Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  When I suggested to Short that he was processing junk merchandise, he puffed up and said, “Got any better ideas?” Whenever the turnstile count hit 10,000, it was a good night in Arlington. The solemn reality was that the Dallas-Fort Worth area was gaga over the Cowboys and the lame antics of a last-place baseball team were not inflaming fan response.

  In short, Bob Short needed a miracle.

  The Rangers could claim one asset. By virtue of their record from the season before, worst in the league, Texas received the top selection in the upcoming amateur draft. All of the scouts unanimously anointed a high school pitcher in Houston, a lefthander, as the best prospect in the country and perhaps the best of the previous ten years or the best since Bob Feller or even, according to some, as—aw, what the hell?—the best of all time.

  Whitey Herzog, pragmatist and skeptic, had traveled to Austin to watch David Clyde pitch in the high school state championships and was now firing a twenty-one-gun salute too. According to the manager, Clyde clearly “had the gun” and the only missing ingredient was “developing a change-up and getting the fine tuning that separates the big leaguers from, well, the guys we’ve got now.

  “Start him off in an all-rookie league, where he’ll get used to being away from home with some guys his own age, then pull him all the way to AA or even AAA next year … and I think the kid will be primed for the majors by the time he’s twenty. And after that,” Whitey said (he’d just watched Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes by thirty-one lengths on TV), “we can bottle his sperm.” Herzog was fostering visions of a time when managing the Rangers might not be the grotesque experience he was presently forced to endure.

  That was Whitey’s timetable. Bob “You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time and That’s Good Enough for Me” Short was hatching a different and more accelerated schedule for David Clyde’s professional advancement. This was showbiz, after all, and while there were plenty of big butts in North Texas, not nearly enough were located in the box seats at Arlington Stadium.

  In David Clyde, Short figured he was blessed with the most promising overnight gate attraction since Jo-Jo the Lizard Boy hit the State Fair of Texas.

  Chapter 6

  According to a recent government study, it has been determined that ninety-seven percent of all present and former major-league baseball pitchers believe that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrial life-forms. It was also noted that seventy-one percent of these same pitchers, living or dead, at some point attempted to patent a perpetual motion machine.

  Well, perhaps they didn’t take that survey, but if they had, these figures would hold true and simply confirm one of baseball’s oldest axioms: that good arms do not usually come equipped with sound or stable minds. Additionally, it has long been believed that elevated levels of eccentricity can be located in lefthanders and knuckleballers.

  So Whitey Herzog deemed it only appropriate that his 1973 Rangers pitching staff should include that rarest of species, the lefthanded knuckleballer. This was Charlie Hudson, a versatile sort who was being utilized not only for long relief and short relief but also as a spot starter. Consistency was Charlie’s forte and he maintained a 6.50 earned-run average in each of those capacities.

  As mid-June approached, Charlie Hudson performed an act that at the time seemed entirely rational, given the guidelines that are conventionally extended to lefthanded knuckleballers. He shot himself. He didn’t stick the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. Charlie, in the proud fraternal spirit of lefthanded knuckleballers everywhere, had accidentally shot himself in the middle finger of his pitching hand.

  The mishap appeared all too Rangeresque on that day’s installment of the latest entries to the American League disabled list distributed to the wire services.

  Kansas City: Pitcher Steve Busby, torn rotator cuff.

  Chicago: Third baseman Bill Melton, pulled hamstring.

  Texas: Pitcher Charlie Hudson, gunshot wound.

  “It was just one of those accidents that hunters and gun enthusiasts have from time to time,” Charlie explained while showing off his bandage. “I was cleaning my .38 revolver and the thing went off.” Nobody bothered to ask Charlie exactly what type creatures he liked to hunt with a .38 revolver just as nobody questioned the wisdom, whether intentional or not, of his accident.

  Privately, most of Hudson’s teammates were thinking, “Nice going, Charlie. Now you can take your Purple Heart and split. I wish I had your guts.” Soon there were unconfirmed sightings of several Rangers players browsing the pawnshops in East Fort Worth. Shortly, though, a team doctor delivered the punch line. “Not so fast, Charlie,” he said when the prognosis came down. “This isn’t as bad as it looks. You can rejoin this circus in six weeks and then have a bone graft after the season.”

