it would start to even out, and your record would kind of balance out both home and road based on the type of team you are. My expectation is that we’re the team at home, that we’re the team that is capable of winning at the rate that we have at home, and when we haven’t been able to accomplish that on the road, certainly, we look for a number of reasons why that’s occurring. I can’t say specifically what those are yet, we just we play very well at home. Guys are comfortable at home, whether it’s with their families, the environment, there’s something about being home that brings out the best in us. We’ve gotta figure out how to win on the road.
How frustrating is that unpredictability when you don’t know what personality you’re getting from day to day? That’s got to be frustrating in planning and execution, from you to Bruce Bochy, to the coaches.
Young: Obviously it’s our job to believe in the team and to believe in the talent and the roster that we put together. We chose these players for a reason, and we believe that this group is capable of being a playoff-caliber team, and a team that we hope could win a championship. So the lack of consistency is challenging because it forces us to try to find answers as to why, and to try to shuffle the deck a little bit. Whether it’s change the lineup or the roster construction, or moves even beyond that that we’ve done this year, we’re constantly searching for the right ingredients, so to speak, the right recipe, to bring this group together in a way that allows for consistency. We’re not talking about a huge change. I mean, we’re at .500 if we had won five more games than we’ve lost at this point, we’d be 10 over. So it’s little things and it’s marginal wins, but just we can’t seem to string together the consistency that he better teams have, and that’s the one thing that’s limited us. To your previous question, the home and road split, if we played even close to .500 on the road, this is a really, really good team. It’s hard to explain why we haven’t won at the level on the road that we have at home, and now it’s hard to win on the road, I understand, but our record should not be as poor as it is on the road, especially when you see how good we can be at home. I say this as really a vote of confidence to the team that there are just some small things that can click here for the last portion of the season that will allow us to play our best baseball ahead, and that’s really what I’m hopeful will happen. But your your question is very fair, that the ups and downs of the season, it scars you a little bit.
Texas Rangers’ Adolis Garcia follows through on a two-run double as Los Angeles Angels’ Logan O’Hoppe, second from right, and umpire Alan Porter, right, look on in the seventh inning of a baseball game, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025, in Arlington, Texas.
Tony Gutierrez / AP
You mentioned trying to construct the lineup, how hard is it to try to, day after day, try to construct that lineup to be productive?
Young: While we felt like we built a very deep roster, one through 13 on the position player side, we just really haven’t been healthy throughout the season. There haven’t been many games where we’ve had our true A lineup, so to speak. We’re not going to now with Evan Carter’s injury and Marcus Semien’s injury, we’re just not going to have the group that we thought for any significant time the rest of the season. But that’s not unique to us. There are other teams that have injuries that still win, and that’s up to us. That’s part of building a deep roster and a deep lineup, is that we have really good players to step in and perform. Now this year, the I think the big challenge has been that we just have had under performance from a number of guys offensively. I think a number of guys got off to slow starts and then started pressing, and it kind of compounded the problem a little bit. To the previous question, when that happens, we’re constantly shuffling the deck, looking for the right lineup, whether it’s Semien in the lead off spot or Evan Carter, Josh Smith, Wyatt Langford, Sam Haggerty, we’ve gone through a number of options. Do we bat Corey [Seager] in the two spot, the three spot. How do we put together the hottest group of guys and kind of stack the lineup to where, at certain portions of the game, these four or five guys who are hot, or at least swinging it better, are going to come up in order and give us the chance to actually score runs? And that’s been the challenge this year, is just the lack of consistency and, and I feel for [Bochy] a lot with this because there’ll be days where he does do that, and he constructs a lineup in a way where he feels like, “Alright, we’ve got three hot guys in a row,” and then one or two of them will go cold and I feel like there are a lot of games where we’ll have 10, 11, hits. Those hits will come maybe every third guy every other inning, so to speak. And so it’s not like it’s consistent, base hit, base hit, double or something like that, where we can score one or two runs, it’s alright, we get a base hit here, and then we end the inning, and then the next inning we get a couple of guys on and can’t get that big hit. It’s just been a year where things haven’t aligned perfectly, but that said, we’re still in a spot where, if they do align, we’ve got a chance to do something special.
In terms of the young players, it certainly looked like they gave you a little bit of a boost of energy and urgency, and the optics have looked a little bit that this team just thought it was going to perform. How do you feel about what you’ve seen in terms of energy and urgency?
Young: I want to be careful here, because I think sometimes we confuse the lack of urgency or the lack of energy when things aren’t going well with the results, and that’s not the case. This is a very focused group. It’s a very serious group. It’s a group that is really committed to being very good, individually and collectively, and these guys, they care. The care factor is super high, and especially when you’re not hitting. I read a quote by Bob Melvin recently. He was describing the Giants’ struggles in the second half of the season, and it feels like they play without energy and maybe I don’t think he used urgency, but he said similar in that when you’re not scoring, that’s the way it looks. But it doesn’t mean the efforts not there. I would categorize our struggles and our style of play similarly, in terms of these guys are caring and they’re giving the effort, but when they are struggling offensively, it just appears at times that there’s a lack of energy. Now, to the contrary, when you have young guys come up and perform and get on base and get hits, there is a youthful excitement that comes with that. I got to say, like even when Cody Freeman hit his first big league home run, it just brought such a smile to my face, seeing a player who’s worked his whole life for this opportunity to get his first major league home run, and similar with Alejandro Osuna earlier in the season. So there’s a natural infusion of energy and youth and just fun that’s injected in the team when you have young guys who come up and perform. But that’s not to knock, in my opinion, where these guys are, what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. They care and they try, it just it hasn’t been there. But I do think, young guys who perform, they do inject life into a team. There’s no doubt about it.
