The Rangers are busy.

I don't play chess. But if I did, it wouldn't be at the level my baseball team does.

Tuesday morning, a little before 9 a.m.:

Within minutes, we got more details: the price for Mingo (and Carolina’s 2025 seventh-round pick) was Dallas’s fourth-round pick next April.

About seven hours later, we got this:

I dumped my thoughts on the dichotomy of it all into 24 words an hour after that.

I could easily throw the Mavs and Stars into the first category. I didn’t know much of anything more than surface-level about P.J. Washington or Daniel Gafford before February 8, but Nico Harrison did, thank goodness. I was already on Team Nico when, eight months earlier, he’d moved Davis Bertans and his $17 million contract to the Thunder on Draft Night for the potentially troublesome cost of dropping from 10th in the first round to 12th . . . and then swiped Dereck Lively II with the “inferior” pick. The Lively and Washington and Gafford additions, in a Jordan Montgomery kinda way, make me happy I don’t really need to wonder how far last season would have gone without them — and they give all of us Mavs fans so much to look forward to these next few years.

Jim Nill? The man as unconcerned about soundbite opportunities as Jerry Jones is dependent on them? The two-time defending GM of the Year in the NHL quietly, and consistently, makes smart (if not flashy) free-agent and trade decisions, oversees an efficient draft machine, and has the Stars in a position to win — that is, to Win — year after year.

For most of its half-century, the Rangers weren’t there. But 15 years ago, Jon Daniels engineered things into a true winning cycle here for the first time, and once Chris Young took the baton, he did the same — and then achieved something to which Daniels, Harrison, and Nill have gotten as close to as their sports allow without quite claiming the big trophy.

Look, I’m trying to keep an open mind on Mingo, as my football leader recommends. But I have more confidence, so much more confidence, in the other three GM’s in town finding talent in all corners and by all methods and sometimes behind doors we didn’t even know were doors — and not overpaying for it. I’m less convinced that the football GM knew a hundredth as much about Jonathan Mingo a week ago as he did about the exact, to-the-penny balance sheet impact that his sponsorship deal with AT&T and his sponsorship deal with Bank of America and his sponsorship deal with Ford Motor Company and his sponsorship deal with Pepsi and his sponsorship deal with Miller Lite and his sponsorship deal with LG all have, and how much more they each could generate in the next round of negotiations.

So when I saw that Young had hired Schumaker — the reigning NL Manager of the Year — when his name had been tied to every managerial opening (and managerial hot seat) since he’d asked the Marlins this past April to void his 2025 club option, I was stunned.

And not stunned.

The Rangers, for the last 19 years, have been as creative and opportunistic — all those things I said in that tweet above — as the Cowboys have not been.

It doesn’t always work. After the 2018 season, the Rangers hired Shiraz Rehman away from the Cubs to serve as one of three Assistant GM’s and also named Matt Blood, then the director of Team USA’s 18-and-Under program, their new Director of Player Development. Two and a half years later, they moved on from Rehman. That’s two years longer than Blood lasted.

This approach, it has probably occurred to you, is the opposite of signing 2024-grade Ezekiel Elliott.

As is stealth-trading for Jonah Heim, Kyrie Irving, and Chris Tanev. Quietly signing Kirby Yates, Matt Duchene, and Naji Marshall. Trading down to draft Lively and picking off second-round “reaches” Evan Carter and Jason Robertson.

All of which is quite different from waiting too long to sign Dak Prescott, and hunting media hits where you can scream “ALL. IN.” while your GM counterparts in town say far less and accomplish so much more.

Is it possible Schumaker is here on a Beltre-in-Boston/Semien-in-Toronto type of pillow deal, and will be managing against the Rangers before a new skipper is needed in Arlington? Sure. Terry Francona was once the Rangers’ bench coach and Clint Hurdle was a World Series hitting coach here, each for one season after managing elsewhere . . . and before managing again, and not here.

But now — and fully setting aside the brainpower and fresh set of eyes and ideas Schumaker can add to the room, whether in San Antonio earlier this week or at the Anatole in a month or in Surprise and then in Arlington when it comes to pro and amateur player evaluation or roster-shuffling, not to mention the chance of a free-agent recruiting edge here and there — Schumaker is in Chris Young’s circle of trust. They were never teammates (face to face: Schumaker went 3 for 4 lifetime against Young), and Schumaker never played for Bruce Bochy. He did play collegiately at UC Santa Barbara in 2000 and 2001, not quite overlapping there with Michael Young (1995-97), but those two did play together with the Dodgers in 2013.

Now they each have a place at the table with Chris Young and GM Ross Fenstermaker. And none of them are busy negotiating stadium naming rights deals, or rehearsing a pitch for “Blockchain Com.”

