Hot Stove Daily: Texas Rangers

Now, about that gold mine.

For all of the flak general manager Jon Daniels has caught over some boneheaded trades – he’ll never live down the Adrian Gonzalez-and-Chris Young-for-a-yearlong-membership-to-Costco swap, and the John Danks-for-Brandon McCarthy deal is fast approaching that – he has pulled some nice swindles himself.

The Mark Teixeira deadline deal to Atlanta two years ago may be the latter half of the decade’s version of Bartolo Colon for Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee and Brandon Phillips. For Teixeira and reliever Ron Mahay, Daniels got Saltalamacchia, Matt Harrison (the Rangers’ No. 3 starter), shortstop prospect Elvis Andrus (starring at Double-A before his 20th birthday) and Neftali Feliz, considered one of the 10 best pitching prospects in the game.

Then there’s Derek Holland, a left-hander who came out of nowhere and could be up midseason, and Michael Main, a former first-rounder with frontline potential, and all sorts of other tantalizing pitchers from Latin America, and, well, it’s all so exciting until you remember the whole DVD debacle.

Danks, Edinson Volquez and Thomas Diamond were nicknamed the DVD trio coming up. It wasn’t particularly clever, and it didn’t have any real significance, and it’s not as if their last names comprised some other acronym they’d be branded with that – FBI? CIA? ELO? – but it stuck. And they were supposed to anchor the Rangers’ rotation for years. Until Diamond blew out his arm. And Danks got traded. And Volquez did too (albeit for Hamilton).

Anyway, the lesson is obvious: waiting on prospects – especially ones who pitch – is a backward way of approaching success. Though with the payroll limitations from owner Tom Hicks, it’s a necessity embraced with aplomb by Daniels and his scouts.

The onus, then, is on Ryan. He brought the organization’s top pitching prospects to Arlington for an offseason seminar. He plans on pushing them to throw more complete games. He will not coddle them. Nolan Ryan doesn’t coddle.

He only hopes that gold mine doesn’t turn out to be full of pyrite.