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Rangers fire manager Chris Woodward in midst of fourth straight losing season

The Rangers are on pace for another 90-loss season.

Update:
This story has been updated with further confirmation.

ARLINGTON — From the time the Rangers finally got to spring training, Chris Woodward was direct. There would be no excuses. The team had a new, state-of-the-art facility, a beefed-up roster, three years’ experience with a painful teardown and rebuild process. This Rangers team needed to expect to win. Even had it boiled down to a logo — “E2W” — emblazoned on T-shirts.

And on Monday, the second anniversary of the last time the Rangers spent a day over .500, there were no excuses.

Only consequences.

With the team languishing toward another 90-loss season, the Rangers fired Woodward two games shy of his 500th with the club and with a season remaining on his contract. Third base coach Tony Beasley was named the interim manager for the remainder of the season. He inherited a 51-63 team that began the day 23 games behind Houston in the AL West and 9 1/2 games out of the expanded wild card race.

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“We want to build momentum into 2023,” general manager Chris Young said of the timing, coming with 48 games remaining in the season. “I think there are some positive things happening. We liked some of the things we’re seeing, but we recognize there are things that we need to address moving forward. And we could either wait until after the season or we could get ahead of it and start addressing it now.”

“We did not come into the season thinking we have put together a championship roster, but we thought we had taken a major step forward in talent from where we were a year ago,” president of baseball operations Jon Daniels said. “We certainly had aspirations to overachieve some and still do have those. But we continue to be realistic about about where we are. We think that we can be better than our record, and better than the way that we’ve played at times. And so that kind of leads to making a decision now, rather than waiting to the end of the year.”

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Beasley, 55, has been on the staff since 2015, overcoming a battle with cancer in 2016. He managed Young in his first full season as a professional at Class A Hickory in 2002. Young said Beasley would be considered a candidate for the permanent job, but also said the Rangers would address a search at the end of the season.

Young and Daniels talked about changing “the style” of play and of “preparation.” They did not, however, address any specifics. While Woodward stressed team prep meetings and discussion, he was not big on team rules. He encouraged players to get ready however they needed, so long as they were prepared for game time. Woodward did not respond to text messages Monday.

The management team also acknowledged they never really gave Woodward contending-quality talent with which to work. He took over a 95-loss team for 2019, saw 2020 scuttled by the pandemic, oversaw a full-scale rebuild in 2021 and had to sit through the idleness of a long owner-imposed lockout this season.

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The Rangers, on their way to their sixth consecutive losing season, are 211-287 in Woodward’s three-plus seasons. The .424 win percentage is the sixth worst in MLB in that time. Ironically, the firing came a day after perhaps the best series win of the season, in which the Rangers rallied on back-to-back days to win two of three from Seattle.

Ultimately, neither the first three seasons nor the weekend mattered much. After ownership committed more than $500 million to free agents in the offseason, though, 2022 became more about results.

Related: Seven Rangers manager candidates to succeed Chris Woodward

And there the Rangers simply have not delivered. After flirting with .500 in June, the club has seemingly taken a step backward. The Rangers are 15-25 since July 1 and have fallen back to a 90-loss pace. Management didn’t expect the Rangers to go from worst to first in one season, but they expected more than another 90-loss season.

“I think it’s reflected in the way we played to some degree over the past six weeks,” Young said of the club’s decision. “We were in an OK position going into the All-Star break, but we’ve fallen off, obviously. I think we see some things that we can tighten up in terms of reaching championship standards. And that’s really a big part of the decision. It’s nobody’s fault, necessarily, but sometimes it just takes a different style, a different leadership voice to achieve those things.”

Some of the record could perhaps be blamed on luck. The Rangers, at 6-24 in one-run games, are on pace for the worst winning percentage ever in one-run games, which, according to advanced analytics, are often decided by nothing more than luck.

Then again: no excuses. Baseball, Woodward often said, is a performance-based industry.

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“There’s an element of luck,” Daniels said. “And there’s also an element of making your own luck and that goes to some of the small things that we are alluding to.”

On the “small things,” which usually relate to defense, situational hitting and baserunning, the quality of play from the start of the season was questionable. More significantly, it hadn’t really really improved. One example: The Rangers ranked in the bottom tier of defensive runs saved, according to Sports Info Solutions.

The Rangers seemed to function more as individual parts than a team. One key element of a championship culture — an all-for-one attitude — never really seemed to develop. There was no galvanizing force in the clubhouse despite the commitment of $500 million to free agents Corey Seager and Marcus Semien.

Both are meticulous in preparation, central to Woodward’s philosophy. Neither, however, has grabbed hold of the clubhouse in the same way that previous leaders of the last 25 years — Will Clark, Michael Young and Adrían Beltré — did. As .500 slipped away from the Rangers over the last six weeks, there seemed to be an air of resignation around the team.

Texas Rangers right fielder Adolis Garcia (53) is congratulated by Texas Rangers manager...
Texas Rangers right fielder Adolis Garcia (53) is congratulated by Texas Rangers manager Chris Woodward after Garcia scored during the first inning of a baseball game in Arlington, Texas on Sunday, May 1, 2022. (Michael Ainsworth / Special Contributor)

Either nobody could — or would — do anything about it.

At the start of August, when the trade deadline passed, Daniels was asked about Woodward’s status. He was non-committal.

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On Monday, the Rangers reached the point where they felt they had to take more drastic steps to stop the losing. There were no excuses. Only consequences.

On Twitter: @Evan_P_Grant

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