  Hudson now realized how Clyde Barrow must have felt when he chopped off a toe with an axe to avoid a chain-gang assignment at the Texas state penitentiary only to learn that he was scheduled for parole the following week.

  Jim Bibby, the big righthander recently snatched from the bowels of the Cardinals farm system, would replace Charlie Hudson on the roster. With the pitching staff’s in-transit format now a matter of daily routine, Herzog didn’t know if he was managing a major league baseball team or a Mexican bus station. The unsettled nature of the Rangers mound ensemble was illustrated in the American League ERA listings.

  Ken Holtzman of the A’s topped the list in mid-June with a figure just under 2.20, followed by Bill Lee, Jim Colbert, Wilbur Wood, Dave McNally, Bert Blyleven, Jim Palmer, Paul Splittorff, Nolan Ryan, Doc Medich, Mickey Lolich, etc., etc. Anybody seeking to locate a Ranger on the list would count down past thirty-six names to finally discover Don Stanhouse at 4.23. And Herzog had already confirmed that Stanhouse was being sent down to Spokane as soon as the AAA affiliate could provide space on its roster. Three dozen names later, one could locate Mike Paul and Pete Broberg with twin ERAs of 5.70. Whitey was concocting travel plans for them, too. When the media asked Whitey about his rotation for an upcoming series against Boston, he replied that he would blindfold himself, pull some names out of a fishbowl and let us know.

  On a late Saturday afternoon the team gathered in the clubhouse at Arlington Stadium just before taking the field for batting practice. Most of the players congregated around a TV set to watch the Belmont Stakes. What they saw was, in my view, the most impressive performance in televised sport as Secretariat won by thirty-one lengths. If that horse had had a rearview mirror, jockey Ron Turcotte would have witnessed the astronaut’s view of the earth after blastoff.

  The 1973 Belmont Stakes was oddly similar in reverse form to the 1973 pennant chase in the American League West at that point, with most of the field tightly bunched and another entry separated from the pack by a ridiculous margin. The White Sox led by a neck, at 32-25, shadowed by Oakland, Minnesota, Kansas City and California in fifth place at 30-30 and only three games back. Then, playing in their own league, came the Texas Rangers at 19-38 and 13 games down. One might note that while the Rangers occupied last place in the American League, the last place finisher in that 1973 Belmont Stakes was a horse named Sham.

  Another Rangers home stand mercifully closed one day after that memorable horse race. The highlight of a ten-day stay in Arlington had come against the Yankees. Bob Short’s director of special events, Oscar Molomont—a Danny DeVito clone whose credentials for the job amounted to his background as a bookkeeper with Short’s trucking line in Minnesota—had concocted a promotion known as Slurpee Night that attracted 10,000 to the park. Any five-figure attendance was always big news in Arlington.

  Factors beyond the inept nature of the home team seemed to be repelling fans from the stadium. What marketing people might now call the “full-phase entertainment setting” at the ballpark was as much a turnoff as the won-lost record of the Rangers. The core of the problem was organ music. The ancient hard-liners insist that the organ ranks as an essential element to the over
all ballpark package and I couldn’t argue with that.

  But between innings at Arlington Stadium, imagine this: The Rangers are getting beat 11-2 or whatever and the organist gives the fans a downbeat rendition of “Slow Boat to China.” Or “Beautiful Dreamer.” Or “Tennessee Waltz.” Or “Ole Buttermilk Sky.” Or “Miss Otis Regrets.” And the instrument itself sounds in acute need of a big shot of nasal spray. The guy who goes to the game once a season sits there and thinks, “Good God. That music really sucks.” Then he goes home and forgets about it. The guy such as myself who goes to the park every night soon finds that the organ music becomes one more item contributing to a personal list of growing neuroses.

