When you spend as wildly and aggressively as the Texas Rangers did this offseason, there are expectations for immediate contention – even if the spending was improvident, and the idea of competing unrealistic.
The Rangers, 12 games under .500 and 9.5 games behind the last Wild Card spot, decided to pull at least one plug:
Woodward has been the Rangers’ manager since 2019, and was signed through the 2023 season (with a club option for 2024). The team has more or less been terrible for the entirety of his stint, which isn’t to place all the blame on him, of course. But once you get up into that 4+ year range and the results haven’t shown, managers tend not to last much longer than that, fair or not.
The season has not been kind to managers, with four managers now having been fired in-season (Woodward, Joe Maddon, Joe Girardi and Charlie Montoyo).
UPDATE: Statement from the club: