Chris Young deserves all the blame for Rangers pitching meltdown delivering another playoff-less year

There's plenty of blame to go around as the Texas Rangers came up short and missed out on the postseason for the third year in a row. Ultimately, however, the buck stops with the guy making the personnel decisions and putting together the roster. For the Rangers, that guy is president of baseball operations Chris Young.

Some will rightly point out that he is hamstrung by the frugality of Ray Davis and his ownership group. Still, you have to look at who Young brought into the fold this year and whether they helped or hurt the team's playoff aspirations. His big offseason acquisition, MacKenzie Gore, was a major disappointment, and his trade deadline get, Chase Silseth, wasn't up to the task when the rubber hit the road.

Chris Young's major acquisitions hurt the Rangers' chances of making the postseason, and he needs to answer for it

Young took five of the team's most promising farmhands and shipped them to the Nationals to acquire Gore. He's got a live, electric arm, but outside one solid stretch in the first half of 2025 that got him an All-Star nod, he's been overwhelmingly mediocre to poor. When the Rangers needed him to step up and deliver in a big moment, he provided more of the same, which was inconsistency and the inability to navigate his way through traffic.

In the must-win finale, he gave up a run in 2.1 innings and didn't register a single strikeout. For the season, Gore finished with a substandard 4.58 ERA, 1.34 WHIP, and a disappointing 1,0 bWAR. The 4.58 mark is the worst of his career. The bottom line is that Young, skipper Skip Schumaker, and the Rangers fanbase never knew what they were going to get from Gore, but could be fairly certain that it wasn't going to be 7 scoreless,6 innings of allowing 1 or 2 runs, or even a quality start.

After Gore was pulled after just 25 pitches, he was replaced by Young's trade deadline prize, Silseth, who immediately gave up a two-run jack to Twins slugger Josh Bell. It would put the Rangers down 3-1 and prove to be the difference, as he was tagged with the loss.

No matter how you slice it, Silseth was a disaster for the Rangers. He registered a 5.31 ERA over 20.1 innings with a 1.67 WHIP and a -0.2 bWAR. He also walked 13 batters. It would be a small miracle if he were back with the team next year.

Even though the Rangers' loss ended up being moot as the Astros were manhandling the lowly A's to win the division, Sunday was a microcosm of how Young's season went south in just three innings pitched as his two big additions to the team flamed out when it mattered most.

The bottom line is that after years of trying to compete, Texas's farm system was dangerously low on talent, and Young decided to take most of the chips that remained and turn them into Gore. Then, at the trade deadline, rather than pick a direction and either definitively buy or sell, he sat on the fence and made Silseth, a player without much of a track record and whose biggest attribute was team control, his centerpiece. The fact that the pair were at the center of the biggest game of the year is pure baseball irony.

For Young and the fanbase, the result is yet another season of an average-to-below-average product on the field that won't be playing any baseball in October. The grace period from the unlikely 2023 World Series run is officially over, and someone needs to answer for why the Rangers keep coming up short. Fair or not, that person is the man at the top. Sunday's season finale was just the perfect storm of questionable decisions made over the winter and at the deadline.

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