Game Over 
The Rookie
For 34 years, the Texas Rangers have struck out in their quest for a World Series title. Can they be saved by a 28-year-old general manager from New York whose only experience comes from the fantasy leagues? At this point, I’m willing to try just about anything.
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Nevertheless, he took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. It was a copy of Mike Shropshire’s history of the early Texas Rangers, Seasons in Hell. Hicks had given it to him, explaining that for the first two decades in Texas, the Rangers “were major league in name only.” The team began to mature in the late eighties. Nolan Ryan helped put the Rangers on the map after he signed with the club, in 1988; the next year a group of investors headed by George W. Bush and Rusty Rose took control of the team and persuaded the city of Arlington to finance a truly big-league stadium. The Rangers won their division in 1996, 1998, and 1999. They were about the best team in the majors, save only the Yankees, who humiliated them in all three playoff appearances. Then the Rangers began their current decline. In 2000 they signed Alex Rodriguez to the richest contract in baseball history, $252 million over ten years. The move was supposed to announce to the world that the Rangers were serious about winning. Instead, it strapped the team’s payroll and bred jealousy in the locker room. In the past six seasons the Rangers never had a legitimate ace to put on the mound, and they failed to make the playoffs. They were rarely even in the hunt past the All-Star break. Oh, and A-Rod was traded to the Yankees in 2004.
Daniels already knew about the decline: He’d been part of it. So how does he propose to reverse this misfortune? “By hiring good people and treating them well,” he told me. “By putting them in a position to do their jobs and then using the information they give me to make good decisions. I think I’m a good judge of people. And I understand the dynamics of decision making at this level.” His master plan, he said, starts with his three priorities: Improve the pitching rotation; fill holes in the bull pen, which was depleted by injuries last season; and make the offense less one-dimensional. “I give J.D. highest marks for that,” Hicks had told me earlier. “Other GMs I’ve had had one or two directions, but J.D. has a dozen balls in the air. He’s very bright, very creative, a virtual encyclopedia of baseball.”
Resolve and resourcefulness are traits that Daniels exhibited early in life. In the fifth grade, his parents urged him to take an exam for a program for academically gifted students run by Hunter College, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. About 2,500 students from New York City’s five boroughs were chosen to take the exam, and Daniels was one of the 230 who passed it. “I had no desire to go there,” he told me, “but my father sat me down and said, ‘This is one decision we’re going to make for you.’” So from the seventh through the twelfth grade, Daniels’ school day started and ended with an hour-and-a-half bus and train trip. First, he took the Q28 bus to the Main Street subway station, then the 7 train past Shea Stadium to Queensboro Plaza, the N train under the river to Fifty-ninth Street, and the 6 train uptown to Ninety-sixth and Lexington. From there he walked four blocks to school. “I was basically a momma’s boy, but riding the subway alone when you’re thirteen, you grow up quick,” he told me. “The city has a reality of its own, and I had to learn to deal with it.”
Baseball has always been his passion. There were not many public parks in his neighborhood, so he played stickball in the street and in the school yard. For a time he played on a Little League team, but that stopped once he inherited the long subway rides to school. Like his mom and his grandfather, he was a New York Mets fan. Shea Stadium was a short bike ride from his home, and he learned how to sneak into the bleachers without paying. He was deep into fantasy league baseball by age twelve and never stopped playing. At Cornell, he sat in on a class on sports arbitration.
After graduation he moved to Boston and took a job with Allied Domecq, which had just acquired Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins. But his mind was never really on doughnuts and ice cream back then. He talked regularly to his college buddy A. J. Preller, who had landed an entry-level job in the office of baseball commissioner Bud Selig. “I spent more time thinking about his job than mine,” Daniels confessed. For fun, he juggled the rosters of three or four fantasy league teams and, according to his wife, Robyn (who was his girlfriend at the time), regularly creamed his competition. “He is very competitive,” Robyn told me. When Daniels quit a corporate job that paid him $4,200 a month and signed on as an intern with the Rockies for $1,200, Robyn supported him. Rolling the dice, Daniels called it. A year later, John Hart offered him a real baseball job.
