The Texas Rangers' Young GM

In the average Major League clubhouse, where thick-armed, barrel-chested men curse and fart with equal aplomb, there is little room for conventional dorkiness. The majority of ballplayers are, after all, the guys who ruled high school, who cruised the hallways with caps backward and skipped class without punishment, who were anointed prom king by 9 p.m. and getting laid two hours later. They are not Jon Daniels.

The 30-year-old general manager of the Texas Rangers, Daniels is 5-foot-11 and built like a ballpoint pen. His awkward grin suggests neither confidence nor worldliness. When he spits -- as baseball people tend to do -- the saliva dribbles from his mouth, less cool than, well, embarrassing. Though he has the power to trade $8 million-per-year All-Stars and determine the fate of a manager, Ron Washington, who has devoted 37 years to the pro game, Daniels last played organized baseball in eighth grade, when he was a Little League catcher in Queens, New York. The next year, he tried out for the freshman team at Manhattan's academically elite Hunter College High School and got cut. His personal scouting report: "I could throw, and I wasn't afraid to take a beating. But I couldn't hit for shit."

No matter. Today, he's a leader of an unprecedented Major League trend. In an age when individual franchises are valued as high as $1.2 billion (the estimated worth of the 2008 New York Yankees), geeky, stats-loving, post-Moneyball general managers like Daniels are being charged with overseeing teams' baseball operations -- and they're changing the game. Of the last 10 GMs hired, 6 have been age 40 or under. Not one has played a single pro inning.

Young Jon was raised worshipping at the altar of Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, and the '86 New York Mets. But it was never a boyhood goal to run a baseball team. "I just couldn't see how someone with no baseball ability -- me -- could wind up heading an organization," he says. "No way in hell." Indeed, upon graduating from Cornell with a degree in applied economics and management, Daniels went to work for Allied Domecq, the parent company of Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts. He was placed in the department assigned to synergize the two brands. Salary: $40,000. "It was," he says, "not especially fun."

At the same time, Daniels's college roommate, a nonathlete named A.J. Preller, was making peanuts serving as an intern with the Philadelphia Phillies. Yet while Daniels was miserable, Preller was living his dream, sitting in on scouting meetings and seeing the innards of a major-league organization. Soon enough, Daniels was tagging along to ball games, hoping Preller's good fortune might rub off on him. In April 2001, Josh Byrnes, then an assistant GM with the Colorado Rockies, offered Daniels a six-month internship. It paid $275 per week. "I had to take it," Daniels says. "Absolutely had to. Because I was learning early on that money definitely doesn't equal fulfillment."

When the internship ended, Daniels -- knowing how hard it is to land a plum baseball gig -- planned to move to California and find yet another dull corporate job. Just before his departure, he interviewed with the Rangers, who needed a baseball-operations assistant to veteran GM John Hart. "I was immediately impressed," says Hart, now one of Daniels's advisers. "He was a guy who knew the game and clearly had a high ceiling."

Hart was right. In October 2005, a mere three years after Daniels accepted a salary of $30,000 to work for the Rangers, owner Tom Hicks named him to succeed Hart, who was retiring after four seasons. At 28 years and 41 days, Daniels became the youngest general manager in baseball history. (He's still the youngest in MLB.)

Though the local media initially mocked Daniels as Hart's caddie (one newspaper dubbed him "Boy Blunder"), he proved to be anything but. Long respected by peers as a sound baseball man, Hart was, in fact, an antiquated, paint-by-numbers GM who surrounded himself with good people but too often listened to none of them. His greatest misses included acquiring John Rocker, trading the talented Travis Hafner to Cleveland for a bag of nobodies, and hiring Buck Showalter -- an overbearing taskmaster -- as his manager. While Daniels has conducted his share of questionable trades -- and the Rangers were hovering, at press time, around .500 -- he is, in the words of Don Welke, the Rangers' senior director of baseball operations, "helping revolutionize the role of a general manager."