Travis Jankowski returns to Rangers as a coach who’s already earned players’ respect

Texas Rangers manager Skip Schumaker needed to clarify one thing Thursday afternoon when he and his now-colleague Travis Jankowski dialed into a Zoom and unpacked the club’s new-look coaching staff.

“I’m not calling him El Blondie,” Schumaker said. “I don’t know where that whole thing is. You guys can call him that. I refuse to call him that.”

He’ll instead refer to him as coach.

The Rangers announced a staff that included Jankowski — who played two seasons in Texas and won a World Series in his first — as the team’s new first base coach. Third base coach Corey Ragsdale, who shifted across the diamond to replace Tony Beasley, previously held that role.

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Jankowski, 34, played 11 years in the major leagues and was teammates with Schumaker nearly a decade ago with the San Diego Padres. Schumaker, he said, “taught me how to be a professional” as a player and gauged Jankowski’s interest in a coaching role this offseason. Jankowski conferred with his agent and was told that the opportunities would be similar to this most recent season — in which he appeared in 21 total games for three different teams — if he continued to play.

“If you want to do that, that’s great,” Jankowski’s agent said. “But if there’s a big league opportunity for you to interview with coaching, and you want to do coaching in the future, you don’t want to let this opportunity pass up because it might not be there next year.”

Jankowski played with 18 of the players currently listed on the team’s 40-man roster as recently as two seasons ago. He is younger than three of them, lost his job to two of them and was well-regarded by teammates and coaches as an invaluable veteran and mentor presence.

“That respect was won in ‘23 and ‘24,” Jankowski said. “They saw my work ethic, they saw me kind of help Evan [Carter] out in ‘23, help Wyatt [Langford] out in ‘24, and these are the guys that were taking my job. If they can see me willing to help these younger guys nipping at my heels, taking playing time away from me, I’ve got to imagine that their respect is going to be there.”

Jankowski, who stole 104 bases in his career, has discussed an “aggressive” philosophy on the basepaths with Schumaker in a coordinator role and plans to work closely with the club’s pair of promising 23-year-old outfielders. He believes Langford can be a 30-30, or even a 40-40 caliber of player if he hones his abilities on the basepaths. He’s excited to work with Carter again and hopes that the former top prospect and postseason hero uses him as an outlet to discuss the mental toll of injuries after consecutive ailment-laden seasons.

“His talent is through the charts,” Jankowski said. “I think a lot of it, again, is the mentality. I think Evan could be a little passive at times and just not as aggressive as I’d like to see him.”

Here are other takeaways from Schumaker’s news conference.

Skip Schumaker, the new manager of the Texas Rangers, answers questions during a news... A reworked hitting team

The Rangers meshed a blend of old and new in an effort to improve an offense desperately in need of a jumpstart. They promoted Justin Viele to lead hitting coach and hired former Houston Astros hitting coach Alex Cintrón to the staff.

Viele is the lone holdover on the offensive side of the staff. The Rangers hired him away from the San Francisco Giants prior to last season and retained him after offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker was replaced by Bret Boone midseason. The Rangers were a bottom-five team leaguewide last season in batting average (.234), on-base percentage (.302) and slugging percentage (.381) in Viele’s first season.

“I don’t think you really saw the best version of him just yet,” Schumaker said of Viele. “I think you’re going to see it this year. I think he’s going to be an excellent hitting coach for a lot of years here.”

Cintrón, 46, is an ex-big leaguer who spent six seasons as Houston’s hitting coach. The Astros ranked fourth among American League teams in on-base plus slugging percentage (.748), fourth in runs scored (2,132) and won a World Series during Cintrón’s tenure.

Schumaker first met Cintrón when the Miami Marlins signed former Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel before the 2023 season. He wanted to understand “where [Gurriel] was at in his career, what he needed to work on, what kind of clubhouse presence he was” and called Cintrón for background. That developed into hour-long conversations. Schumaker introduced Cintrón to Viele this fall when the former parted ways with the Astros. Viele, per Schumaker, said, “This is our guy.”

“He developed some really young players into some pretty good big leaguers right now,” Schumaker said. “He had the ear of some really good guys over in Houston that I trust in talking to a couple former players over there. You do your homework, you do your background and you don’t just pick out of a hat. That’s really important to me to understand how the construction of a major league coaching staff also works.”

The Rangers still intend to hire a third hitting coach in a to-be-determined role. That’s now standard practice for baseball’s best organizations. The Rangers employed three major league hitting coaches three seasons ago when they won the World Series. The Toronto Blue Jays employed three this season when they marched to the World Series and the New York Yankees — whose offense was statistically the best in the league this year — did too.

An ‘enormous hire’ at pitching coach

The Rangers fielded baseball’s best rotation last season and built a cost-effective bullpen behind it. The man who oversaw the operation — pitching coach Mike Maddux — declined to return and instead joined the Los Angeles Angels in an identical role after three seasons under former manager Bruce Bochy.

The organization is bullish on his replacement. Schumaker considers newly minted pitching coach Jordan Tiegs “an enormous hire” for the organization and was told that “we have to keep this guy” when he conferred with the team’s core players before he rebuilt the staff.

Tiegs, 38, ran the team’s bullpen last season in his first on-field role with the big league club, helped stabilize a group that was largely pieced together the previous winter and drew positive reviews from veteran relievers and organizational higher-ups. He previously served as the system’s minor league pitching coordinator for three seasons and was instrumental in right-hander Jack Leiter’s development.

“This guy is really, really good,” Schumaker said. “I know a lot of people don’t know who he is. The industry — the baseball industry, as far as the coaches and front offices — absolutely know who this guy is. Our players were really impacted in a positive way through Jordan and I thought Mike, honestly, was really good for Jordan.”

Twitter/X: @McFarland_Shawn

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