  I presumed that the organist himself was, indeed, the Phantom of the Opera. Eventually, I learned that my nightly torment was provided by either the son, grandson or nephew (I forget which) of Dr. Felix Gwodz. That didn’t mean much to most Americans but everybody living in Fort Worth knew who Dr. Gwodz was—the county coroner. Not a single day passed for a quarter of a century when Dr. Gwodz’s name did not appear in the local papers. “Tarrant County medical examiner Dr. Felix Gwodz ruled today that the cause of death was a shotgun blast to the face and not the fire that left the victim looking like, according to Dr. Gwodz, a ‘toasted marshmallow.’” To the population of Fort Worth, Dr. Gwodz was like a member of the family. He was also well known for playing his accordion at polka festivals in the area. I finally went to the stadium management people and proposed that the organ be replaced by Dr. Gwodz and his accordion. My pitch was rejected at first. Later, they would begin to come around.

  In the final game against the Red Sox on Sunday night (as a footnote to history it should be pointed out that the Rangers were the first major league team to schedule its Sunday home games under the lights because it was too damn hot in Arlington to humanely consider anything in the afternoon), an assortment of spectators charitably estimated at 1,200 got to see a couple of future Hall of Famers at work. Carl Yastrzemski and Carlton Fisk each lined homers that landed in the abandoned cheap seats with such velocity that one could hear the thud all the way back up in the pressbox.

  The Red Sox won that one, 12-1, and Whitey Herzog gathered his F troop and headed north.

  First stop: Cleveland. This was my first visit to what at that time might have been the only U.S. city to rank beneath Dallas in national esteem. I don’t know why. After devoting the better part of a young lifetime to confinement in North Texas, with its nondescript and horizontal landscape that turns brown by the Fourth of July and stays that way until the next April, Cleveland, the Mother City of the Rust Belt, exuded, I thought, a certain charm long before its present renaissance.

  To a denizen of the prairie tribes, there is something near-mesmerizing about industrial decay. The fact that the Cuyahoga River once burst into flames was held out as a source of civic embarrassment, but I never detected so much as a puff of smoke on any of the lakes and streams on my visits to Cleveland.

  Cleveland, of course, utilized the immense Municipal Stadium as the showcase for the hometown Indians, and if there is any such thing as an authentic burial ground haunted by lost spirits, this is the place.

  The proud and regal 1954 Indians, winningest major league team in what is now the fifty seasons since the end of World War II, lost games three and four of the World Series at this arena, thus completing an upset sweep perpetrated by the New York Giants. For baseball purposes this park was seemingly cursed and abandoned forever-more. True, Arlington Stadium provided an unoccupied quality with its usual crowd of 6,000 or so. Like numbers in this immense structure on the shores of Lake Erie, designed to comfortably accommodate 80,000, presented a spectral effect.

  The size of the crowds in those years had been largely ordained by the ineptness of the home team, which explained the reason why so many former Indians were now wearing Rangers Blue. Municipal Stadium in 1973 was nothing more than a glorified factory outlet mall for Stroh’s beer.

  Another unique aspect of the stadium setting on the lake front was the presence of two fans who situated themselves deep in the rightfield stands. They were equipped with kettle drums, and whenever the home team was at bat these guys pounded their drums in the traditional Western movie tom-tom cadence. BOOM-boom-boom-boom. BOOM-boom-boom-boom. Year in, year out. Every inning of every game. In the largely deserted ballpark, the echoes took on the quality of distant thunder. This place would be hell on earth for a man sporting a hangover and I quickly made a mental notation to arrange my late-night activities in Cleveland accordingly.

  A mid-week afternoon game completed the Rangers’ two-game visit to Cleveland and the drummers and beer vendors were literally the only living creatures in the stands to watch Whitey’s Kids beat Gaylord Perry. Final: Texas 4-2.

  After the game I approached Herzog with the usual stale questions about Perry and the alleged use of his notorious grease ball. Herzog was clearly delighted by the outcome. “The old greaser wasn’t greasing so good today, was it?” Whitey said. “I understand that he gets that stuff off some doctor. Guess his prescription ran out.”

  Herzog was further exhilarated here because, just this once, the two “live young arms” of the staff, Broberg and Stanhouse, often characterized by Herzog as suffering from attention-deficit disorder, actually outpitched a Hall of Famer. Stanhouse, with elongated sideburns, was holding a Stroh’s bottle in both hands and hoisting a personal toast to “my first save, ever, in organized ball. Sitting on the bench before the ninth inning I had a real strong feeling and I told myself that I was going to strike out the side.” Stanhouse’s trio of dead Indians included Jack Brohamer, Buddy Bell and John Lowenstein.

