Herzog’s everyday lineup included talent that might not have offered first-division potential. They were, however, entirely qualified to hold their own in conversations on topics like bass fishing and provide welcome company at cocktail parties of almost any social strata. The test of time would demonstrate over and over that the Rangers ballplayers were far more entertaining in person than they were on the field.
Epstein, the first baseman, had a World Series ring from the previous season but now agreed with Oakland’s director of player personnel who had determined that his job skills were better suited to a team like the Rangers. Life in baseball, Epstein told me, was cluttered with too much “inconsequential bullshit” and he had devoted more of spring training to securing his pilot’s license than attempting to regain his timing in the batting cage.
Even before the start of spring training, Herzog had said, “If Rich Billings is the starting catcher again, we’re in deep trouble.” When that evaluation was passed along to Billings, he simply nodded and said, “Whitey, obviously, has seen me play.” But Whitey, obviously, had not seen the other candidates for that position play, and now Billings was again pencilled in as the starting catcher.
Third baseman Joe Lovitto came endowed with what all the scouts insist are the four essentials necessary for major-league stardom. Lovitto could run, throw, hit and hit with power. The problem was that while he could do all of these things, Lovitto seldom did. Lovitto told me of an encounter he’d had with Ted Williams the season before. “We were on the road somewhere and Ted called me into his hotel room,” Lovitto said. “He told me that I had my head up my ass and that I was wasting my talent.”
How, I inquired, had Lovitto responded to a critique like that from such a man as Ted Williams? Lovitto seemed astounded that I would even ask the question. “Well, what would you do?” he demanded. “I told him to go fuck himself and slammed the door in his face.”
Meanwhile, the manager was gaining a sharper focus of what he anticipated from this season’s team. “Defensively,” said Herzog, a man of keen intuitions about the game, “these guys are really substandard, but with our pitching, it really doesn’t matter.”
Herzog had three players he did like. He correctly predicted that outfielder Jeff Burroughs and shortstop Toby Harrah would be future all-stars. And of Bill Madlock, the player Herzog was surprised to discover was black: “That kid can flat play. But he’s not quite ready yet and I’m going to send him back to AAA because I don’t want Madlock to pick up too many bad habits from the guys I’m going to keep.” It was Bill Madlock’s destiny to become a four-time batting champion of the National League. Madlock owes Herzog a round of drinks, at least, because almost all of the twenty-five players who did break camp in Rangers uniforms had hitched a ride on an express train to baseball’s scrap heap.
How was it that those responsible for orchestrating the lyrics and melody of the franchise could produce such a blueprint for failure? Well, remember that this team until now had been the Washington Senators, which for the preceding seven or eight decades had gone to war carrying the banner emblazoned; “Washington—First in War, First in Peace and Last in the American League.”
Read the Rules of Baseball. It’s right there in Article VI, Paragraph 14, etched in boilerplate. “Three strikes and you’re out, four balls take your base and if the New York Yankees don’t finish first and if the Washington Senators don’t finish last in the American League, then call the attorney general because the fix is in.”
This was the team that had been the topic of a hit Broadway musical, Damn Yankees, in which a fan sold his soul to the devil so the Senators could win a pennant. When Bob Short bought the team, he wasn’t about to mortgage his hereafter for such a happening, but what he did do was sell off whatever marginal talent was available in order to pay the rent at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium.
Short was also amenable to any ploy that might sell tickets or, as he put it, “put butts in seats.” That was why he authorized a trade that sent a couple of rookies to the Detroit Tigers for pitcher Denny McLain, who in 1968 had been the first (and the last) pitcher since Dizzy Dean to win thirty games in a season. By the time McLain joined the Senators, his arm was dead and gone and he would eventually wind up a convict in the federal pen. The two players that Short ceded in that trade, Ed Brinkman and Aurelio Rodriguez, acted as the cornerstones for an outstanding Tigers infield that remained intact for the next ten years. Such was the Texas Rangers legacy.