Robyn seems the perfect complement for a young man on his way up. She fielded my questions as though she’d been doing interviews her entire life. “We had talked about the possibility of him getting [the GM] job, but he’s so humble, he’d never let himself get ahead of himself,” she said. A day after the season ended, Daniels was packing for a scouting trip to the Dominican Republic when he got a call that Tom Hicks wanted to see him the next morning. “I don’t think he slept much that night,” she recalled. “He woke at four a.m. We both went to work, and all day he kept sending me text messages: ‘Waiting in the lobby,’ ‘All going well.’ Around noon, he called, very casual, asking about how my day had been. Then finally he said, ‘I got the job.’ It was crazy.”
Crazier still is the idea that Daniels is now recruiting talent fifteen years his senior. Hicks holds out hope that Daniels might lure the great Roger Clemens, age 43, to spend his final years as a Ranger; on opening day at Arlington’s Ameriquest Field, the two sat together. Clemens has said he will retire, but he’s changed his mind before, and Daniels has prepared a good sales pitch. Last year Clemens had the best earned run average in the major leagues. Because of the Astros’ pitiful offense, he lost three 1-0 games and finished with a record of 13-8. The Rangers, by contrast, produced 260 home runs, the second most in major league history. This winter, Daniels charted how many runs the Rangers scored on the days Clemens pitched for the Astros—against different teams, of course—and showed him that with the Rangers, his record could have been 24-3. “That’s the sort of thinking that can produce results,” Hicks told me.
IF THERE WAS ANYTHING painful about Daniels’s promotion, it was that it came at the expense of his friend and mentor, John Hart. Still, everyone close to the Rangers had known for nearly two years that Hart had to go: The question was when. Hart had successfully revitalized the Cleveland Indians in the nineties, but in Texas, the players became convinced that he had betrayed them by not upgrading the pitching. By Hart’s fourth year, the team was close to revolt. “Hart was a huge lightning rod, a PR disaster,” Randy Galloway, the veteran sports columnist of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, told me. “He was the worst GM in franchise history.”
Hart had inherited a mess in Arlington. For starters, there was the A-Rod deal, over which he had no control. In addition, Hicks, who was so eager to make that move work, pushed Hart to spend money like a drunken sailor. He blew megamillions on Korean pitcher Chan Ho Park (who went 22-23 in more than three seasons and never had an ERA below 5.00), three bull pen pitchers who proved to be busts, and the aging slugger Juan Gonzalez. The ball club that Hart took over in 2001 was one of the least cost-efficient in baseball. From 2000 to 2003, the dirt-poor but highly successful Oakland A’s—who, along with their superstar GM, Billy Beane, are the subject of Michael Lewis’s influential 2003 best-seller, Moneyball—paid about $500,000 per win. Profligate franchises like the Rangers, however, paid nearly $3 million per win. Written off in 2002 after they allowed Jason Giambi and two other stars to slip away in free agency, the A’s won 103 games and the division, while the Rangers won 72 games and finished 31 games out of first place.
In Hart’s defense, the Rangers have recently trimmed their payroll while keeping their keystone position players. He lopped off a record $41 million between the 2003 and 2004 seasons and another $10 million last year. What Hart couldn’t produce was good pitching. And eventually, he began snubbing both the media and the fans, which made him a Jonah to the organization. Hart recognized his problem—as did Hicks—and offered to resign after the All-Star break in July 2004, when the team was already out of the playoff race. “That started the big hullabaloo,” Hicks told me. “We were set to promote Grady Fuson [head of player development], but [manager] Buck Showalter and some others came to me and said that would be a big mistake, that we’d lose all our top staff people if Fuson got the job.” Hart agreed to stay another year or two, provided he was allowed to groom Daniels as his replacement. Daniels was promoted to assistant GM. “That’s when I started taking a hard look at J.D.,” Hicks recalled. After last year’s late-season meltdown, when the bull pen collapsed and the club lost twelve of thirteen road games, Hart told the owner, “I’ve become a millstone to this franchise. I need a different role.”
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