Dallas-Fort Worth Baseball Media in 1972

The media market in North Texas was changing in 1972, just as the rest of the country was. With the advent of television, newspapers had felt the pinch as advertising dollars shifted to the new medium. Now, a couple of decades after the arrival of television, newspapers were beginning to fold or merge with others. Instead of multiple outlets, cities were left with just one or two papers to give fans the latest news on their team.

The Markets

In 1972 Dallas and Fort Worth were still very distinct cities, far more so than they are today. The ongoing feud between the two towns was summarized by Amon Carter, owner of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who once said, “Fort Worth is where the West begins, and Dallas is where the East peters out.”1 Relations between the two cities were thawing, though. After decades of bickering, the federal government had finally forced Dallas and Fort Worth into partnership on a new airport. Naturally they had argued about location, so the future Dallas Fort Worth International Airport was under construction midway between the two cities, just north of Arlington.

In media, the two markets – Dallas and Fort Worth – were defined separately by the Federal Communications Commission, although things were changing. The Arbitron ratings company issued separate radio ratings for the two cities until 1973, when they were combined. Radio had figured out that a single market, with central antennas, was much better for ratings and thus how much they could charge advertisers. Television was slowly moving the same way. In the 1950s the town of Cedar Hill had become established as an antenna center for the Dallas-Fort Worth market. South of Arlington and situated on one of the highest points in the Metroplex,2 it was ideally located for broadcasting into both cities. KRLD-TV and WFAA-TV combined to build a 1,500-foot antenna, so their signals could be received over a wide area. A signal broadcast from the downtown area of each city could be received over a much smaller footprint. Over time, numerous other television and radio stations built antennas in the same area, which inevitably led to the markets combining.

The Newspapers

Newspapers, however, were much more parochial, focused on their home areas, which they still do. In 1972 the newspaper market leaders were the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with several other papers taking up smaller but still important roles. Those papers were owned by conglomerates that also owned television and radio stations.

Alfred Belo, owner of the Galveston Daily News, had sent his employee, George Dealey, to Dallas to start the Dallas Morning News in 1885. Dealey ran the business, eventually becoming owner in 1926 of the parent Belo Corporation. The company expanded into radio with WFAA in 1922, and in 1950 started WFAA-TV as the Dallas ABC affiliate. In the 1960s the company bought several suburban newspapers, and thus owned a significant portion of the Dallas media market.

Their major newspaper competitor in Dallas was the Dallas Times Herald, founded in 1888. It had also expanded into other media, buying radio station KRLD in 1926 and television station KRLD-TV in 1949. In 1970 the Times-Mirror corporation, owner of the Los Angeles Times, bought the company, and attempted to compete more aggressively with the Morning News. At that time KRLD-TV was renamed KDFW.

In Fort Worth the Star-Telegram ruled, having been founded in 1909 by a merger between two struggling papers. Owner Amon Carter also moved the company into radio, founding WBAP in 1922, and in 1948 creating WBAP-TV as the first television station in the South. Their biggest newspaper competition was the Fort Worth Press, founded in 1921 as a Scripps-Howard newspaper, but it always struggled against its larger neighbor.

The Texas Rangers

The Rangers arrived in 1972 largely because of an unusual broadcasting deal. To get the Senators to move to Arlington, Mayor Tom Vandergriff agreed that the city would pay owner Bob Short enough money to pay off his debts in Washington. The city did this by buying the Rangers’ broadcasting rights for the first 10 years, at $750,000 per season. The $7.5 million paid up-front to Short ensured that the team would come to Texas, but also that the city would lose a lot of money.

Arlington set up a company to handle broadcasting, and in the first season ended up with a 30-station radio-broadcast network. KRLD in Dallas became the flagship station. It hired Bill Mercer, well-known to locals as the radio announcer for the Dallas Cowboys and the minor-league Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, and former pitcher Don Drysdale, who had spent the previous two seasons broadcasting in Montreal, as the two announcers.

KDFW got the limited television rights, showing just 24 games during the first season. Only five of them were home games, as Short believed that showing home games on television would reduce the attendance at the ballpark. Dick Risenhoover, a longtime broadcaster, was the lead announcer, with Drysdale and Mercer alternating innings in the television booth with him.

The second game played that season was intended as the first telecast of a Rangers game. Due to the players strike at the start of the season, the television people canceled the game coverage and planned other shows. By the time the strike was settled, two days earlier, it was too late to change their plans and show the game. Rangers fans thus missed the opportunity to see the first-ever win for the team, 5-1 over the California Angels.

