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MLB WORLD SERIES: RANGERS v CARDINALSOctober 27, 2011Jon DanielsST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: Game Six Q. A lot of key pieces on this club were acquired through trades. Is the trade a vehicle with which your organization is comfortable dealing with? Do you see that continuing, or is that just a one-time thing as you rearrange the roster? JON DANIELS: I think our mentality has been find talent anywhere, anyhow. We don't care, trade, free agent, international, draft, domestic. I think going back for years we just tried to set out and empower our scouts. "We're not going to tell you what players look like, you tell us what they look like. You tell us who you want." It so happened that we've made some deals. Right now everyone is writing about the ones that worked. There are a few that haven't. I appreciate you guys ignoring those for the time being. Bottom line, regardless of where they come from, it starts with a good recommendation, the good scouting jobs, and our guys have done a real good job with that. Q. When you hired Ron, he was sort of an unknown commodity at that time from a managing standpoint and then there was a situation in '09, as well. I wondered what was it about him that inspired that kind of faith and trust in you? JON DANIELS: It's the same thing that everyone is seeing right now. It's the sincerity. He is who he is. There's no pretense. There's no BS. He is a true-blue baseball man with a tremendous heart. Someone made the comment the other day that it's one of the tougher spots to fill in the game today is Major League manager. There aren't that many qualified candidates. Along that line, they made the comment that there aren't people that speak the language of the front office. And my response was, why would you want them to speak that language? Otherwise one of us in a suit would be down there. You've got to be able to speak the language of the player, motivate players. You're talking about doing that over 162 games and 183 days, plus six weeks of Spring Training, plus hopefully a month in the postseason, 200-something games and not many more days than that, with all the different personalities and all the other issues that go along with it, and at the same time to be a teacher, and for me Wash has filled all of those perfectly. He's been an ideal fit for our organization. Q. When you took over in Texas, the dominant franchise in the division was Anaheim, and you look at what they've done, and the fact that they have Roenicke now and Maddon out there after taking teams to the playoffs. Could you talk a little bit about that? Are you still trying to mirror your franchise a little bit after them? JON DANIELS: Well, on some level, sure. We tried to take pieces that we've observed from other organizations that have had success, and then really just tried to make our own identity. But there are a lot of things that the Angels do well that we were scared of them all year. I think even after going to the World Series last year, we looked at them as the team to beat in the division. With their pitching and the way they play the game, I don't think they get enough credit for some of the young players they brought up this year. They were in contention until the last three, four days really, and they were breaking in three, four young players. They've done a lot of things right over a long period of time, and they've got a lot more flags flying than we do. We've got to catch up. Q. You heard Wash speaking about sustaining this level of success, and it's obviously impossible to predict, but do you feel as though the organization is structured to maintain this kind of competitive level? JON DANIELS: That's our goal. I mean, we've said dating back to whenever we started, we said, hey, we want to be an organization that isn't in and out, not a one-hit wonder, where we can sustain it over time. That doesn't mean you're going to be in the World Series every year. You're going to have years where injuries get you or moves don't work out, but where you don't have to take a three, four, five-year step back to rebuild. You want to keep that window open as long as possible. That's where we've got a foundation now at the Major League level. We also have a foundation throughout the system where we feel we've got those pieces coming, our scouts and our coaches have done such a good job throughout the system where you might be able to lose a Cliff Lee but you've got Derek Holland and Matt Harrison and Alexi Ogando step up. We talk about it in waves. We need the next wave, and we've got to accelerate their development. Don Welke talks about accelerating the development of the gifted. That's our thought process on the development side. You marry that with an ownership group that's committed to winning and kind of understands the unique position we're in right now in our local market with a fan base that is dying to come out and support us, and it's all coming together at the right time. Hopefully we're able to keep it going. Q. When you became general manager, obviously the team had never won a playoff round, still trying to establish its own history after a lot of years. How much of your job was just changing the culture and getting an organization to sort of learn how to win after so many years of not doing it? JON DANIELS: We definitely talked about it. Obviously the organization had success in the mid and late '90s, didn't win a postseason game, but you certainly have to look at that as a successful run. But outside of that, all the history of the Rangers was on individual accomplishments, it wasn't really team accomplishments, and I think that was a driving force. It was something we talked about around 2007 Instructional League. We kind of talked to the guys in the room at the time about how much talent was in the room and what they had the chance to accomplish if they could kind of change that mindset and not worry about individual stats and things of that nature. And in that room in our complex out in Surprise, we always had the pictures of the best players and best moments in franchise history, and the reality is when you look -- and they change. As we get better moments, they change, and right now all the pictures are of the last couple years. As a team that's what it's about. We still have individual accomplishments and great things happening, tremendous players and staff members, but it's within the team concept. Q. I'm sure you're well aware that baseball players get labeled and Mike Napoli's label was a lot better hitter than a catcher, at least when he came to you guys. How pleasantly surprised have you been and pleased that he's become such a complete player, especially here in the playoffs? JON DANIELS: He's done a tremendous job. I'd like to say we knew that everything was going to work out this way. We knew we felt he was a winning player. That fit what we were trying to do. We didn't know he was going to hit .320. We knew he had power, he was an intense competitor. Our scouting reports, our guys felt that he was a solid, defensive catcher. You've got to give him a lot