And it’s not as if this is a soft landing for Schumaker. You can certainly imagine the Cardinals (12 years as a player, one as a coach) and Padres (four years as a coach) both offered him a similar advisory role over the past month or so, but instead he chose a brand new spot in Texas. This isn’t Dusty Baker going back to the Giants as a front office advisor, Chris Woodward returning to the Dodgers as a roving instructor, Jayce Tingler reuniting with Thad Levine. It’s not Steve Sarkisian heading back to Nick Saban’s staff after a stint with the Falcons, or Mike Zimmer rekindling the good old days with the Cowboys.

Schumaker will have time here to get comfortable with the culture and the leadership upstairs — and with his old bench coach Luis Urueta now part of the coaching staff as well (important in his history with Schumaker, and perhaps now with Bochy, is that Urueta speaks Spanish fluently and Schumaker does not) — and get a complete picture from the inside. That was presumably the idea when the Rangers brought Will Venable in from Boston three weeks after hiring Bochy. To assimilate. To get him more comfortable with the Rangers, and the Rangers with him, until the time came when Bochy was ready to re-retire.

Now, maybe that’s Schumaker’s lot. And maybe he’ll be ready to manage again before Bochy is ready not to. But if their timing lines up, having Schumaker here now with sleeves rolled up is certainly a massive step that a future day-long series of interviews can’t accomplish, on either side of the deal. He probably has plans to be in Tarrant County a whole bunch a year and a half from now, anyway; his and Lindsey’s son Brody, a high school junior in California, has committed to play at TCU if he doesn’t turn pro.

(Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images)

How cool would it be if the plan is for Bochy and Schumaker, arguably the best managers in the major leagues just a year ago, to basically switch seats here when Bochy is ready for that? For Schumaker to be the next manager of the club, for Bochy to assume a senior advisor’s role, for the eventual transition to be almost as seamless as a change on the top step of the dugout can be?

This is not a John Hart/Grady Fuson arranged marriage. Not a Jason Garrett/Wade Phillips sabotage.

Young was effervescent about Schumaker in his initial comments to reporters about the hiring, but it didn’t come off at all as puffing (which you will understand if you’ve got an hour at your desk or on the treadmill or in the car to watch or listen to this awesomeness — a sitdown Schumaker did a month ago on Eric Hosmer’s “Diggin’ Deep” podcast, which is golden gold; LFG, Cade Spinello!). “He’s a great person with a very accomplished baseball resumé who is so plugged into the game,” Young said of Schumaker. “He knows today’s players, has led in the dugout successfully, and there’s a wisdom he brings that is going to push us forward and help us make good decisions in a number of areas. We’ll get his feedback on almost everything related to our personnel decisions, processes, and the systems that we have.”

Very cool.

Take a listen to the above podcast from about 43:15 in until 44:38, as Schumaker talks about the process of choosing a college for Brody — and specifically the things in the recruiting pitch that appealed to him and turned him off of a program. It might shed some light on the factors that led Schumaker to choose this job for himself. Again, his arrival here isn’t rooted in any long-standing relationship.

Chris Young, man. The resourcefulness, the initiative, the imagination. It’s not always going to work, but I’m here for all of it. I don’t know how long Schumaker will be here, or if there’s a second Rangers role ahead for him, but I love that some fascinating dominoes have been carefully positioned.

Could Mingo be a true WR2 or WR3 for Dallas, at about $1.5 million next year and around $2 million in 2026? Sure, I guess. And great, if so.

I’ll acknowledge that I’m not super tuned-in on trade values in football, and I realize that moving Cooper two years into a five-year, $100 million contract for a fifth-round pick (which turned into tackle Matt Waletzko, who has been on the field for eight snaps in his career, including zero this year) had a huge salary-shedding component that didn’t saddle Carolina with Mingo, but, man, I just can’t imagine the Panthers had a better offer than a fifth-rounder — in fact, what is virtually certain to be a high fifth-rounder if coming from Dallas — and that’s what gets me here.

Maybe I’m dead wrong, but the Dallas Cowboys GM lacks the track record or the credibility in player (and pick) evaluation to earn from me any benefit of doubt. Right or wrong, I’m beyond doubting any longer whether the football team might or might not be making half-baked decisions in the day-parts the decision-makers are actually spending on football.

And I’ve also conceded that I don’t really care as much now; less, in fact, than I ever have.

But I care about the Rangers as deeply in my DNA as ever. It’s entrenched.

And it helps, a lot, when I have faith that the braintrust running my baseball team is playing 3-D chess — single-minded yet open-minded and wholly undistracted — and capable of a bad-ass surprise like this one every once in a while.

(Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)