Introduction: The Team That Couldn’t Hit: 1972 Texas Rangers
This article was written by Steve West
This article was published in 1972 Texas Rangers essays
Just how bad were the early Texas Rangers teams? Put it this way: When reporter Mike Shropshire wrote a book about covering the Rangers from 1973 to ’75, he called it Seasons In Hell, and when that book was published, two decades later, the Rangers still hadn’t made the playoffs. Counting the ’60s, the decade that they began as the Washington Senators, the Rangers did not go to the playoffs for the first 35 years of their existence. They threatened, finishing second six times (but never within five games of the division winners). The one time they were in first, the season ended with a strike, and they still had only a 52-62 record.
So why write a book about the 1972 Texas Rangers, perhaps the worst team in club history? Well, it’s because they’re the start of that history. It seems that you can’t swing a bat in the team store at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington without hitting something with 1972 written on it. For a team that has been around a relatively short time, the Rangers certainly like to promote the history of the club, and it all began with this team. Many Rangers fans wear T-shirts with 1972 on them, or have key rings, or pennants, or some other memorabilia. These guys are, for good or bad, legendary. And this book is the story of why.
Perhaps one of the biggest influences on this book is one of the men who have been in the broadcast booth for so many years, Tom Grieve. Grieve was a Washington Senator who came over to Texas, was the longest-serving player from that original team, then became the general manager, before moving into the broadcast booth. Since then he regularly tells stories about the 1972 team, or about the early years, making it yet another point of interest for that first team.
THE 1972 TEXAS RANGERS
It took the vision of one man to get a major-league baseball team in North Texas. Tom Vandergriff, mayor of Arlington, a small town midway between the big cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, had that vision. Hoping to build economic opportunities in his city, he persuaded people to support his plan. It took a lot of Texas guts to pull this off, but by pitting the two big rival cities against each other, he managed to get a team into the little town in the middle.
It took a long time, though, a lot longer than he expected. He spent the 1950s and ’60s trying to lure a team to move, or get an expansion team. He built Turnpike Stadium, a ballpark for the minor-league team that could quickly be converted to major-league status. He almost got Charlie Finley to bring his Kansas City A’s to Texas, but Charlie eventually decided on the West Coast.
Then Vandergriff found his man. Or, maybe, Bob Short found his mark. Short was a veteran of moving sports teams, having taken the NBA’s Lakers from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. Now he’d bought the Washington Senators – the expansion team, not the original, which itself had moved to Minnesota a decade before. Was it Short’s plan all along? Buy a team, run it down, move it, profit? Who knows? He certainly never admitted to something like that. But he did it – twice.
Short complained about everything in Washington. The fans didn’t show up. It was because of the horrible ballpark, or the neighborhood around it. He had a terrible ballpark deal, and couldn’t make any money because of it. His radio and television deals tied his hands. About the only thing he had going for him was the manager, Hall of Famer Ted Williams. Until Vandergriff showed up.
Secret negotiations ensued in the middle of 1971. The Texas people were willing to give Short anything he wanted if he moved the team. They had a ballpark ready. They had broadcast deals ready. And the fans, who came out to see a minor-league team would surely flock to see a major-league one too. All Short had to do was agree to move the team.
And he did. It took some finagling, a few lawsuits, and a lot of complaining from real senators. There was an air of financial shenanigans, too. Baseball wouldn’t let the Senators leave Washington without proving Short was losing money, which was easy, since he cre- ated the books. They wanted him to find local owners to buy the team instead of moving it. He found some, but they couldn’t provide enough guarantees for his liking. Notably, he wanted them to cover all his losses for the last several years – which were largely paper losses anyway.
So baseball voted, and Short was allowed to go. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was sitting there waiting for him. All he had to do was suffer some verbal slings and arrows, along with the indignity of seeing the final game in Washington abandoned when fans invaded the field, and he could cash in. He did, by the way: the city of Arlington paid him upfront for 10 years of broadcasting fees. Not only did that $7.5 million pay off his debts, but it ensured a handsome profit, given that later investigations showed he’d put down almost no money to buy the team in the first place. And he certainly wasn’t going to be around for 10 years to see how much selling the radio and TV rights would hurt the team.