of the credit, though, because he came with a mindset, he came in tremendous shape into Spring Training. I think he had something to prove, and then throughout the course of the year he made one adjustment after another offensively, better two-strike approach, better understanding of what pitchers are trying to do to him, and all of a sudden he goes from being kind of a dangerous slugger to complete hitter. And to your point, it really rounded out his game. Q. With back-to-back World Series appearances now and the chance to win one here, are the Rangers at a point where they can be thought of as one of the elite teams now, or do you think that reputation is starting to come around? Does back-to-back World Series do that? With the organization do you guys have to? JON DANIELS: That's for you guys to figure out. Our mentality, our mindset, as soon as this season is over is going to be how do we get back, how do we figure out a way to do it and keep it going. After the last World Series we talked to our guys, now we need to be even better. Now is when we need to step it up and pour more talent into the pipeline. I think if we look back at some of the teams, the Angels, the Twins, the Yankees, the Red Sox, those teams did it for a decade basically, so I don't want to take anything away from what we're in the middle of. I'm really proud of everything we've accomplished to this point and hopefully we can add something to it. But these other teams have done it for a long period of time, really sustained it over -- I think we have a chance to do it if we keep making good decisions and our players keep playing at this level, but it's a little premature for that in my mind. Q. Growing up in New York you obviously know what the Mets meant to New York City in the '80s and the Yankees in the '90s. I know Dallas is a football state and Dallas is a Cowboys town, but do you think the Rangers, if you win this World Series or not, can establish yourselves as being on par with the Cowboys in that town or do you think that's something that's never going to be possible? JON DANIELS: That's such a high standard, the Cowboys in our marketplace. But I don't really look at it as competition with them. I think that our fans are good enough and into the sports scene, especially the championship caliber teams, that there's enough room for all of us. And it's the Mavs, too. It's a tremendous time to be part of the sports scene in the Metroplex. But we drew just under 2 million fans a few years ago, we drew just under 3 this year. Our fans have already answered that question for me. They're coming out in droves, and it was the hottest summer on record. I know me being a pampered New Yorker, I had trouble handling it, you would have, too, and these guys are 40,000 strong in 106 degrees at 7:05 at night. I think they've showed it, you go all around the Metroplex, there's claw and antlers and the tees and all of our logos. For me that's been answered. I think that they're coming out already. Q. Was there any point since you took over as GM and started building this franchise up to where it is now where you felt, we've really turned the corner here and have a chance to do these kind of things like win back-to-back pennants? JON DANIELS: The first time where I felt like -- internally we talk about this a lot. The first time where I felt like we've got a foundation that we're starting to build, we're on the right track, was that Instructional League in 2007. I know that sounds a little crazy to think about it at that point. We weren't talking about back-to-back World Series appearances at that point, but you look around that room, and I remember all the coaches and scouts and executives talking about, there's a lot of talent in this room. And now you look at your Big League club, Matt Harrison, Elvis Andrus, Neftali Feliz, Derek Holland, Scott Feldman, there are so many pieces in there -- like guys that went in the Cliff Lee deal, a number of guys that have been traded in some of the deals, Tommy Hunter, Chris Davis. There were so many Big Leaguers in that room at that time that were in A-Ball. And there was the feeling in the organization like, okay, we've got a group here that if we developed in the right way and add to it and keep our core at the big -- keep the Ian Kinslers and the Michael Youngs and that group, basically in their prime, and bleed these young players in, we've got a chance to win. And obviously it's worked out as well or better than we could have hoped because just about that whole group has come along. But that was the first time internally where we said, all right, we have got a chance to do something. Q. As a young general manager, this is a two-part question: What was your growth curve like? And secondly, what do you think of the hopscotching of young general managers around the league with this offseason so far? JON DANIELS: The first part, when we started, our group started in '06, I thought -- we probably felt we were closer to winning than we were, so we pushed and made some moves that were probably a little -- not probably, were a little ill-advised. It wasn't until after that season where we really stepped back and said, let's put a comprehensive plan together and not go at this piecemeal, and really put a philosophy in place and power up people. Ownership bought into the idea and allowed us to spend on scouting and development, and it was at that point we started bringing a lot of good people in and just the chance to learn from all them, that was maybe the biggest piece of my personal development, which is all the good people that I get to work with and learn from. And obviously it's a lot easier when you have a plan in place, you just look at everything through that prism of, all right, does this fit what we're trying to do? Is this what we're about? If it's not, let's move on. So I don't know if that answers the question, but that was -- the people that we brought in, into the organization, probably impacted my development as much as anything else. As far as the GMs, I haven't really been able to pay too much attention to it. I know a lot of these guys are very talented. Next week I'll have a chance to sit back to digest. It'll be interesting. I didn't get invited to the swap meet. I was busy. Q. How often have you thought throughout the course of this summer how glad you are that Michael Young stayed and didn't go anywhere? JON DANIELS: It's worked out. We talked about Mike Napoli, it's worked out better than we would have hoped. Michael almost won the batting title. Really provided Wash with as much versatility and flexibility to keep guys fresh, and when different guys went down during the course of the season, whether Adrian going down with the injury or Mitch struggling late, Wash was able to fill and we didn't have to call somebody up and give an extra player extended playing time because of Michael's versatility. That's the on the field. The off-the-field part is obvious. Like I said, it's worked out as well or better than we could have asked for. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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