Be Where Your Feet Are

Familiar rhythms still change the beat

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

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The Texas Rangers fired manager Chris Woodward on Monday, marking the fourth time this season that a team had relieved its skipper of his duties. Prior to this year, you had to go back to 2016, when the Braves fired Fredi González in May, to find the last time an in-season change in the dugout was made.

I thought we might have a story.

Turns out the Rangers were just getting warmed up. Two days later, they cut ties with Jon Daniels, who had overseen baseball operations in Texas for 17 years and led the franchise to its only two World Series appearances. The organization announced that General Manager Chris Young would inherit all the responsibilities of Daniels, who had been the President of Baseball Operations.

A familiar sense of urgency flooded my body. Hard wiring is not reversed easily.

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Last week, a friend I’d made through working in baseball invited me to join him at an amateur tournament in San Diego. He and I had bonded over the years, never working for the same team but always thoroughly enjoying our time together. Sometimes it was at the Winter Meetings; other times it was when one of us was in the other’s home city.

He was in town for a few days, and — as far as I knew — he was searching for his next opportunity. Of course, I was wondering what team he might land with.

I soon learned that he had flipped over to the Dark Side. That’s front office vernacular for joining an agency. After two decades of working in baseball operations, his curiosity and wisdom led him in a different direction.

Some people leave baseball and never look back. Their internal clocks recalibrate almost overnight. The late nights at the ballpark, the early mornings of Spring Training, a suitcase in a perpetual state of packed and unpacked, the minor league cities and a maddening blur of time zones. It all comes to an end.

Like Archie “Moonlight” Graham walking off the dirt and onto the rocks, baseball disappears.

Then there are those who can never get the game out of their blood. It’s like a drug, complete with highs, lows, and ramifications that impact personal lives. The addiction cannot be kicked.

It’s the itch that spawned Warning Track Power. It’s also why, immediately after reading that Chris Young, whom I know from our time together with the Padres, was overseeing a front office in flux, I felt the impulse to do something.

Exactly what? I don’t know. That hard wiring doesn’t consider circumstances.

I have come to appreciate that my ingrained visceral reactions are more about chasing the past than satisfying the present.

Yogi Roth, who talked to us back in May about Steelers rookie quarterback Kenny Pickett, likes to say: Be where your feet are.

And as soon as my mind wandered to proposals featuring scouting manifestos and strategic baseball initiatives, my son, soon to be four years old, approached me with a foam bat in one hand and a ball in the other.

Wearing his Angels hat, he says, “Pitch to me, Dad.”

I spring from my chair at the kitchen table.

“I’ll be Mike Trout,” he continues. “You’re Ohtani.”

Instead of chasing ghosts, I’m finding barrels with foam baseballs, not hard enough, we tell my wife, to break a window.

Then, far removed from the annual front office turnover, I am where my feet are and where my feet want to be.

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