The Senators moved to Arlington for the 1972 season. Rebranding called them the Texas Rangers, after the legendary state law-enforcement group. They embraced the area, using Texas symbols in all their marketing, doing everything but wearing cowboy boots and hats on the field. They did what they could to bring immediate success, but they couldn’t fix one thing: the players. The team was a roster of has-beens and never-weres, with the occasional rough diamond that was either not yet polished or was quickly traded away at any sign of life.
Bad luck hit the team even before it played its first game. The first-ever players strike in the spring of 1972 delayed Opening Day, and all the plans the team had to bring in the crowds for their first game. After a week of the season was lost, instead of the first game being at home, the Rangers opened in California, and didn’t get home until a few days later. But when they did, the pageantry was there, albeit to a much smaller crowd than hoped.
That first-ever Texas Rangers game? You wouldn’t believe it if you read it in a novel. They lost, but they did it impressively. With the Rangers and Angels tied, 0-0, in the bottom of the ninth, Rangers reliever Paul Lindblad threw a bases-loaded walk-off wild pitch – perhaps symbolic of all the bad luck that would follow the team for decades.
When the Rangers came home for their first North Texas series, they swept the Angels in four games. Imagine the excitement in DFW for the first-place Texas Rangers. But they lost the following day and fell to fourth, and reality set in. By early June they hit last place and kept falling. Pretty much everyone quit on the team during the dog days of August, just showing up for the paychecks.
In late August the Rangers started a string in which they lost five, won one, lost four, won one, then lost five again. 2-14, if you’re trying to add it up. Next they won two out of three, so they were up to 4-15. The last of those three was a one-hitter by Bill Gogolewski, who apparently used up all the luck from the baseball gods, because the very next day they started the infamous 15-game losing streak. By the end of the streak they’d completed a 4-30 run, bad enough to make any fan cry. The game to end the losing streak took another Herculean pitching effort: Dick Bosman threw a three-hit shutout to beat the White Sox, 1-0.
Toward the end of the streak the media began to report the rumor that Williams was quitting at the end of the season. The Greatest Hitter That Ever Lived had been driven crazy by this team. With a combined .217 average, they were The Team That Couldn’t Hit, and there was nothing he could do about it. He would rather go fishing than manage them for another year.
Good things did happen during the season. Several game stories in this book tell of some of the better days the team had. In the June amateur draft the Rangers got Jim Sundberg and Mike Hargrove, who would each go on to long careers in the major leagues. Sunny is still around the team, having worked in the front office and in the media for the Rangers. Bobby Jones was around, too, although he was still in the minors. He’d been to Vietnam, where he’d earned a Bronze Star, and came back to play and coach for the Rangers, and spend more than two decades managing in the farm system. He retired in 2016, having spent 45 of his 50 years in baseball in the Rangers organization.
If you want to find a win for Bob Short, take a look at the attendance figures. He brashly predicted a million fans would come out, but he was wildly wrong. In the early part of the season, writers in Washington were quick to point out that compared with the prior season, Rangers fans weren’t showing up as much as Senators fans had. But by the end, Short had the last laugh. Barely. Although they had four fewer home games, the Rangers had 662,974 fans through the turnstiles, 7,818 more than the Senators did the previous year. And Short proved right in the long term. There were just 25,000 more fans in 1973, but in 1974 the Rangers hit almost 1.2 million. The most the expansion Senators ever had was 918,000, while the original Senators passed a million just once. Since 1974 the Rangers have hit at least a million every season, except for the strike year of 1981, when they had 850,000 in just 56 home games. By the 1990s they were regularly hitting 2 million and passed 3 million a couple of times in the 2010s.
The on-field effort helped with attendance, of course. Short sold the team to Brad Corbett in 1974, just a few months after the fifth anniversary of his buying it. (This was not a coincidence: It was the most favorable tax window to sell, and may have been his plan all along.) Corbett owned the team until 1980. Neither of them had money to put into the team (and neither of them wanted to). They spent the decade trading good players for bad, almost always with some cash coming back to them, which was used just to fund operations. They even lied about that – when shortstop Jim Mason was sold to the Yankees at the end of 1973, Short told local media that he got $250,000. The Yankees said they paid $100,000, and the media in New York thought even that was too much.