What does Nathan Eovaldi inject in this team, not just every five days, but throughout the week? I think he’s had an impact on the steps Jack Leiter has made. How valuable, beyond the contract, has he been to you?
Texas Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against the New York Yankees at Globe Life Field on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
Young: You can’t quantify it. There’s just no value that we could place on what Nate has done as a Texas Ranger, from helping us win our first World Series championship to the seasons that he’s had last year, this year, and we have him for two more years, and just what he means in the clubhouse, the impact he has on his teammates, young pitchers. I can speak to this firsthand, not specific to Nate, but as a young player, when you’re around great veteran players. It accelerates your learning curve. Sometimes your best coaches are your teammates. I had the opportunity to be around early in my career, guys like Kenny Rogers and Greg Maddux and Trevor Hoffman and some really, really great players that I was able to learn from. I felt like I got a lifetime worth of education sitting in the dugout next to Greg Maddux for the year and a half that we were teammates. My hope for Jack and some of our younger players is that they’re getting a similar experience and education, that we’re accelerating their development because they get to sit by and learn from Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi and and being surrounded by good, veteran players. I just can’t express the excellence that Nate represents in terms of, not just the player, but the person and the leadership and all the intangibles that he brings. He’s such a unique player, such a winner. Every executive that I talk to who’s either been around him or knows his reputation, they always say the same thing. Just they just say, “This guy is the best,” and that’s the only way I can describe him is the best.
As good as the Rangers’ starting pitching has been this year, does that add to the frustration of this season?
Young: In terms of the frustration this year when we have pitched so well, is it a wasted opportunity because our offense has been a little bit of an Achilles heel? I’d say there have been some moments where it’s been frustrating. I think the biggest ones for me have been in times where actually we lose because the pitching doesn’t perform, and mainly because the stress that they’ve been under, where we play seven, eight, nine one-run games in a row, and our leverage arms get stressed and tired, and we’re asking too much of them, and having to go to them every night. The 10-0 win against Cleveland on Saturday, I couldn’t remember the last time we won a game like that. So the feeling of just relief that we had that we knew we could finish this game and probably run out Luis Curvello, a rookie, to at least get an inning or maybe two to finish the game. We just haven’t had the luxury of that, even in the spots where we’ve been going well. So the offense has put a little pressure on the pitching, but it’s not too late for the offense to take some of that pressure off the pitching. I do believe, and we saw that this weekend, the offense put up some runs. The pitching did what they did, and all of a sudden, we won multiple games by not having to use our leverage arms. That’s a great feeling to have. And so my hope is that is we get into these last 30-plus games, that we can kind of continue that and take some of the stress off the pitching. Ultimately, this is a team game, and the seasons that go really, really well, when the pitching struggles, the offense picks them up, and when the offense struggles, the pitching picks them up. We just haven’t had that many moments this year where we’ve been able to pick each other up on one side or the other. But I’ll tell you what it has been fun. I grew up a Ranger fan. I know the history of pitching in this organization, and it has been really, really fun to watch our staff this year and to see how well they pitched. I’m expecting a strong finish from these guys.
Bruce Bochy is in the last year of his contract, he’s called this the most challenging year he’s ever had in terms of team. What havey ou seen from him in terms of how he’s handled this?
Young: Bochy has been wonderful. I hate to hear him say that it’s been the most challenging year. He’s been in baseball for a long time. This is my 25th season professionally in baseball, and I’d put it right at the top for me as well. But to hear Bochy say that, it takes on a different level. The reality is that, for whatever reason, we haven’t been able to get it done in terms of being where we want to be, leading the division or a certainty for the playoffs. That said, there’s still this opportunity ahead of us. If we can play really good baseball for 30 days, we could be in a spot to win another world championship. So in spite of how we feel or what the challenges may have been to this point, it really doesn’t matter, and I’d say Bochy has a great mentality with that. He said it in our staff meeting before the Cleveland series, and he kind of took the words out of my mouth. It’s about what we’ve got moving forward, and that’s going to define this season. So we’ve got a chance to erase all the challenges that we’ve had, and it’s one of the things about the game of baseball for me, it’s what makes our game so great is that it’s one, unpredictable and two, sometimes when you face the biggest challenges, you are rewarded with the greatest rewards. I’m hopeful that’s what we have coming. I’m hopeful that we have this opportunity now to finish strong, and that this thing is going to come together, and we’ve got great things to look forward to. I’m an optimist by nature. I want to believe, I’m a fighter. I love the underdog mentality, and we’re kind of right where I normally like to be. We’ve got this opportunity, and Bochy is prepared, he’s ready for it, and he’s going to find a way to get the best out of these guys and like I said, I hope that it comes together here, because if it does, I think this team is talented enough to compete for another championship.
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