In a move that reflected his desperation, Herzog agreed to a player transaction that brought another outfielder, Alex Johnson, into the Rangers’ nest. Since this was the same Alex Johnson who had led the American League in hitting two seasons earlier, one might wonder why a player with such reasonably up-to-date credentials might now be pressed into the ranks of the vagabonds and grifters who wore Rangers blue. The explanation was to be found in more recent events. Johnson had apparently agreed with Mike Epstein’s equation of baseball with inconsequential bullshit to the extent that the latter entailed catching routine fly balls and running toward first base after hitting the ball. These had become chores that Alex Johnson, in his last days with the California Angels, had for unexplained reasons refused to perform. “I dunno,” conceded Herzog. “A guy like that can poison a ball club. But how do you poison this club?”
According to reports from California, Alex Johnson also was not inclined to invite members of the media over to his house for sweet rolls and hot chocolate. That crossed my mind when, by accident, I encountered Johnson as he stepped out of a rental car around midnight at the Surf Rider. He had just hit town. Johnson struck me as having the torso of a rhinoceros and apparently the personality to match. I introduced myself and asked him what he thought about being traded to the Rangers.
“Work is work. It don’t matter where,” said Johnson, and then promptly concluded what would become the most extensive interview he would conduct in a season and half with the Rangers.
March turned into April. Spring training was ending and I didn’t want to leave. Neither, probably, did Whitey Herzog or anybody else associated with the club except Harold McKinney. He’d plowed his rental car into a parked car on the lot in front of the Banyan Room and vaguely recalled having then abandoned the scene. For days, the car he’d clobbered remained there in the lot with its left side caved in. “I wish they’d tow the goddamn thing. It makes me nervous every time I look at it,” said McKinney, apprehensive that a witness might still emerge and that he would be led off in chains. McKinney was also marginally concerned about the expense report he would eventually file back at the paper, highlighted by a bar tab at the Banyan that exceeded three grand.
With the Rangers poised to load the wagons and roll back to Texas, I made my last visit to the Banyan for a final pop or two. The sign outside said “Happy Hour” but, inside, two players were staging a wake. Herzog had posted his final roster and Bill McNulty, the outfielder who had been sent over for soiling his manager’s suit in Oakland, and a right-handed candidate for the bullpen weren’t on it. “I guess,” reasoned McNulty, “that when you’ve been released by the Rangers, that’s God’s way of telling you to look into a new career field. But goddamn, ballplayers live this dream of making the big league. Most of them get weeded out in Class A and they figure what the hell and go on with whatever it was they were going to do in the first place. But when you make it to the fringes of the big leagues, close enough to taste it … I guess I’ll always wonder what might have happened if I’d had a chance to take that last step.”
Amid the deafening clatter of icecubes, the pitcher was introspective. “I have a wife back in Denver who’ll be more disappointed over this than I am,” the pitcher said, and I figured he was going to reach in his billfold and produce a snapshot. “She was going to hit me with the divorce papers last winter, but her lawyer told her to hold off, waiting to see if I made the majors and the big money. Knowing them, they’ll probably encourage me to try to catch on s
omewhere in AAA and then try again next year.”
The next day was getaway day and the Rangers’ entourage prepared to depart the Surf Rider. While Canucks wept and Wayne Carmichael pondered his comeback, I stood on the bed to admire my deep and radiant suntan in the bathroom mirror. I looked like the UN ambassador from Sumatra. Randy Galloway presented more of the dirt-floor Nicaraguan effect often associated with the back streets of his native Grand Prairie. But on the charter flight back to Texas, one of the pitchers, Rich Hand, put matters into a harsh perspective. “It’s nuts to get a tan like that because now you just get to watch it fade. I don’t think you’ll be walking the beach much in Cleveland and Detroit.”
A deep thinker.
