Chaos theory: Wyatt Langford & the butterfly effect.

The latest in a series of strained Newberg Report metaphors. Play ball.

If you’ve read my Rangers stuff for very long, you know I’m a sucker for the butterfly effect — a metaphorical simplification of the idea in chaos theory that a small, seemingly (if momentarily) insignificant change in conditions can lead to a vastly different outcome — and I’ll force a story on you from time to time that leans into it.

To wit:

• The nearly impossible events that led to Alex Bregman not being drafted by the Rangers

• Imagining what would have happened if not for the Pudge Rodriguez handshake that killed a trade to the Yankees

• The chain of moves that turned Joe Nathan, eventually, into Nathaniel Lowe

• What if Nellie caught it?

That sort of thing.

Well, I’m back at it. Wyatt Langford, one year to the day after his Florida Gators’ “Sunshine Showdown” game against Florida State was rainstormed out, will run no such risk on Thursday. He will be somewhere near the middle of a lineup for a game played in a weatherproof ballpark. After just 44 minor-league games, and nearly half that many in his first pro spring training, Langford will be in the starting lineup for the reigning World Champions of Major League Baseball, with expectations that he’ll be creating all kinds of slash-line chaos from the jump.

As extraordinary as his rise as a pro has been, we’re at a point with this player that it doesn’t seem that improbable. As for the events that led to this — not so much for Langford, but for the Texas Rangers — the sequencing there, the wing-flapping that led to this baseball tornado, are far less linear.

June 10-11, 2020.

Though it’s the only draft since 2018 in which they didn’t pick in the top eight, the Rangers arguably had the best draft class in baseball in the COVID-truncated 2020 season. They took Evan Carter in the second-round, but that’s not all: three of their other four picks in the five-round draft — Justin Foscue (1st round, 14th overall), Tekoah Roby (3rd), and Thomas Saggese (5th) — have since landed on Top 100 prospect lists formulated by at least two of Baseball America, MLB.com, and Baseball Prospectus. Roby and Saggese eventually keyed a really, really important trade. On top of that, Texas had more success signing undrafted players that summer than any other team, adding high school righthanders Josh Stephan, Aidan Curry, and D.J. McCarty, among others.

But they didn’t chase Langford then. Nobody did.

The Rangers did scout the Florida native, in fact as far back as 2018, when he was a high school sophomore. At a Perfect Game showcase event that year, they saw the bat speed and the potential for it to translate into real power, but he was at a small school with unremarkable size and below-average run times, and there were questions about whether he could grow into a fit at catcher or third base or if he was ultimately going to be limited to first base.

By time Langford was a senior at Trenton High just outside Gainesville, a Class 1A school in a town of 2,000 with fewer than 700 students spread across grades 6-12, he’d filled out some but remained a curiosity at best. “[We have] scout notes from that year, but not many,” says Baseball America Editor in Chief J.J. Cooper of Langford, who was in his sixth year (not a typo) on the varsity squad for the Tigers. “Scouts liked his bat but were worried about his body in high school.”

Though Langford had won the 2019 Perfect Game home run derby, he wasn’t ranked by Baseball America in its top 500 draft prospects in 2020 or by MLB.com in its top 200 — unlike Roby and Rangers fourth-rounder Dylan MacLean, who were on both lists, and Saggese, who was No. 279 in Baseball America’s rankings.

There were 160 players selected in the shortened 2020 draft, and Langford, whose high school season lasted eight games before the plug was pulled by the pandemic, wasn’t among them. Nor was he one of the 17 undrafted high school players who signed pro deals around the league for $20,000 or less. Instead, he headed 30 miles east on State Road 26 and enrolled at Florida, which had offered him a scholarship his sophomore year. It was the only school he ever talked to, and as it turns out, the only team, college or pro, that was ready to give him a shot.

Maybe if the 2020 high school season had lasted more than two weeks, Langford would have had time to changed scouts’ minds on the chain-link fields.

And maybe if the draft had lasted 20 rounds rather than five, with no $20,000 limit on players taken after the fifth, some team might have bought Langford out of his college commitment on Day Three.

Neither happened. Good thing, as far as the Rangers would eventually be concerned.

March 11, 2022.

Game One of Florida’s weekend series against Seton Hall was rained out on that Friday, setting up a Saturday doubleheader. That’s not meant to be a weather-related point designed to shoehorn the butterfly effect into this story even more snugly. That’s also not at all why this date matters.

March 11, 2022 is meaningful because, on that day, Major League Baseball announced details that day of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which had been signed the day before to end a 99-day lockout. Among the features was a new draft lottery system, meant to disincentivize organizations looking to tank seasons. For the first time, the order of selections in the first round would not be set strictly by the previous season’s win-loss records; instead, the first six picks would be determined by a lottery involving all 18 teams who missed the playoffs. Because the draft order for 2022 had already been set based on 2021 records — and on the 2021 rules — and because teams were deep into the process of scouting for the 2022 draft knowing where they were positioned to pick and what the size of their draft bonus pool was, the lottery would first be implemented for the 2023 MLB draft, based on how the 2022 season played out.

October 2-5, 2022.

The Nationals ended up with baseball’s worst record in 2022 (55-107), followed by the A’s (60-102) and the Reds and Pirates (each 62-100). The Royals (65-97) were next, and the Tigers had the sixth-worst record (66-96). Both the Rangers and Rockies finished 68-94.

