When the Rangers’ 2026 season is picked apart, Chris Young doesn’t come out looking spotless. But he also doesn’t deserve to be flattened into the easy critique that Texas simply failed because the front office didn’t care enough to spend. The picture is messier than that.
Young said at last year’s general manager meetings, “My main thought is that we're going to have a payroll that's high enough for us to win. We've got a great core group in place.
We are in a great position. We don't have to make any moves to accommodate payroll or to buy payroll flexibility, so to speak.
But we're expecting to win with whatever number we have. I’m very confident we'll be able to put together a very good team, whatever the payroll number is.”
That didn’t translate into a winning season, but the payroll itself wasn’t the problem people often make it out to be. Per Spotrac, Texas opened with a labor payroll just over $192 million, which put the club 13th in baseball and well ahead of teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, Milwaukee Brewers, Cleveland Guardians, and Chicago White Sox.
Young also made one of his sharpest money moves by trading Marcus Semien for Brandon Nimmo. Nimmo delivered a 106 wRC+ despite some ugly luck, while Semien played like a below-replacement-level player.
The real story of Young’s year is split into the good, the bad, and the part that came down to fortune.
The strongest case for Young comes from the way he worked the margins all season long. Front offices don’t just operate from October to July; they keep digging for help everywhere they can. Young did exactly that with the bottom of the roster, and it paid off more than once.
Chris Paddack’s one-game run was a strange little footnote, but it fit the larger theme. More important were Elias Díaz and Nicky Lopez, two waiver-wire additions who gave Texas real value for stretches of the season.
Díaz and Lopez both provided starter-level production at times and served as useful depth when the roster needed it most. They each ran into rough patches, but they also bounced back late and helped keep the Rangers moving through injuries.
Those were smart, efficient pickups.
Where Young deserves the heat is the bullpen. He built it around soft-tossers and low-upside arms in a league that is increasingly powered by 100 mph heat from the middle relief ranks, and the results were ugly. Texas finished with a 4.47 ERA, 23rd in baseball, a 7.85 K/9 that ranked 26th, and an average fastball velocity of 93.9 miles per hour, which also ranked 23rd.
Chris Martin was a disaster. Jakob Junis was mostly effective, but he also missed time with an IL stint and faded badly in September, when he posted a 9.00 ERA.
By July, Texas had five rookies in the bullpen, and Young still treated Chase Silseth and Adam Macko as the only extra help he needed. That’s where the criticism really lands: once it was obvious the plan wasn’t working, he didn’t do enough to correct it.
Then there’s the part Young doesn’t get to claim credit for at all. Jacob Latz and Ezequiel Duran became two of the Rangers’ biggest breakout stories, but neither was supposed to matter much in the way the roster was originally built.
Latz was a long shot for the fifth starter role before emerging as a high-leverage reliever a few weeks into the season. Duran seemed close to the exit until Josh Smith’s injuries and later meningitis opened regular playing time for him.
Those were the season’s best surprises in Texas, but they belonged more to Skip Schumaker than to Young. Schumaker saw what he had, leaned into the hot hands, and the wheels never came off.
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