And that’s largely why the Rangers of the 1970s (and the Senators of the 1960s) were so bad. Owners operating on shoestring budgets, trying to stay afloat. The 1972 Rangers were the start of it in Texas, but they were a symptom of the malaise that was in the organization. The team had several good young players, but they were either traded away or rushed to the big leagues – David Clyde, anyone? – for financial purposes, and not developed properly. Mason and Grieve are good examples of that, too. In both cases Short wanted to put them on the major-league team, but Williams said they needed much more development in the minors.
It wasn’t until Eddie Chiles bought the team from Corbett – effectively a forced sale, because Chiles had loaned Corbett money to keep the team afloat, and he couldn’t afford to repay it – that the Rangers began showing some professionalism. Perhaps it was the escape from the wild times of the ’70s, too. By the time George W. Bush bought the team in 1989, they were on a solid financial foundation. And then they could push on to develop teams that would be competitive in the next decade. Again partly thanks to Grieve, who spent 1984-94 as the general manager.
So, if you remember the Rangers of the 1970s, you know how bad things can be. Hopefully you stuck around to see them turn into a winning team. Of course, they still don’t have a ring, 45 years later. Two World Series appearances, and twice they were one strike away from winning it all. But the curse of the Rangers continues.
DID YOU KNOW?
Some fun facts about the 1972 Texas Rangers:
They spent time in first place, and it wasn’t just on Opening Day. A week into the season they won and jumped to first. The following day they lost and fell to fourth. They never got above third place again all season.
Imagine finishing 20 1/2 games back. No, not behind the league leaders. The 1972 Rangers finished that far behind the next-to-last team, the Angels, who, at 18 games behind division champs Oakland, were closer to first than to last.
Surprisingly, the Rangers were pivotal in a division race. The Detroit Tigers were 10-2 against the Rangers, while the Boston Red Sox were 8-4. The Tigers won the American League East by half a game over the Red Sox. Just one more loss by the Tigers, or one more win by the Red Sox, against the Rangers, and baseball history could have been completely different.
They had a 15-game losing streak, still the worst in franchise history (through 2017). That streak was part of a 4-30 run in August and September, which got them to 99 losses with three games to go. They managed to win the first two but got their 100th loss on the last day.
The team batting average was .217, the fourth lowest since the start of the twentieth century. How galling was that to manager Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of all time? The only teams that were worse? The Yankees at .214, in the Year of the Pitcher, 1968, and two Deadball Era teams, the 1908 Brooklyn Dodgers at .213, and the 1910 Chicago White Sox at .211.
Only one pitcher reached 10 wins, Rich Hand. He also led the team with 14 losses. Naturally he was traded the following May. The best pitcher may have been Mike Paul, who was 8-9 with a 2.17 ERA in 20 starts and 29 relief appearances. They traded him too, the following August.
The “best” hitters were Toby Harrah and Larry Biittner at .259 (Harrah was ahead by a few decimal points). Or, if you want to use the OPS+ stat (On-base Plus Slugging, adjusted to ballpark, with 100 being league average), it was Don Mincher, at 133. Only two others, Frank Howard and Ted Ford, were above league average in that stat.
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is the currently fashionable stat to show how good a player is. Replacement level is zero, which means you could pick someone up from the minor leagues who should do that job just as well. The Rangers had 11 hitters and 8 pitchers at or below zero. In other words, 19 of the 38 players the Rangers used in 1972, exactly half of them, were below replacement level. The Rangers also had three hitters and three pitchers over 2 WAR. For context, a WAR over 5 puts you at All-Star level, while a WAR over 2 could be a starting player in the major leagues. Mike Paul led the team with 3.4 WAR, while Elliott Maddox was the best hitter at 2.5 WAR. Despite all those terrible players, it was the only major-league season for just one of them. Pity poor Steve Lawson, who pitched well with a 2.81 ERA in 16 innings in his debut season. Arm trouble quickly led to the end of his career, but he at least could say that he played in the big leagues.
The ballpark was a converted minor-league park, with thousands of seats quickly added when the Rangers arrived. It was so hot in the summer that fans called it a frying pan for the two decades it somehow remained in use. When they replaced it, in 1994, they still weren’t smart enough to put a roof on the new park.
WHAT’S IN THE BOOK?