And that’s only because Texas split its season-ending four-game series at home to the Yankees — while the Rockies, facing the Dodgers to finish out a season in which Los Angeles won more games (111) than any National League team in 116 years, took three out of four from the Dodgers. In Los Angeles.

Had the Rockies lost that series, or even split it, they would have had a worse win-loss record than Texas. And in that scenario, Colorado would have been positioned seventh going into the draft lottery, and Texas eighth.

But the Rockies won three of four, and they and the Rangers each finished with 68 wins. But because the Rangers were the worse of the two teams the year before (Texas won 60 games in 2021, Colorado 74), they were considered to have the seventh-worst record — and seventh-best lottery odds — with the Rockies left at eighth.

Good thing.

Langford, by now not a freshman catcher but instead a sophomore left fielder on his way to All-American honors, ended up going 7 for 12 with a double, triple, two homers, and seven RBI in the Seton Hall series. We now know it was an even bigger weekend for the Rangers.

December 6, 2022.

Among the items on the agenda at the 2022 Winter Meetings in San Diego was the actual execution of the first-ever draft lottery. The Rangers, though sitting seventh going in, had a 25.2 percent chance to move into the top four slots in the July 2023 draft — less of a chance than they had to fall to the eighth slot, for instance.

This is what happened:

As you can see, from an against-the-odds standpoint, the big winner that day was Minnesota, which, despite finishing with 78 wins and actually sharing the lead in its division as late as September 4th, leaped from the 13th position to the fifth pick — in what would eventually, right up to Draft Day, be widely considered a five-player class at the very top. Said The Athletic’s Keith Law, 10 days before the draft: “I see five players who could be a 1-1 [overall] pick in most years, certainly in the last two drafts.” And he wasn’t alone.

But the Rangers won big, too — and possibly twice.

They moved up three spots, from seventh to fourth. Massive difference, not just in player tiers but in available bonus pool money to allocate as well. (The Rockies, incidentally, fell from eighth to ninth.)

And Texas wasn’t the only team to leapfrog into the top tier. Detroit jumped three spots as well, from sixth to third.

It’s possible that was enormously important.

July 9, 2023.

Because this is what happened right after the Pirates and Nationals took LSU teammates Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews off the board with the first two picks on Day One of the 2023 Draft, on July 9:

That part was perhaps less shocking, though, than who was left for the Rangers at number four. In their final mock drafts, issued earlier that day, here’s who the top national draft experts had going first overall to Pittsburgh:

• Keith Law (The Athletic): Wyatt Langford

• Carlos Collazo (Baseball America): Wyatt Langford

• Jim Callis (MLB.com): Wyatt Langford

• Jonathan Mayo (MLB.com): Wyatt Langford

• Kiley McDaniel (ESPN): Wyatt Langford

• Eric Longenhagen (FanGraphs): Wyatt Langford

All six had Skenes going second to the Nationals and Crews going third to the Tigers. They all stayed faithful to that consensus top five with Max Clark and Walker Jenkins, both high school outfielders, going next to the Rangers and Twins (only Longenhagen had Texas taking Jenkins rather than Clark).

Stated another way: the first five of the above analysts had Skenes, Crews, and Clark going in that order, which is exactly how it did play out — only all five of them thought those three players would follow Langford. Not precede him.

Of course, for all we know, if the A’s, Reds, or Royals, all of whom had better lottery odds than the Tigers or Rangers, had ended up picking third instead of Detroit with Skenes and Crews off the board, maybe they would have taken Max Clark, too.

Say it with me, now: I guess we’ll never know.

Epilogue.

I suppose you’re cool if I merely touch on the rest in passing, because what Wyatt Langford has done since July 9 involves a wholly unrelated brand of chaos. After getting only four at-bats as a Florida freshman, he got in the weight room and metamorphosed his body (hmm, guess maybe I’m flying kinda close to that butterfly theme after all), and started unremittingly doing bad things to pitched baseballs.

In his remaining two Gators seasons, Langford hit .363/.471/.746 (1.217 OPS) with 47 home runs in 610 plate appearances, the rough equivalent of one major-league season.

After signing with the Rangers, he got 200 plate appearances on the farm in the 2023’s second half, hitting .360/.480/.677 (1.157 OPS) with 10 home runs — and was in consideration for activation in the World Series when Adolis Garcia was injured.

This spring: .365/.423/.714 (1.137 OPS) in 71 plate appearances, with the MLB lead in total bases and RBI.

And just before he put a bow on that stat line, this:

The Rangers drafted fourth in a year when, in any year before it, they would have drafted seventh.

They drafted fourth when they should have drafted seventh, and landed not the fourth-best player, but the one every reputable analyst believed would go first.

And speaking of first, they did it in the midst of a year in which they won the World Series.

If not for a pandemic-shuttered high school season . . . if not for a shortened draft . . . if not for a lockout and a new CBA and a new set of rules for how the draft would be conducted . . . if not for a last-place team in the other league winning three of four season-ending games against a historically dominant rival . . . if not for the luck of the lottery . . . if not for three other teams going in a direction on Draft Day that was at least a little surprising . . .

. . . if just one of those butterflies hadn’t flapped its wings, maybe two . . .

Then Jonathan Ornelas would have never been asked to make a deal this week on his jersey number.