How the Texas Rangers Came to Town

Editor’s Note: This article, written by Jim Reeves, was originally published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

 

Politicians called it modern-day highway robbery. The nation’s capitol mourned as if it had lost a president. Fans wept openly at old RFK Stadium and threatened to lynch Bob Short on the spot.

In North Texas, specifically the Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth corridor along the Turnpike, it was Independence Day all over again. Fireworks lit up the night sky. Fans danced in the streets.

It was September 20, 1971, and Tom Vandergriff’s 13-year, Holy Grail-quest for a major league baseball franchise had finally ended successfully.

Just like that, the Texas Rangers were born.

If this was Hollywood, this is where we’d bring up the Hallelujah Chorus and fade out showing multiple pennants flying over The Ballpark in Arlington. That delightful beginning almost 23 years ago, when Washington Senators owner Bob Short emerged from a 13-hour owners’ meeting in Boston to announce that he had received the necessary votes to move his franchise to Arlington, has yet to be followed by a happy ending. For that we still bide our time.

But for that moment in the fall of ’71, simply getting major league baseball into North Texas was enough. Vandergriff, the man-on-a-mission Arlington mayor, had almost singlehandedly pulled off the impossible and he had done it despite the protestations of a President (the late Richard Nixon), assorted U.S. Senators, and the Honorable Judge Roy
Horeninz, the Houston owner who wanted to keep Texas and its bountiful TV market for himself.

It did not make Vandergriff a popular man in Washington, a fact brought home to him in singular fashion when he was in the city shortly after the announcement that the Senators would be leaving D.C., to take up residence in the wild, wild, West.

Sitting in the backseat of a cab en route to a hotel from the airport, Vandergriff discovered just how unpopular he had become.

“You know anything about this guy Vandergriff?” the cab driver growled when he learned that his customer was from Texas.

Tom conceded that indeed he did and that the man was, in fact, an admirable fellow.

The cabbie proceeded to call the hombre who had stolen the Senators the lowest snake in the grass that had ever crawled. And that was one of the nicer things he said.

Vandergriff chuckled and chatted and finally, against his better judgment, told the driver who he was. And wound up being dumped, bag and baggage, at the nearest corner.

The Rangers, over the years, have experienced the same feeling.

Perhaps the Rangers inherited too much from their forefathers in Washington. The Senators, we were often told in the post-World War II years, were always first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.

The Rangers refined that saying somewhat, particularly in their first two seasons in Texas. They weren’t first in war. They weren’t first in peace. But they were definitely last in the American League West.

Moving into a revamped minor league ballpark, the name was changed from Turnpike Stadium to Arlington Stadium though fans would have named it Vandergriff if he would have let them, did not bring the Rangers good fortune — or, for that matter, many fans those first two seasons. The novelty of major league baseball quickly wore off as North Texas fans — only 662,974 the first year — watched Frank Howard and a ramshackle band of basically expansion players win just 54 games and lose 100. Ted Ford led the team with 14 home runs. Its winningest pitcher, Rich Hand, went 10-14. Ugh.

Short, wringing his hands and wondering if he’d made a drastic mistake (the break-even attendance count for the team that first season was 800,000), looked toward a better 1973.

Guess again. Ted Williams, the team’s legendary manager and sole link with respectability, quit after the ’72 season. Under Whitey Herzog, who brought in a long-term plan he believed would turn the franchise around, the Rangers lost a whopping 105 games, a record that still stands.

The Rangers drew just 686,085 but 218,240 of those fans came out to see a teenage wonder named David Clyde, who would make a dozen starts at Arlington Stadium, six of them in from of more than 21,000 fans, including the team’s first-ever sellout for his debut on June 27, 1973.

Clyde, facing a Minnesota Twins team that included Rod Carew and Tony Oliva, was just 18 and still fresh from Houston’s Westchester High School when he took the mound in front of 35,698 buzzing fans that hot June afternoon in ’73. Ten thousand more were turned away at the gates.

Nervous, Clyde walked the first two batters he faced, then struck out the side. The fans roared their approval.