Chapter 4
Tavern life is eternal in Fort Worth, Texas, a historic place that’s chin-deep in trail-dust heritage. After the Civil War the city based its economy around the prostitution industry and met with prosperity. Even when some Bible-thumping zealots managed to weasel their way into the state legislature in 1896 and enact a reform measure that raised the legal age of consent in Texas from ten to twelve, the people of Fort Worth rallied together in a show of support for the innkeepers. A protective guild was organized and, bolstered by the wholehearted endorsement of local law enforcement, the Fort Worth brothel trade became an entity that was truly greater than the sum of its parts. If anybody thinks I am exaggerating, an article written by a professor, Richard F. Selcer, in a 1992 issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will back me up. When the Chamber of Commerce brags about Fort Worth being home of the “world’s oldest indoor rodeo,” they’re technically correct but the events I’m thinking of don’t include bronco bustin’ and calf ropin’.
In the city “where the west begins,” the natural laws of commerce came into play as well, and inevitably cottage industries like cattle and oil materialized in and around Fort Worth, utilizing the mercantile strength of the hooker trade as a life-support mechanism.
Those whorehouses—and they proliferated around the city at least as long as I lived there through the mid-1970s—are the reason the stockyards were founded on the North Side. The town’s population of what Professor Selcer termed “soiled doves, daughters of joy, bawds, painted women, sluts, tarts, floozies, chippies and street walkers,” brought the huge Swift and Armor meatpacking plants to town, not vice versa. The same goes for American Airlines, the Santa Fe Railroad and, I am privately convinced, it’s the same reason Texas Christian University moved from Waco to Fort Worth. Why do you suppose General Dynamics put a huge factory in Old Cowtown? Because of the school system? Why would Cap Cities Communications buy a newspaper like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram? Why else would the National Association of Fire Chiefs stage its annual convention in Fort Worth year after year? And this particular civic attraction in my view is the only rational reason why Bob Short would transfer the Washington Senators franchise to Arlington Stadium, just a seven-minute drive along the Interstate from the East Fort Worth city limits. Pompano Stadium was meager in comparison to the other spring training ballyards in Florida, true enough, but the aesthetic gap that separated Arlington Stadium from the other eleven American League performance venues was even more pronounced.
The park had initially been constructed to house the Dallas-Fort Worth entry in the Texas League, a team called the Spurs, and was adequate for that function. When the opportunity came along in the form of Bob Short, the park added on 18,000 outfield seats to up the seating capacity of the place to 35,000. What resulted was an open-bowl effect, perfectly suitable for a stock car race in South Carolina but hardly what baseball patrons of the big-league genre would reasonably hope to expect. Civic boosters liked to think of the place as “intimate” and it was—intimate like a drunk tank in the Bronx on New Year’s Eve. With no roof or protective overhang to offer shade, the arrival of summer meant that inside that stadium it was hotter than First Baptist Hell.
I wrote a column that first season pointing out that Arlington Stadium lacked the amenities that fans can expect in other American League ball armories. There were no rats in the restrooms, like they have in Chicago. No iron pillars to block the view, like they have in Detroit. No pack of teenage thugs roving the stands, looking for organ donors, like the ones you can encounter in the House that Ruth Built. Tom Vandergriff, the mayor of Arlington, wrote me a letter thanking me for that column. Unfortunately, none of those features adequately compensated for the fact that Arlington Stadium bestowed about as much big league magic as a Wal-Mart store.
As such, this arena was indeed a proper domain for the team offering the talent base and high-loss quotient of the Texas Rangers. Season ticket sales indicated that the fandom remained largely unconcerned about the Rangers’ on-the-field plight. Marketing projections showed that ticket buyers intended once again to avoid the park in record numbers. Bob Short’s only consolation might have been the immortal observation of Yogi Berra: “If the people aren’t going to come, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.”
Late in spring training, when Rico Carty’s exhibition batting average rested at .zero-something, he assured the fans back home via me, the oracle, that “when the bell rings, the Beeg Boy will heet.”
“When the bell rings” is the term that ballplayers who are having a lousy spring use for the start of the regular season. Everything will fall into place and the cogs and gears will mesh “when the bell rings.” John Donne referred to this when he wrote his baseball poem. Now, according to the schedule distributed by the main office from the American League, the Chicago White Sox would be on the field for a game that actually counted in the standings, so the Gong Show in Arlington Stadium would now begin.