All this history and more is covered in this book. The 1972 Texas Rangers were a culmination of a couple of decades of trying to get a major-league team. Dallas-Fort Worth has a long history with baseball, going back to the 1800s. Minor-league teams played in both cities for many years, indeed right up until the Rangers arrived. Articles in this book tell you that history, about the effort to bring a team to North Texas, and the story of Tom Vandergriff, the man now known as “the father of the Rangers.”
The franchise began as the expansion Washington Senators, and we cover their story, which is often forgotten since it was so brief. We’ll tell you about Bob Short, the wheeler-dealer who ran the team on a shoestring, and looked at Texas as a way to make a quick profit. You already know everything there is to know about manager Ted Williams, right? We’ll tell you the story of Ted and his coaches, and the guys in the front office who ran the team, often despite Short’s interference.
And there are the players. Biographies of everyone who played on the 1972 Rangers, whether it was their only major-league experience or if they had long careers. None longer than Tom Grieve, of course, who went on to spend five decades with the franchise, as player, general manager, and broadcaster, and earned the nickname “Mr. Ranger.”
We also have several game stories from 1972. The first-ever game, which wasn’t supposed to be. The first home game, cowboy boots and all. The time that Nolan Ryan struck out 14 Rangers, decades before he became a Rangers legend. And more.
Then there are all the fascinating extras we include. Stories of the guys who broadcast the games (including a Hall of Fame pitcher) in the days when the radio broadcasters took turns in the TV booth too. A newspaper beat reporter who went on to become one of the best-known writers in the Dallas media market. The story of how the team was put together, how the season unfolded, and the long suffering of Rangers fans before the team finally put a winning product on the field.
There’s a lot of history here. Not all of it was good, but they were the first. Next time you’re in the ballpark, look around for a 1972 logo, and think back to the people who started it, all those years ago.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people worked together to produce this book. Every article was written by a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), all of whom volunteered their time. My original idea for the book was enthusiastically supported by C. Paul Rogers, chair of the Banks-Bragan Dallas-Ft. Worth chapter of SABR (who also gave me the book’s title), and other chapter members. SABR members everywhere pitched in, providing help and advice or, more directly, writing articles for the book. The story of the 1972 Texas Rangers presented here is due to their interest in recording and preserving baseball history. You can read biographies of all the contributors at the back of the book. I thank each and every one for their time and patience as this book moved through the process from conception to publication.
Of course, there were also contacts with the players in the book. Many of them gave their time freely either to me or to writers throughout the book, and I acknowledge the importance of getting the book written with their first-person knowledge and experience.
Thanks to my wife, Marian, and son, Joshua, for their enthusiastic support during the long gestation of the book. Many times I read odd stories about the team and players, and they listened to all of them with at least polite understanding. I’m glad to have them with me, and happy they enjoy watching the Rangers both on television and at the ballpark as much as I do.
I thank Carl Riechers, the book’s fact-checker, and Len Levin, the copy editor. They went through every article with a fine-toothed comb and found many things that I had missed. I would read each article two or three times before they even saw it, and they’d still catch things. Carl’s ability to fact-check is amazing, making sure that someone hit .215, not .216, somewhere in the distant past. I’d get my own articles back from him and wonder how I managed to write some of the things I wrote, and glad he was there to fix it. As copy editor Len’s job is to make sure everything follows SABR’s Style Guide, which he must have memorized by heart, and also to ensure that everything reads properly. Often Len would subtly change a sentence I’d written and make it much clearer. Thank you both so much, Carl and Len. You definitely made this book better.
Finally, my deepest thanks go to my co-editor, Bill Nowlin, SABR director and coordinator of BioProject books. Bill invested a lot of time and effort in guiding me to produce this book, and I am grateful for his help. It took longer than we both expected from start to finish, but Bill was there all the way, and pushed it over the finish line. Maybe a baseball metaphor is better: I got the book to third base (with a lot of help), but it was Bill who drove in the winning run. Bill, thank you so much for all your work and support.
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.
- Read more: Find all essays from The Team That Couldn’t Hit in the SABR Research Collection online
- BioProject: Find biographies of players from the 1972 Texas Rangers at the SABR BioProject
- Games Project: Find articles on the 1972 Texas Rangers at the SABR Games Project
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