ARLINGTON – On Friday morning, a fashionable 10 minutes later than scheduled, Chris Young strode into an underground interview room dwarfing his new manager and began the introduction of said manager, Skip Schumaker, with a formal greeting.
That was his first sentence of the day. The second started with “Over the past year …”
The importance of that cannot be overlooked. Skip Schumaker, the hottest managerial candidate on the market – if he’d gotten to the market – is wearing a No. 55 Rangers jersey now because of a year spent auditing the Rangers organization from top to bottom as a senior advisor. We use “audit” here as if he were a student observing a class for a semester, not as if he was checking for fraud.
“A unique opportunity to really learn an organization like this for a full year just doesn’t happen,” Schumaker said in his own opening remarks. “I quickly learned the passion [Young] has for winning and for doing whatever he can to make this a first class organization. The alignment there is real. Our core values and what we expect every single day and making winning the most important part of our day is exactly who I am and what my family is about. And I believe in a winning culture.”
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In other words, he knows what he’s getting into. Both the optimistic version and the real one, too.
Over the last year in which Schumaker served as a “senior advisor” to Young, he saw the big league team plenty. He’d drop in on them at least once a month. He’d sit in Young’s suite during the game and hear Young’s passion, and occasionally frustration. He got to know general manager Ross Fenstermaker similarly.
It went well beyond that, though.
He spent significant time at Double-A Frisco seeing top prospect Sebastian Walcott and the more advanced pitchers in the system. He spent time getting to know rising coaching star Carlos Cardoza, the manager at Frisco whose profile in the organization is only likely to grow. He talked hitting with Conner Gunn, the director of offensive initiatives and strategy. First of all, that was a real title. Second, Gunn’s responsibilities are only expected to grow, too, with the club not bringing director of minor league hitting Cody Atkinson back.
“When you talk about alignment, the back and forth we’d have and the way we see the game, the standards and expectations,” Fenstermaker said. “It all crystallized pretty early in the process for me. In many ways, he’d see things I didn’t. Just having that time with him throughout the course of the year sharpened the way I see the game.”
Settle in, Skip: See photos from Rangers’ intro news conference with new manager Skip Schumaker
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In the right hands, like, say those of a guy who stressed on Friday the Rangers organization will be the best in baseball at communication, that’s a year’s worth of gold and built-in credibility. Schumaker knows the pressure points and the entry points.
Schumaker came to the Rangers last November after leaving the Miami Marlins job before the Marlins could formally come up with an explanation for why they’d dismiss a guy who won NL Manager of the Year a year prior. But the Marlins history is littered with similar tales of the inexplicable. Anyway, Schumaker was going to take a year off from managing for a “reset.” The Rangers already employed one of his best friends in the game, Michael Young, in an advisory role. The Rangers had just lost their designated managerial succession plan when Will Venable took over the White Sox. And they had an older manager entering the final year of his contract.
It provided an opportunity to set up a role for a potential successor who could spend a year learning the organization at every level. It was further enhanced by the fact that the-then manager, Hall of Fame-bound Bruce Bochy, welcomed him to the organization thusly: “I’m looking forward to learning from you.”
“That just shows you what kind of guy he is, because he wasn’t going to learn anything from me, right? There’s no way,” Schumaker said. “But it let me know what kind of leader he was and it just broke the ice. It made me feel comfortable. He let me come into some meetings. We texted throughout the season. I’m very grateful for how he went about this and allowed me to learn from him.”
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It would be easy to read all that and, given our predilection for conspiracy theories, wonder if the Rangers hadn’t hatched some kind of nefarious plot. Sometimes the truth is just simpler. It’s about staying prepared. And preparation is essential to success. Even Schumaker said that as part of his philosophy with the acronym CAPE: Communication, Alignment, Preparation, Execution. Maybe the Rangers can have CAPE capes made for batting practice next year. Then again, maybe not.
The Rangers saw the hottest potential manager in baseball come available after 2024 when the spot was still filled. They saw having Schumaker on board as both an asset for 2025 and a potential successor. They didn’t have successorship conversations until Young and Bochy closed the door on running things back in 2026.
But, when Young and Fenstermaker sat down with Schumaker to begin the formal interview process, it was more about manifesting pre-existing and aligned visions than it was about getting a feel for one another. It puts Schumaker ahead of being prepared for success and resolving failure than any candidate who would have been on the market. Certainly this year. Maybe any candidate the Rangers have ever considered.
“He’s got the same belief and alignment — that’s the right word — in terms of culture,” Young said. “He has an infectious energy and personality. He cares for people and a great way about him in terms of communicating that. We really have full confidence that he’s the perfect person to help move us forward to strive for our next World Series championship.”
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