Chris Almendarez

What we talked about

A pharmaceutical rep, a Little League field, and a phone call on I-35

He got into baseball through youth sports. His sons played Little League on the fields behind Dell Diamond, and coaching put him next to Reid Ryan, whose son was about the same age. The families became friends. He was a pharmaceutical rep at the time, and when his company started downsizing and the next move was to New Jersey, he sent an email, took a severance package, and asked for a job in baseball instead.

The decision came down to a conversation in the car. He was driving down I-35, talking with his priest, Father Paul, weighing another pharmaceutical offer out of Scottsdale. What he remembers being asked is what he thought he was doing, and being told that it is very rare to get the chance to work in a field you are that passionate about. He calls it one of the best decisions of his life.

Seventeen seasons, eleven as president

He joined the Express in October 2009 as a senior account executive selling corporate partnerships and suites, moved up to assistant general manager and then general manager, and became team president in October 2015. On tape he counts it as his seventeenth season with the club and his eleventh as president.

He makes an argument for that route. He had already been a season ticket member and had entertained clients in the suites, so he knew the building as a fan before he sold anything in it. His general manager, Tim Jackson, came up the other side of the house, through community relations and marketing, which he thinks is why the two of them fit.

“Best staff in baseball,” and what he means by it

It is his social media hashtag and he uses it as an operating claim rather than a slogan. He names a core group — Tim Jackson, assistant GM Stu Scally, and senior vice president of marketing Laura Fragoso — and describes a front office living homestand to homestand, planning the next one while the team is on the road.

The retention argument underneath it is simple. Recognition, and the sense of belonging to something. He is blunt about the sequence: take care of the staff, and the staff takes care of the people walking through the gate.

The hospitality business that happens to have a ballgame in it

This is the most useful stretch of the episode for anyone outside baseball. The Rangers control the players. The Express controls everything else — the entertainment, the music, the promotions, the concourse, the food, the parking attendant who is the first person a family talks to.

So he does not describe himself as running a baseball team. He says they are in the hospitality business, and that people are coming out for Star Wars night or Princess night or Bluey weekend as much as for the game. He is even willing to say out loud that he could not recap last night’s game inning by inning, because he was not watching it.

Pulling the tarp at eight in the morning

We filmed during a rainy homestand. One group had put the tarp on at eleven the night before; he and others were at the ballpark at eight that morning to pull it off, then folded it back and moved it so the grounds crew could work. He and Tim Jackson each took a tarp team rather than assigning it.

His framing is that this is the job, not a photo opportunity. Same with picking up trash on the concourse during a game, which he describes as the obvious thing to do in your own house.

One word a year, and why this one is “intentional”

He has picked a single word for each year since 2014, a habit he took from author John Gordon, who wrote The Energy Bus and One Word. Instead of a resolution, one word to sit under every decision.

This year’s is intentional, and he applies it in order: his wife Lindsay, his sons, the staff, then the fans. It is the same idea as the hospitality argument, aimed inward.

The Nolan Ryan Foundation and the nightly raffle

The club’s main charitable vehicle is the Nolan Ryan Foundation, which runs a 50/50 raffle at every home game at Dell Diamond. Half the pot goes to the winner and half accumulates across the season, then goes back out through community grants that local nonprofits apply for and a committee reviews.

He points out that the structure is flexible when it needs to be. After the Central Texas floods, they were able to redirect raffle proceeds toward relief rather than wait for the grant cycle.

What baseball actually paid for

He came from a broken home in the Houston area, was a good enough player that his mother pushed the scholarship rather than the big-league dream, and became the first person in his family to go to college on a baseball scholarship. He describes the sport as a vehicle, and means it literally.

There is a coincidence he likes. He was seven when the Astros signed Nolan Ryan, and he says the two of them share a birthday — which is how he frames ending up running Nolan Ryan’s team for Nolan Ryan’s son.

Attitude and effort

Two lines from his coaches have followed him around: take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves, from his junior college coach, and judge yourself on attitude and effort, because in baseball those are the only two things you control.

He applied both to his own kids and now applies them to a front office. His point about the game is that it humbles people — three hits in ten trips makes you a great hitter, and no other sport grades that way.

Twenty-five seasons, and the competition across the street

The club celebrated twenty-five seasons last year and is planning a Fourth of July weekend around America’s 250th. He is candid that Dell Diamond is no longer the only game in town — Kalahari sits across the street, Austin FC is up the road, and the entertainment budget now has to compete with all of it.

His answer is relationships rather than transactions, and his read on why minor league baseball has to work harder at it is sharp: a University of Texas fan paid tuition for that loyalty. The Express has to earn it one person at a time.