Ex-mayor Tom Vandergriff recounts 13-year effort to bring baseball team to Texas

Editor’s Note: This story, written by Sam Blair, was originally published in the Dallas Morning News.

 

Twenty-three years ago, Arlington Mayor Tom Vandergriff came home from a long swing through 12 American League baseball training camps, glowing from something besides a great suntan.

He felt strongly that North Texas soon would have a major league baseball franchise. It took little more than a year to reach that goal. On April 21, 1972, the Texas Rangers played their first game in Arlington Stadium, a minor league facility expanded to 35,694 seats in just six months.

On Monday night, the Rangers will open their 20th season against the Milwaukee Brewers. Pursuing the dream was nothing new for Mr. Vandergriff. When he began to seek a team in 1958, he was 32 years old and still known as the “boy mayor” of Arlington, an office to which he first was elected in 1951. By 1971, he was nearing middle age.

But he never had been so excited about his mission.

“I knew we were closer to landing a club than ever before,” said Mr. Vandergriff, 68, now Tarrant County judge.

“In the winter of 1970, I had learned that Bob Short, the owner of the Washington Senators, was feeling more pressure to move the club. The American League required approval by three-fourths of the club owners to move a franchise. So that spring, I went to every American League camp.

“That was the place you could crack the brass.”

At each stop, Mr. Vandergriff knew he must make the best possible pitch for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In his articulate, low-key manner and resonant baritone voice, he delivered beautifully.

It was sweet satisfaction that he did so much better pitching for his “neighborhood team” than he had at his alma mater, the University of Southern California. “I once gave up the longest home run in school history,” he said.

In the spring of ’71, Mr. Vandergriff pursued his goal with a quiet confidence because of two conversations a few months earlier. The first was with Cleveland Indians president Gabe Paul, the second with California Angels owner Gene Autry, a native of Tioga in Grayson County who had made a fortune as a singing cowboy in Western movies and later in broadcasting and hotels.

“I went to Cleveland to see Gabe Paul on a blasted cold winter day, and he was the first to tell me, ‘Go for Washington,’” Mr. Vandergriff said, “He also told me, ‘Don’t tell Bob Short I told you. He doesn’t want to leave Washington, and you’ll run into opposition from him.’”

Mr. Vandergriff knew he must proceed quietly and carefully. There also were people in high places who believed that the nation’s capital must always have a major league baseball team. One was then-baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who as a schoolboy had hung numbers on the old scoreboard at Senators games in Griffith Stadium. The other was President Richard Nixon.

But the Arlington mayor, son of pioneer North Texas auto dealer Hooker Vandergriff, knew it was time to shift into overdrive and move fast after talking to Mr. Autry.

“He told me, as a fellow Texan, that other American League owners wanted to move the Senators, Short was having financial trouble. His team was drawing poorly in Washington, and all the other clubs lost money playing there. If the Senators had to move, Autry wanted to see the club in North Texas.”

As a club owner with a history of hard times and financial stress, Mr. Short was aptly named. Yet he was not eager to reach for the life preserver offered by moving the Senators to a new market, although he once had prospered from such a move in the National Basketball Association.

Mr. Short was an attorney who graduated from Georgetown University in Washington and later became a key figure in the Democratic Party in the 1950s. He also became a force in the then-struggling NBA when he bought control of his hometown Minneapolis Lakers. They were a good team with a bad box office. In 1961, he bought up the stock of his partners for roughly $300,000 and moved the franchise to Los Angeles.

The Lakers became immediately successful, but Mr. Short, who seemed forever stretched thin by other business enterprises such as trucking and hotels, never became a famous face among the beautiful people of Los Angeles. He operated the club by long-distance telephone and told employees on the scene to trim expenses to the bone. In the spring of 1965, he sold the Lakers to Jack Kent Cooke for $5,175,000 and was believed to have made a profit of $3.5 million from the deal. This was before the era of high-dollar franchise deals. In 1960, Clint Murchison Jr. paid $600,000 for an expansion NFL franchise that became the Dallas Cowboys.

His Los Angeles bonanza enabled Mr. Short to buy control in December 1968 of the Washington Senators. This was an expansion franchise launched in 1961 when the previous Senators moved to Minnesota and became the Twins. Mr. Short was enamored of Washington, the city of his youth and a place where he yearned to move easily with people of power and position. In January 1969, he hired as his manager the legendary Ted Williams, who in 1941 with the Boston Red Sox was the last major leaguer to hit better than .400 for a season.

