ARLINGTON – The Rangers played their final exhibition Tuesday. Veritable handfuls of people actually showed up, too. Must have heard there was a statue to see.
Make no mistake, though, spring training ended a night earlier. It ended the moment Skip Schumaker went to the mound in the fifth inning with nobody on, two outs and nobody warming up, to casually inform 24-year-old Carter Baumler that, hey, he’d made the team. Maybe you think it was an odd time to drop that news. Maybe, then, you have no romance whatsoever about baseball.
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Anyway, it was a mic drop on spring training. It was the final lingering roster decision, so the business of camp was completed and everything that followed was fluff. It was also the perfect way to end about as perfect a camp as the Rangers could have envisioned. Everybody emerged healthy. Largely, the offense seemed discerning. The guys who needed to perform to win jobs performed. Everybody vibed.
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And, so, Schumaker put the perfect coda on his first camp as manager. Let’s call it Camp Intention.
There was intent behind everything Schumaker did. From the first meeting of camp with pitchers and catchers, which was run by pitching coach Jordan Tiegs instead of the manager, to informing Baumler on the mound on TV that he was going from Double-A to the majors, there was meaning behind every move. The first meeting was about setting an expectation that his coaches would have a voice and should be heard. Most importantly, he communicated the expectations clearly, plainly and with positive connotations. Tabbing Baumler mid-inning was just a clear way of telling a kid he’d met the moment.
“There is intent every day,” Schumaker said before Tuesday’s 4-1 win over Kansas City. “I think you come in every day with the goal of getting better or getting guys better or getting the trust of the team. I go back to ‘trust,’ as the word I’d choose to describe this camp. Are they learning to trust me? Can I trust them? Can they trust their teammates? That is a big part of winning.
“So yeah, there’s intent behind everything that we do every day. There’s intent throughout my day with everything I do in life. I just believe in that.”
His intent on Monday was not to go viral — goodness, a manager would rather have an actual virus than go viral — but to make a special moment for any player even more special for a kid who’d done everything asked of him as a long shot to make the roster. Every player remembers when they were told they were going to the major leagues. For each of the 23,615 major leaguers who have come before, according to Baseball-Reference’s total, it’s a moment they never forget. Every story is special. So far as we know, nobody, however, has ever been told in the middle of a game while on the mound, surrounded by veterans.
Back home in Des Moines, Iowa, it brought his mom and dad, who were watching on TV, to tears. When Baumler talked to his father, he could tell he had been crying.
“And my dad never cries,” he said.
Might have brought a few tears in the dugout, too. If not tears, then certainly smiles.
“Little things go a long way, right,” said Corey Seager, who was so initially confused by Schumaker’s stroll to the mound, that he started back to shortstop. “A little moment like that is big for him and for the whole team. A lot of guys with experience have never seen that before. It’s memorable for the kid. It excites the whole team. We saw the embraces he got in the dugout. And you saw the uptick in his velo, too.”
The fastball did jump from 95 mph to 97 on the way to striking out Isaac Collins. Seager doesn’t miss a thing.
“What he did last night was awesome,” Jacob deGrom said. “It’s been fun to be a part of and see how Skip is handling this whole thing. You look forward to going out and competing for him, but everything with him is with intent. This is how we’re going to do it. You set expectations. And as players, you want to live up to those. We have high expectations. He has high expectations and you can feel everybody pulling in the same direction. And everybody holds each other accountable.”
Said Nathan Eovaldi: “It just seems like there’s a plan behind everything. It seems like he has a crystal ball and he can see into the future and he’s moving the right pieces now, getting everybody prepared for the moments to come. There is intent there.”
Schumaker said he spent the year between managing Miami and taking over the Rangers job focusing on ways he could improve. He hates nothing more than standing still. If you are standing still, he likes to say you are moving backwards.
While he gained praise in Miami for his communication, he wanted to make sure he better honed his communication skills for his next job, if he got a chance. He focused on better understanding the front office perspective to marry it with the clubhouse perspective and create alignment in messaging. Which sounds like corporate babble, but can actually be understandable in plain language. But it’s only effective when both sides trust one another. That goes for the good conversations and the bad.
“Look, the [Baumler] conversation was great, but there were eight others that were horrible,” Schumaker said. “A lot of those guys deserve to be on the team or had really good springs. And I had to give them bad news; I’ve been on the other side of, and you just can’t BS a big leaguer. So you have to let them know where they’re at, because they’ll see right through you if you try to sugarcoat something. I try to be as honest as I can, but maybe I tried to sugarcoat some of those conversations earlier in my career as a coach, and I realized that I didn’t want that as a player, and I have to be better at that moving forward. And so I think that goes back to trust again, to being just authentic, no matter what.”
So after all those conversations, he got to have a moment on the mound that was for the kid and for the teammates.
And what was the reaction?
“You could see the look in his eyes right away,” veteran catcher Danny Jansen said of the mound meeting. “Everybody daps him up a little bit. It’s just a really cool moment to share with somebody. And, for me, it was just pure joy for the kid.”
Funny you mention that, Danny. We’ve spent a lot of time asking Schumaker about winning culture and what being a good teammate is. And the answer he always supplied was in some way about experiencing joy at the success of others.
It sure seems like Schumaker communicated his message to his team. And his team heard him loud and clear.
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