Rangers’ Chris Young lauds ‘adjustments’ Jung, Duran have made in 2026

The Texas Rangers are on a roll.

They’ve won seven of their last nine games and are hitting the road this week for road series in Kansas City and Boston. President of baseball operations Chris Young joined GBAG Nation on 105.3 The Fan (KRLD-FM) and discussed the recent hot stretch for Texas, the status of Corey Seager’s back, Josh Jung and Ezequiel Duran’s respective All-Star cases, Josh Smith’s role with the team and more.

See the highlights of the interview below, edited lightly for clarity.

The team is playing some good baseball right now, what are you most impressed with here over the last three series?

Chris Young: Well, just overall winning series, obviously we dug ourselves a little bit of a hole there, got to six games under .500 and we’ve clawed our way back close to .500, but we’re not where we want to be yet. We still have a ways to go, but it is nice to see us playing better baseball, winning consecutive series in a row, and I think most importantly, from a health standpoint, having the majority of our guys healthy. It’s really one of the first times this year that I think we’ve had our full team out there. We did get a little bit of a blow this weekend, losing Danny Jansen, but we do expect him back, but getting Wyatt [Langford] and Corey [Seager] back this weekend was huge for us, and you obviously saw the contributions those guys made over the weekend and helped us win a series against a good Cleveland team. So we’ve got to build on it, we’ve got to keep going, continuing to play our game, and hopefully stay healthy and see where this takes us.

How is Corey Seager feeling after his first couple of games back?

Young: Corey is doing well. Yesterday was a scheduled off day for him, and actually I was really proud to see the guys come out and win a game pretty easily. Of course, it helps having Jacob deGrom on the mound, but the guys came out and swung it. We got a huge home run early from Justin Foscue that set the tone, and the guys continued to add on, and really was nice seeing those guys do that, different group of guys stepping up and helping us win the game when Corey was out, and that’s what good teams do. We’ve got to find ways to give him off days over the course of the season. We can’t depend on him being in the lineup every single day, or else we’ll run him into the ground. So him having a scheduled off day yesterday, he’s feeling great, with yesterday off and today off, it’ll be two off days in a row for him. He should be good to go this week, and Skip [Schumaker] will do a great job of monitoring how he’s feeling and finding another day to get him off his feet sometime later in the week.

Starting the All-Star pitch this year for Josh Jung and Ezequiel Duran, what’s stood out about both of them for you at this point in the season?

Young: Just the level of consistency, the approach from both of them. They both made real adjustments. I mean, we saw last year how they both struggled, and we were alarmed to some degree. And to see them come back this year, they had great offseasons, and they’ve worked really, really hard. They’ve made adjustments, and they’re just having consistent professional at-bats, and that’s what the best hitters in the game do, is they go up, and they’re going to have their days where they go 0-for-4, but you see them bounce back, and you see them make adjustments, and you see them understand how the league is pitching them, how opponents are pitching them, and they make adjustments. Those guys have been huge for us, and actually it gives me real optimism seeing the performance of those two to go with Joc Pederson, Brandon Nimmo, and now we’ve got Corey and Wyatt back, so when you put that group together, those are some guys having pretty good years, and when we get the normal performance from Corey and Wyatt to go with [Jung] and [Duran] and Nimmo and Joc, it’s exciting to think that this offense could continue to get better and better, and that’s my hope for this group, because I do believe they’re talented, and my hope is the best is yet to come for all these guys.

READ MORE: 5 things we learned about the Rangers last week: Ezequiel Duran is ‘The Solution’ in Texas

Who else is due for some positive regression to the mean after some disappointing results?

Young: Well, I think one that’s on the IL right now that we really need is Josh Smith. It’s a player that can really move around the field, play multiple positions. From an R&D standpoint, we really like some of the projections on him. And last year, the second half was a rough second half. He had a very good first half, fell off in the second half, did not get off to a great start this year. We were starting to see some positive signs right before he got hurt, but you add another left-handed bat in our lineup that can have a quality approach that can really wear down an opposing pitcher. He can go up and just really not chase, and I think that’s something that would fit well in our lineup, if Josh can get healthy and kind of get back to his normal performance, so that’s one that we’re really counting on and excited about. Jake Burger is a streaky hitter. We know that he’ll have two weeks where he’s on fire and then two weeks where maybe he cools off a little bit, and we kind of got to ride the highs and find ways to maybe get him some time off his feet to make sure those little lulls don’t last too long, but Justin Focsue’s done a really good job of stepping up. He’s been crushing left-handed pitching, and so we’re slowly putting together a group of guys that I feel like collectively kind of complement each other, and my hope is that the run production continues in a positive manner when all these guys are healthy and playing together.

You’ve had to make some difficult roster decisions lately and Alejandro Osuna is an energetic player. With him trying out first base in the minors, is that a guy that you look at to help at first base when Burger maybe is in a little bit of a slump?

Young: Yes, that is something we’re looking at. And really, these were very difficult decisions with both Alejandro Osuna and Cody Freeman. They’re two guys that we love. They’ve both been developed internally, they’ve been Rangers since the day they signed, and we just think they’re really important pieces to not only this year’s team, but the future, and it’s a hard thing for a young player to be on the bench and not get much playing time, and then you put them in there once, twice a week, and expect him to perform, and that was really part of our thought process with both these guys, as we sent them down, we love who they are and what they embody, the fight, the determination, the teammates they are, but we also need them to get playing time, and so we weren’t going to have the at-bats for both those guys this week. It may change in a week. We’re facing three lefties in Boston this weekend, so Osuna was not going to see much playing time. Next week that may be different. We may have a string of right-handed pitchers, at which point we recall him. So he and Cody are going to be back, but we love who they are, and the way they fight, and kind of the connection to the fan base. I think our fans love those guys, and we understand that, but we also don’t want to hinder their development or cool them off by sitting them for long stretches at a time. But yeah, Osuna will see time at first base, and there may be moments where he’s the better matchup than Burger against a tough right-handed pitcher, and he gives us a better option.

What adjustments would you like to see Jack Leiter make, particularly as it pertains to that fifth inning?

Young: Yeah it’s funny because I try not to read too much into any one inning, and as a former pitcher, I never thought about which inning it is, and probably wasn’t cognizant of the innings in which I had higher ERAs or lower ERAs. That said, there is something to mid-game, whether it’s a focus, I don’t think it’s a stuff issue. I think his stuff is still really good, but is there something that’s happening that causes him to lose his rhythm or his inability to execute pitches? Is it the other team adjusting over the course of the game and us not staying in front of that and adjusting ahead of them? There is something here that we need to get on top of, and so I think that’s a priority for our pitching coaches and for Jack, and I think it’s just really bearing down and focusing in those innings and having kind of a killer instinct. Jack is so talented, and the second half he had last season, we’ve seen little pockets of it this season, but we haven’t seen the consistent level of performance that we know Jack is capable of. I certainly know he’s not satisfied, and I am looking forward to him getting on a roll here, because I do believe that he gets going, he can run off eight, 10, 12 starts in a row where he’s close to dominant, just like we saw last season. So we’ve got to help him figure this out. Is it a pitch usage? Is it the quality of the pitches? Is it just the other team adjusting? Is it location? There’s a number of reasons that could be causing these mid-game, not going to call it a meltdown, but just the runs that are being produced against him mid-game, and if we can help him get through that, he may end up going six or seven innings per start. So we’ve got to find a solution here, but our pitching coaches are on it, Jack’s on it, and hopefully next time out we’ll see a better performance.