The Texas Rangers made Mike Maddux an offer he couldn't refuse:

Melvin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last night that Texas has "overwhelmed [Maddux] with a huge deal" that dwarfed the multi-year contract the Brewers had offered him, and that Maddux couldn't afford to turn the Rangers down. No terms were even guessed at in the story, but Melvin said "he's probably going to be one of the top-paid pitching coaches" in baseball.

Why was Mike offered such a lucrative contract? He's a known quantity to the Rangers:

The younger* brother of future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux, Mike pitched the final game of his 15-year big league career on July 4, 2000, pitching the sixth and seventh innings of a 10-4 Astros loss to Arizona (for whom rookie Vicente Padilla pitched the eighth). Houston released him the next day. He retired a week after that.

And then came a move that probably led to this day. Maddux had barely cleared his Houston locker out when he agreed to take a job as the pitching coach for the organization's AA affiliate, the Round Rock Express.

Which was owned by Nolan Ryan.

And managed by Jackie Moore.

*This is a mistake. Mike Maddux is older than Greg.

The story also points out a number of Rangers pitchers who moved to Milwaukee and florished.

I assume that Maddux is on board with Ryan's vision of how to rework the Rangers pitchers from the ground up. Certainly, the use of CC Sabathia in Milwaukee shows that Mike isn't married to pitch counts.

The Texas Rangers might end up being a test bed for different ideas in how pitchers are developed and used. I don't know if Nolan Ryan is correct. Baseball strategy, both on the field and in player recruitment and development evolves over time, and mostly in the right direction. Ryan is betting that the evolution of how pitchers are used went wrong at some point. If Nolan is right, will he be able to pull the rest of the majors back to his way of doing things?