The long game.
The Rangers’ commitment to playing small ball on Day Two of the draft set the table for a potentially explosive outcome. That’s the plan, at least.
The public scouting community loved Day One of the Rangers’ draft. MLB Pipeline noted that no team extracted more value from the first three rounds relative to the website’s rankings, despite Texas picking in the middle of each round. Baseball America’s lead draft analyst called it “a swing-for-the-fences draft,” adding “it’s hard not to appreciate the boldness.”
What outsiders celebrated about Saturday, however, was made possible by months of work that culminated on Sunday.
The organization’s Day Two was marked less by boldness than by layers of tireless, careful, targeted work to carry out a precision attack. And there was almost no margin for error.
