Grant: Jeff Banister 'took all the clichés off the T-shirts' to turn Rangers around and win AL Manager of the Year

The rotation was altered. The lineup: transient, at best. The bullpen was completely overhauled.

Only two things remained constant: The manager and his message.

The Baseball Writers Association of America on Tuesday awarded Jeff Banister the AL Manager of the Year award. The Rangers' rookie manager immediately called it an “organizational award.” The general  manager, while acknowledging contributions from around the organization, said the day was all about Banister.

Banister received 17 of the 30 first-place votes and was named on all but two of the ballots to beat Houston’s A.J. Hinch by a 112-82 score. It made him the fifth ever rookie manager to win the award and the first Ranger to win it since Buck Showalter in 2004.

Banister oversaw a 21-game turnaround for the Rangers from 2014’s 67 wins. It was the biggest jump in the AL this season.

Those are all details.

In a broader sense, though, you could say the award was really as much about the message - the ubiquitous “Never, ever quit” - as it was the man. The man had to grow as his first season unfolded and had to find different ways to get the message across, but the message always stayed the same.

“I think we took all the clichés off the T-shirts and brought them to life,” Banister said Tuesday. “There were plenty of times where it would have been easy to jump off the message and change course. But when everybody outside of the clubhouse didn’t believe, those guys did. We had the same message over and over. And we were relentless with that.”

It would have been easy to quit in April after Yu Darvish was lost for the season, Derek Holland was lost for five months and the Rangers crawled out to an AL-worst 8-16 start. They didn’t.

It would have been easy to quit at the All-Star break after the Rangers lost seven of eight games and lost almost all of the ground they’d slowly made up through May and June. They didn’t.

It would have been easy to quit after blowing a five-run first-inning lead against the New York Yankees three days before the trade deadline in an ugly 21-5 loss to the New York Yankees to push them eight games back in the AL West and five games back in the wild card race - with five teams between then. They didn’t.

From that day forward, the Rangers went 41-22 to post the second-best record in the AL and jumped over two teams in the AL West to capture the division.

And he did it all with a team that had lost 95 games in 2014.

“Coming off last year, if we had another bad season, then 2014 is not a fluke anymore,” general manager Jon Daniels said. “Then it’s a pattern, a direction and we’ve got issues. I think the way Jeff took on the challenge with the slow start, with the risk of that ‘here we go again mentality,’ seeping in and that he didn’t deviate from what he said he was going to do, that was impressive.

“This was a reflection on everything the organization did, but it’s his reward,” Daniels added. “This day was is about him. This is a hard job and he never backed down from the challenges.”

You could say, he never, ever quit.

But it might be more of a compliment to say his team never did.

Twitter @Evan_P_Grant