There are those who say Clyde saved the franchise. Maybe he did, but at serious cost to himself. He never gained the success predicted for him and many thought it was because he couldn’t handle the major league fast lane at such a young age.

Even with Clyde averaging over 18,000 fans per start, Short was still losing money. Desperate, he fired Herzog on September 7, 1973. Why? Because suddenly Billy Martin was available.

“If my mother were managing the Rangers and I had the opportunity to hire Billy Martin, I’d fire my mother,” Short said at the time.

Ironically, it was one of the last major decisions he would make as the Rangers’ owner. In April, before the 1974 season opener, he sold the club to a Dallas-Fort Worth group headed by plastic pipe entrepreneur Brad Corbett. Under Corbett and Martin, a new era of Rangers baseball was about to begin.

The Rangers became legit in ’74. An off-season trade had sent minor league hitting whiz Bill Madlock, who would win four National League batting titles, to the Cubs for pitcher Ferguson Jenkins. Jenkins supplied the Rangers with what they needed most — veteran leadership for the pitching staff. At the same time, Jeff Burroughs was blossoming into a talented young slugger and Martin boldly opened the season with rookies behind the plate (Jim Sundberg) and at first base (Mike Hargrove).

Jenkins would win a remarkable 25 games. Burroughs would win the MVP award. Sundberg would prove to be the best defensive catcher in the game (he won six Gold Gloves) and Hargrove was the league’s rookie of the year. The Rangers, however, known as Billy Martin’s Turn-Around Gang, gave the Oakland A’s a run for their money, finishing just five games out and in second place with an 84-76 record.

For the first time attendance cracked the million mark with 1,193,902 fans pouring through the turnstiles. Corbett was ecstatic and willing to gamble. Early in the ’75 season he traded three players for Cleveland icon Gaylord Perry. In an age when baseball’s average salary was less than $45,000, Corbett was paying his top two pitchers, Jenkins and Perry, a combined $335,000.

Money, Corbett soon learned, wouldn’t buy a pennant, no matter how much he borrowed and spent. Nor, over the next five years, could he wheel and deal for one either, though he certainly tried. Finally, his own funds exhausted and his plastic pipe business failing, Corbett persuaded longtime friend and Fort Worth businessman Eddie Chiles to buy out his controlling interest in the Rangers. The deal was consummated in the spring of 1980.

Chiles, who had made his name and fortune in the oilfields of west Texas, also found frustration in baseball. He couldn’t just whip it into shape, as he had The Western Company of North America. He couldn’t fire star players when they failed to perform up to expectations. He couldn’t even get Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to follow his orders and end the strike of 1981, though he flew to New York and faced Kuhn in his Park Avenue office with that mission in mind.

Still, Chiles, who died last year, fought on as Rangers’ owner until the oil business hit hard times and his own personal fortune began disappearing. Chiles gave up on baseball in the winter of 1989, selling the club to an investor group led by George W. Bush, son of the president, and Edward W. “Rusty” Rose.

A succession of managers had followed Martin, who was fired at mid-season 1975. Frank Lucchesi, Eddie Stanky (one day), Billy Hunter, Pat Corrales, Don Zimmer, Doug Rader, Bobby Valentine, Toby Harrah, and current manager Kevin Kennedy. Each had some measure of success. None has yet delivered a pennant to North Texas.

Star players have come through, too. The roster includes Jenkins, Burroughs, Sundberg, Hargrove, Perry, Harrah, Bert Blyleven, Bobby Bonds, Willie Horton, Sparky Lyle, Richie Zisk, Al Oliver, Jon Matlack, Buddy Bell, Mickey Rivers, Larry Parrish, Jim Kern, Jeff Russell, Nolan Ryan, Rafael Palmeiro, and current stars Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, Will Clark, Dean Palmer, and Tom Henke.

Arlington Stadium has been replaced by The Ballpark at Arlington, perhaps the finest baseball facility in the world. The Rangers are in a new, leaner American League West. The time is ripe for the team’s first title ever.

North Texas fans, who have supported the team since its arrival in 1972, can’t wait. It has been a long time between celebrations.