Mr. Short wanted to become the showy savior of baseball in the capital and along the way build some political ties that might help him down the line. Alas, even with Mr. Williams at the helm, the lowly Senators remained the box-office equivalent of a .175 hitter.

By summer 1971, financially strapped and having failed to sell the Senators to Washington interests, Mr. Short realized that he must look seriously at moving to the Dallas area and Arlington’s little Turnpike Stadium. By then, he had become friendly with Mr. Vandergriff, whom he had met through mutual ties in the Democratic Party. Mr. Vandergriff at that point had developed strong support among other AL owners.

But it wasn’t unanimous.

“We had arranged for a consortium of banks in Dallas and Fort Worth to give Short the financing he needed to move, and eventually we neutralized the opposition of Kuhn and Nixon,” Mr. Vandergriff said. “But as we got closer to a special league meeting in Boston in September to vote on the move, Jerry Hoffberger of the Baltimore Orioles and Arthur Allyn of the Chicago White Sox remained strongly opposed. Hoffberger owned a brewery and sold too much beer in Washington to support the Senators leaving. I still don’t know why Allyn was against us. Still, we thought we had 10 to 12 clubs supporting us, and only nine were needed.”

One supporter was missing, however, when AL president Joe Cronin convened the owners for the special meeting at the Boston Sheraton on September 20, 1971, Mr. Autry had taken ill after arriving in Boston and was in a local hospital.

As the owners went behind closed doors, Mr. Vandergriff and the Dallas-Fort Worth alliance still felt confident of nine positive votes. But Oakland A’s owner Charles O. Finley, who a few years earlier had been denied permission to move his club from Kansas City to Arlington but later was allowed to transfer it to Oakland, made a surprise play.

“Finley told Short he would trade his vote for Jeff Burroughs, the best young player in the Senators’ organization,” Mr. Vandergriff said. “Short knew he had very few good players to bring to Texas, and he wasn’t going to give up his best young talent. He told Finley no.”

So each time Mr. Cronin took a vote, it remained eight for, two against, and two abstentions — Mr. Finley and Mr. Autry.

“When it was obvious Finley would hold out, Cronin took the initiative,” Mr. Vandergriff said. “He went to the hospital to see Autry, who signed a proxy allowing Cronin to count his vote for us. Once Finley realized it was settled without him, he voted for us, too, and it was 10-2. When I saw him afterward, he smiled and shook my hand. ‘Oh, I’m so happy!’ he said.”

Mr. Vandergriff was more than happy, he was ecstatic. As Howard Green, the Tarrant County judge of that era, expressed it, “For 13 years, Tom experienced a splendid misery.”

The long campaign began in 1958, with Mr. Vandergriff’s election as chairman of the new Bi-County Sports Commission. It was organized at the urging of sports editors Flem Hall of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Bill Rives of the Dallas Morning News, who believed that Dallas and Fort Worth leaders must rise above their perennial business and political rivalries and unite to seek a major league baseball franchise. Mr. Vandergriff was elected chairman because he had both political and baseball savvy and came from a little town with no ax to grind.

Years passed, mayors came and went in Dallas and Fort Worth, as did other commission members. Some people got discouraged and dropped out. The area was passed over in expansion by both the American and National leagues and missed out on earlier franchise moves from Kansas City and Seattle.

With the support and encouragement of Mr. Green, Mr. Vandergriff arranged for the city of Arlington to purchase Turnpike Stadium from Tarrant County, whose votes in 1964 had approved bonds for a 10,000-seat stadium that could be expanded to major league proportions when the time was right. Through the years, Mr. Vandergriff expanded his contacts and support through baseball.

The club’s ownership had changed three times since Mr. Short, who died in 1981, moved the franchise to Arlington. The club was sold to the Brad Corbett group in May 1974, to Eddie Chiles in April 1980, and to the George W. Bush-Rusty Rose group in April 1989. In 1977, after 26 years as an Arlington mayor, Mr. Vandergriff left office and concentrated on family business enterprises for a few years. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1982, served one two-year term, then returned to business in Arlington again. In 1990, after switching to the Republican Party, Mr. Vandergriff was elected Tarrant County judge.

Through all the changes, his love for the Rangers has remained constant. So on opening night, as always, he will be there smiling, ready for the first pitch.