The voice.

In the last few weeks, the Rays have lost their GM and their manager, and the A’s have lost their Assistant GM, neither of which is as irreparable as Jose Canseco losing a finger, but developments haven’t been real good for those two AL contenders lately.

The Angels added Tim Bogar as a Special Assistant to the GM this week, and that’s a positive for them. But it’s a temporary gig, a pillow deal until some club (maybe even Tampa Bay) decides to make Bogar its next manager.

The Rangers added a new Special Assistant to the GM, too, but there’s nothing temporary about it. Unless there are higher rungs on the same ladder down the road.

Welcome back, Michael Young.

Anytime you can improve the decision-making process in the front office, you do it.

Anytime you can increase your reach in terms of recruiting players, you do it.

Anytime you can find ways to make young baseball players better ones, you do it.

Anytime, that is, that you can make management stronger and that you can maximize the chances of making your ballplayers better, you absolutely jump at it.

Texas got better in all those areas on Wednesday. With one move.

And the thing is, Michael Young would have never taken this job if the punch list was headlined by ribbon cuttings and radio voiceovers and Q&A’s. Those things might be involved at some level, like they are for Jon Daniels and Jeff Banister and Derek Holland, but Young is in this to work.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t have agreed to be in this at all.

Young talked yesterday about the “entirely new respect” he has for what the “very talented group” of baseball operations officials at 1000 Ballpark Way do every day, the “things you don’t see as a player, or a fan.” Whatever his perception was coming in, these last few weeks opened his eyes further.

A significant number of those officials, and not just the one sitting next to Young with the microphone in front of him, talked about the entirely new respect they have for Young, and how much further their eyes were opened by the insight he brought on day one, and the conviction, the presence, the preparation, the 0-to-90 immersion into the task — and yet not one of them was surprised one bit.

I’m not going to drop 3,000 words about Michael Young on you this morning — I did that in February when he retired as a Texas Ranger — because this is a fairly simple story, without too many layers. The Rangers, who find themselves in the most important baseball operations transition they’ve had in years, believed they’d be better with him. Young, after his first year away from baseball since he was his kids’ age, believed it was time to get back into the game, with this team. (“I wanted to take a deep breath away from the game. It didn’t work out that way. I watched every game I could.”)

It simply all lined up.

Young has already made a serious impact, Daniels said, in bringing a strong voice from a player’s perspective during the process to find a new manager to lead the team. For what it’s worth, Young insists the Rangers found the right man for the job in Banister, about whom he “can’t say enough.”

Both Daniels and Young called the past the past, as far as their well-publicized chill was concerned, and while they each tried to minimize that chapter in this story yesterday, understandably, the fact that the 37- and 38-year-old made the effort to swallow pride, understand what happened there and why, and work toward letting it all wash away under the bridge was huge. Michael Young, Special Assistant to the GM, obviously doesn’t happen otherwise.

Young volunteered going forward, Daniels joked, to handle all tough conversations with players about changing positions. Daniels added, in all seriousness, that Young will be able to take on conversations of another kind, able to flip open a black book that’s full of numbers nobody else in the front office has when it comes to recruiting players and doing background work on other big hires.

Where Young actually hopes to have the biggest influence — and for me this was the great takeaway from yesterday — is by “impacting our minor leaguers’ careers, or even their day.” You learn so much playing this game, he said, but it would be wasted if you didn’t pass it down.

We’ve seen enough moments of Young standing in front of his locker after a loss, or on the mound with a rookie starting pitcher losing his focus, or on the top dugout step next to a young Ian Kinsler or a young Elvis Andrus, to know that Michael Young never wasted much of anything, as far as his voice was concerned. The idea of him getting in Jurickson Profar’s head as he tries to pull everything back together, or Michael De Leon’s as he tries to figure all of this out — or Andrus’s as he tries to get “it” back — the value in that can’t be quantified.

Or manufactured.

Daniels talked about how much he’s always admired and counted on how hard Young pushed himself as a player, how he prepared, how he was never satisfied, because those, said Daniels, are the things the Rangers want to be all about.

Chapter Two. Let’s go.

Young has a ton to offer in bringing that mentality if nothing else, said Daniels — not just to the players but also to the braintrust Young now joins.

The biggest thrill, Young said, would be to help get the Rangers’ young players prepared to contribute to Major League wins. And a big part of that will be imparting not so much the things he did well as a player himself, but instead the things he believes he could have done better. “What gray area can I help unlock, to turn a weakness into a strength?”

Wednesday was a really, really good day for the Texas Rangers and for Michael Young, and I’m confident in believing it was a really good one for Andrus and Profar and Rougned Odor, too.

And for De Leon and Michael Choice and Jake Thompson.

And for Jon Daniels and Mike Daly and Jeff Banister.

And for you and me.