Rangers GM Jon Daniels has built a World Series-caliber team for the second straight year. (AP)

Long gone are the days when Jon Daniels received vexed looks by those who could not believe that he was old enough to be a major league general manager.

Daniels is still the youngest GM in the majors at 34, but he has spent six years in charge of building the Rangers’ organization, and in 2011, for the second straight year, he has steered Texas into the World Series. A combination of tremendously talented homegrown players, savvy trades and occasional dips into free agency have cemented the perception that the Rangers under Daniels have become one of the best organizations in the game.

For that reason, it is fascinating to consider his baseball roots — both where he did and did not get his start.

Daniels went to Cornell and received his degree in Applied Economics and Management. Out of college, he lived in the Boston area while working for Allied Domecq, a company that was dealing with the branding of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins. The undertaking was uninteresting, and so, following the path of college friend A.J. Preller (now the Rangers Senior Director of Player Personnel, who was then an intern with the Phillies), Daniels decided in 2001 to seek an internship in a baseball front office.

He lived in Boston, and so the first place to interview was obvious enough. Daniels submitted his resume to the Red Sox. At that time, the Sox were in the early stages of creating a baseball operations internship program, a task that had been entrusted to then-baseball operations assistant Ben Cherington by then-GM Dan Duquette as a means of injecting young talent into the team’s front office structure. Read the rest of this entry »

Adrian Gonzalez was a member of the Rangers from 2003-05. (AP)

ARLINGTON, Texas — Jon Daniels had an eventful first winter as GM of the Rangers when he took over control of the club’s baseball operations following the 2005 season. He unloaded Alfonso Soriano, acquired Vicente Padilla and made a couple of additional minor moves.

But there is unquestionably one trade that, more than five years later, he regrets. In December of 2005, he agreed to a trade (which was officially announced on Jan. 6, 2006) that sent first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, outfielder Terrmel Sledge and pitcher Chris Young to the Padres in exchange for pitcher Adam Eaton and reliever Akinori Otsuka.

It was a move meant to bolster the short-term playoff hopes of the club. The Rangers had emerged as surprise contenders in 2004, when they went 89-73. They followed that by going 79-83 in the 2005 campaign.

Still, the team thought that if it could acquire some quality pitching, it had a shot of competing in an AL West division that did not feature any juggernauts. The Rangers had what most viewed as one of the best young position playing cores in the game, led by an infield that featured first baseman Mark Teixeira, shortstop Michael Young and third baseman Hank Blalock.

Gonzalez (whom the Rangers had acquired in a deal with the Marlins in 2003) was seemingly blocked at first by Teixeira. Though the young prospect — who served primarily as a DH while with the Rangers in 2005, in deference to Teixeira’s entrenched position at first — was open to playing the outfield, most in the industry expected that Texas would be forced to trade him.

And to a degree, they were right. The Rangers concluded that his greatest value to them was likely as a trade chip.

“I know that at the time, when Mark Teixeira was here, it led to a lot of clubs making an assumption that we would trade him, that we wouldn’t be able to keep both of them. We did get some inquiries on him [prior to the San Diego trade,” said Daniels. “We didn’t obviously project him to be the superstar that he’s become. Clearly, had we known that, we would have found a way to make it work. But we thought he was going to be a good player. At a young age, he was always a guy we thought would hit. The question was how much power. He’s matured into one of the better power hitters in the game, clearly.” Read the rest of this entry »