Something odd happened on what was supposed to have been Opening Day, 1973—a harbinger of a procession of conspicuously odd things that the Rangers would encounter that year. Through some divine providence, the game was called off because of a mid-afternoon snowstorm. To Whitey Herzog, that amounted to a stay of execution. Well into August, Herzog could be seen in his office before games, still praying for snow.
The White Sox won the opener when it was played the next night, Saturday, 3-1, before a paid gathering of 22,000. I could list the Rangers’ 1973 opening night lineup here, for the benefit of baseball trivia enthusiasts, but I will not. Show me a trivia nut who can recite that lineup from memory and I will show you a person so anal retentive that he should be institutionalized immediately.
Oh, what the hell: Rich Billings was the catcher, Mike Epstein was at first, Dave Nelson (who appeared in the all-star game that season for the simple reason that every team had to be represented by at least one player) started at second base, Toby Harrah was the shortstop and Joe Lovitto was at third. The outfield consisted of Rico Carty, Elliot Maddox (who would go on to sue the City of New York after he claimed that he messed up his knee when he fell over a sprinkler pipe at Shea Stadium) and Jeff Burroughs. Alex Johnson was the designated hitter. The bench included Larry Buttner, famous around the majors for the spelling of his name, and Tom Grieve, who played twelve years in the majors and then became general manager of the Rangers. On the day that Grieve’s son Ben graduated from high school in Arlington in 1994, he signed a contract with Oakland that included a bonus worth more money than his old man earned during his twelve seasons in the majors combined.
Dick Bosnian was the starter in that 1973 opener and he pitched heroically for the Rangers that night until he yielded a key home run to Dick Allen that seemed to be still traveling on an upward trajectory when it passed over the centerfield fence. Yes … Allen had been the American League’s MVP the season before, but one or two Dick Allens would lurk in the batting order of every team on the Rangers’ schedule. Meanwhile, Wilbur Wood, the Sox’s big knuckleballer, limited the Rangers to four anemic singles in the opener.
Wilbur Wood, by the way, was typical of most of the upper-tier pitchers in the American League of that era in that he would deceive the hitter rather than overpower him. Poor Ri
co Carty. He was totally baffled by Wood’s dip-and-dive knuckleball pitches and swung the bat like a man attempting to fight off a swarm of killer bees.
Up in the pressbox I was availing myself of the one amenity Arlington Stadium did provide that was as good as any in the major leagues. Baseball has its share of traditions, God knows, and the whole structure of the art form is based around these. But the custom I found most delightful was the one calling for the host team to provide free food and booze to the sportswriters. Standards of hospitality varied drastically from ballpark to ballpark. The most feeble spread was a dead heat between Oakland, naturally (if the legendary miser Charles Finley was notoriously renowned for his pinchpenny approach to paying players, one can only imagine the nature of the largess Charlie O. might extend to the unpressed gentlemen of the press) and Yankee Stadium, where the fare was one step up from jail food—processed cheese and stale bread, served with some anonymous brand of tap beer that always gave me the runs. Milwaukee’s County Stadium was well known for its greasy beef spareribs that were prepared in a fashion guaranteed to offer gastronomic upheaval, but at least they never ran out.
On the other side of the ledger, standing tall, were the four-star operations (and these recommendations came from the findings of a league-wide poll and are not merely one man’s opinion): Fenway Park (Oysters Rockefeller), Memorial Stadium in Baltimore (crab cakes and cherry vanilla ice cream) and Metropolitan Stadium in Minneapolis-St. Paul (Bloody Marys). And, surprisingly, Arlington Stadium. The barbecue buffet, featuring a rare beef-brisket, always drew raves from visiting writers and broadcasters. But the feature that extracted the raves from the likes of Harold McKinney and Randy Galloway happened to be of a procedural nature.
Seasons in Hell Page 3