  In a season that was by now just one-third old, the Rangers had adapted to a communal mind-set that enabled them to take the losses in stride. The occasional wins, then, provided the feeling of warmth and convivial fellowship that permeates, say, a New Year’s Eve party at the Elks Club.

  A minor fiasco involving travel arrangements did not dampen the mood. According to the mandates of the labor contract between the Major League Players Association and baseball ownership, when charter flights were not available the players would occupy all of the first-class seats on domestic flights. The remainder of the entourage would then be situated two to a row in the tourist section and afforded first-class food and beverage accommodations. The regular passengers were then crammed into the six or seven rows in the back of the plane.

  But, when the Rangers arrived at the Cleveland airport for the flight to Baltimore, traveling secretary Burt Hawkins was horrified to learn that the gate agent had screwed up. The “civilian” ticket holders had already been allowed to board and were situated in seats throughout the plane. With takeoff in five minutes, it was too late to correct the situation. Hawkins expressed his dissatisfaction to the gate agent in most colorful language.

  These ballplayers, when sprinkled among the general population and in a festive mood, offered potentially unwholesome catalytic potential for a ninety-minute flight. Sure enough, as the plane rolled down the runway to take off, I heard someone shout, “HEY, STEWARDESS! BRING ON THE FUCKIN’ BOOZE.”

  Fortunately, that request was handled promptly enough to ensure reasonable tranquility on the flight. Stanhouse, still flush from his resounding ninth inning back in Cleveland, prowled the aisles, autographing paper napkins and stuffing them into the shirt pockets of the various passengers who had no idea who Stanhouse was or what convention he and his bizarre cronies were headed to. I was fearful that Stanhouse would soon lapse into his patented “Paging Mr. Gozinya … Mr. Peter Gozinya” routine but for some reason he chose to refrain.

  We were at the early developmental stages of the man who, six years later, would be immortalized by his future manager Earl Weaver as Stan the Man Unusual—or Full-pack, which is what Weaver claimed he would smoke whenever Stanhouse pitched for him with the game on the line.

  Meanwhile, an anxiety-stricken middle-aged woman sat wedged b
etween me, on the aisle, and Rico Carty in the window seat. Rico, halfway through the flight, was getting oiled and began a one-sided conversation with his seat companion. I got the immediate impression this woman was not accustomed to being placed in close proximity to enormous men with rich Caribbean accents. Nor did she appear to be an avid follower of the Great American Pastime.

  “They call me the B-e-e-e-g Boy,” he told her. “Ho-ho-ho. They say the B-e-e-g Boy no longer h-e-e-t. And you know what I say? Horse sh-e-e-t!” Now Carty was gripping an imaginary bat and waving it in her face. “The B-e-e-g Boy,” he assured this woman, “will h-e-e-e-t!”

  Since Rico Carty, customarily a gracious and adequately restrained individual when away from the ballpark, was apparently succeeding in marginally traumatizing this woman, I was fearful of what might be taking place elsewhere on the airplane.

  Naturally, this peculiar trip, of all trips, would have to be one of those that would encounter upper-air turbulence. Things were beginning to go bump in the night. After several minutes I heard a voice, unmistakably that of catcher Ken Suarez, yell, “WHO’S FLYING THIS THING? HELEN KELLER?”

  At this point I halfway expected to see Leslie Nielsen emerge from the cockpit area wearing a parachute. Stanhouse, though strapped into his seat because the plane had apparently managed to fly into a hurricane, continued to make himself the center of attention.

  He spotted my media colleague, David Fink, seated about eight rows behind him, and began yelling, “FINK! YOU ASSHOLE! YOU MISERABLE SON OF A BITCH! YOU HAD ME ALL READY TO GO TO SPOKANE! YOU PUT THAT IN YOUR GODDAMN NEWSPAPER BUT I SHOWED YOU! WAIT’LL WE GET ON THE GROUND … I’M GONNA KICK YOUR BALLS OFF!”