The Rangers’ first season, 1972, was a terrible one on the field, and there were plenty of struggles off it, too. Arlington had committed to $750,000 a year in radio sales, but fell short, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the balance. In his book Play-by-Play, Mercer blamed a combination of inexperience and poor salesmanship. The inexperience was based on a group of people coming together at the last minute to try to build a major-league broadcast network. Although they all had radio experience, none of them had worked together before. In addition, Mercer claimed that the lead salesman was more interested in having fun on the radio expense account than in actually selling advertising.

These failures led to big changes in 1973. The radio network fell apart, with stations unhappy at the losses. From 30 stations in 1972, the network was down to 16 in 1973. Drysdale moved on, deciding at the end of the 1972 season to take a broadcast job with the Angels. This angered Short, who had expected Drysdale to stay, but Drysdale pointed out that he had a one-year contract and it had ended. Risenhoover moved into the radio booth alongside Mercer, and others came in over the years. Mayor Vandergriff even got involved, spending three years in the booth, paying his own way and not taking a salary, just so the network could try to break even. Broadcasting in North Texas seemed to be as much a cowboy operation as the Rangers were.

On the newspaper scene, each of the papers had its own writers covering the team. For the Dallas Morning News, the lead writer was Merle Heryford, who had covered the minor-league teams in Dallas for decades. He was backed by a young feature writer, Randy Galloway, who occasionally spelled Heryford as the beat writer. Galloway went on to write about the Rangers for years, eventually becoming the premier sportswriter in North Texas, and expanding into radio and television as well. David Fink and Harry Gage were the primary writers for the Dallas Times Herald in 1972.

Harold McKinney and Bob Lindley were the writers for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, while Mike Shropshire and Tommy Love wrote for the Fort Worth Press (Shropshire moved to the Star-Telegram in 1973). Press writers later described how they, as an afternoon paper, had more time to write in-depth articles than the morning Star-Telegram did.

The Future

Ironically, given the animosity between the two cities, they combined in 1974 to buy the Rangers. A group led by Brad Corbett purchased the team from Short. The group contained equal numbers of investors from each side of the Metroplex, and included the son of the founder of the Star-Telegram, Amon Carter Jr., who had just sold his late father’s newspaper (he remained as publisher) and was looking for something to do with the money.

Ultimately, as in much of the country, the battles for media control in the Metroplex would end up in just a few hands. After years of struggling, the Dallas Times Herald ended up losing a circulation war against the Morning News. In 1991 Belo Corporation, owner of the Morning News, bought and closed the Times Herald, leaving the Morning News as the sole major newspaper in Dallas.

The Star-Telegram was bought by Capital Cities Communications, Inc., in 1974. The paper quickly won its citywide battle against the Press, which folded in 1975 after decades of unprofitability. The two major cities were eventually down to one major newspaper each, and both struggled through the long, slow decline of the newspaper industry.

In the meantime, the rise of cable and of sports broadcasting as a staple of programming led to a corresponding rise in television rights fees. In 2015 the Rangers signed a 20-year deal with Fox Sports Southwest for $1.6 billion, or $80 million a year. Essentially, they were receiving about a half-million dollars for every game they played. This was just for local cable rights, and didn’t include national rights fees, or anything from radio.

The Rangers were also being run by savvy financial people by that time. In 2016 the team was talking to the financial markets, looking to sell a billion-dollar bond against that huge rights deal. The aim was to hedge their bets, making sure the team would receive the $80 million a season regardless of what changes might happen over time with the television contract. Who knows what changes might happen in baseball broadcasting in 20 years?

Bob Short thought he’d done a great deal to get $7.5 million in rights fees from Arlington, and to sell the team at a profit. What would he think of the numbers being thrown around today?

STEVE WEST vividly remembers the first time he stepped into the seating bowl at The Ballpark in Arlington, and saw the vast expanse of green grass spread out in front of him. Along with his wife and son, he has been a season ticket holder for many years. He is halfway to his goal of collecting a baseball card of each of the more than 1,000 players who have been Texas Rangers.

 

Sources

Mercer, Bill. Play-by-Play: Tales from a Sports Broadcasting Insider (Latham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2007).

Shea, Stuart. Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2015).

Shropshire, Mike. Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and “The Worst Baseball Team in History” – the 1973-1975 Texas Rangers (New York: Diversion Books, 2014).

 

Notes

1 June Naylor, Insiders’ Guide to Dallas & Fort Worth (Guilford, Connecticut: Morris Book Publishing, 2010), 3.

2 The word “Metroplex,” a term that has both admirers and detractors, was coined by a local adman in the early 1970s. Denoting a metropolitan area that has more than one significant anchor city, it is a squashing-together of the words “metropolitan” and “complex.” Tim Rogers, Texas Monthly, February 2013.