Cepeda, now at the end of his career and playing thanks to the advent of the designated-hitter rule, did in fact compare David Clyde favorably with Sandy Koufax. “And that,” Cepeda added, “means trouble for the hitters in this league.”
Luis Aparicio, in Boston to wind down his Hall of Fame infield career, allowed that “I’ve never been so impressed with a young pitcher.”
Were the Red Sox simply blowing smoke, setting Clyde up for a rematch later in the season back in Arlington? Probably. But the Sox, to their credit, were making the task of covering a dead-end baseball team considerably less anxiety-provoking. So was Whitey Herzog. Before the start of the series at Fenway Park he jettisoned the immortal “player to be named later” from the Rangers’ farm system to make room for Jim Fregosi, a former seven-time all-star shortstop with the Angels and lately of the New York Mets. He brought more to the Rangers than experience and a good bat.
His stay in New York had been a somewhat troubled one. The Mets had traded Nolan Ryan to acquire Fregosi’s services. In subsequent seasons, while Ryan was setting the baseball world ablaze, Fregosi was not. Fans in New York are known to have what might be termed a high-gratification-expectation (HGE) quotient, and the media there was ever helpful in reminding Fregosi that the paying customers were displeased.
“Yeah, I was really going horseshit in New York,” said Fregosi as he walked with Galloway, McKinney and me from the park to the hotel lounge. “But I’ve been hard at work on my book,” he added. He said he was entitling the autobiography The Bases Were Loaded And So Was I.
This Rangers team was ordained to stack up losses in numbers that would be unsurpassed in franchise history. But Herzog was now determined. If his team was going to lose, it was going to lose with style.
Chapter 11
According to a two-paragraph item stuck on the back page of my newspaper, the Star-Telegram, the city of Fort Worth had just lost a proud citizen. I don’t recall the guy’s name, exactly, but he did have one of those standard-issue Fort Worth-West Texas names like Bob Ray or Mack Ed. Anyway, according to the paper, this guy had been beaten to death with his own six-pack of cold beer in the parking lot of Donnie’s Blue Room Lounge in the honky-tonk district along the Jacksboro Highway, also known as the Old Jizzum Trail. The honky-tonk district in Fort Worth, by the way, begins at the intersection of Twelfth and Throckmorton and extends northward to the city limits of Pawnee, Oklahoma.
Back in the world of baseball, the Detroit Tigers had just experienced manslaughter in Arlington Stadium. The Rangers, for the first time that season, had completed a three-game series sweep, and the ignominious distinction of being the team on the losing end of that proposition belonged to the Tigers. After the third game, I ventured over to the Detroit clubhouse to see if manager Billy Martin might have some kind of explanation.
There was nothing to fear in attempting that, really. My paper, after all, had a comprehensive health-insurance plan. I was met at the door by the trainer of the Tigers. He put his index finger to his lips, said “sshhh,” and then we tiptoed back to the manager’s office, where Martin bore the eyes of a man who had just been … well … beaten up with his own six-pack.
Few American citizens could match Billy Martin’s legitimate reputation as a back-alley ass-kicker, but the man’s voice was misleadingly soft. He sounded like Mr. Rogers, the kiddie show guy in the cardigan sweaters. “Give all the credit to those guys,” said Billy, gesturing toward the Rangers’ dugout. “They played damn solid ball for three days. No mistakes.” That much was true. Martin simply had to be wondering what cosmic disturbances were at work that called for his Tigers to be in town on this rare occasion when the Rangers performed like a major-league baseball team instead of a warm-up act for the Flying Walendas.
More than anything on the planet, Billy Martin desired to manage in a World Series. The year before, he had been deprived of that opportunity because of a dreadful call by a first-base umpire that cost the Tigers the deciding game in the league championship series against Dick Williams’ Oakland A’s. Martin now suspected, and with good reason, that this season’s Tigers might lose the Eastern Division race to the superior pitching and defense of the Orioles. Dropping three games in Arlington spelled doomsday.
Lyndon Johnson once noted that the only event a political candidate could not overcome was “being caught in bed with a dead woman or a live man.” If one wished to draw comparisons between politics and baseball, it could safely be alleged that pennant contenders in a close race might as well gargle with Drano as drop three straight to a recovery-room outfit like the Rangers. Billy Martin could not have realized it at the time, but something else involving the Texas baseball franchise was looming in his future about sixty days down the road, and it was a destiny far more daunting than the mere loss of a three-game series.
Whitey Herzog probably thought that he had accidentally tiptoed into the Twilight Zone. First his team had swept the Tigers. Then, two nights later, Herzog gazed at the lineup card hanging next to the bat rack in his dugout with an air of quiet reverence, as if it had been painted on the wall by Claude Monet. Herzog probably didn’t know the difference between Claude Monet and Clint Courtney, but to me it seemed that Whitey was tilting his head, as if attempting to capture the lineup card in various shadings of light.
He searched the card up and down and nowhere on it was there a Carty or a Maddox or a Mason or a Steve Stunning. The names on his team this night would include Bert Campaneris, Rod Carew, John Mayberry, Reggie Jackson, Carlton Fisk, Bobby Murcer and Brooks Robinson. His starting pitcher would be Catfish Hunter. This was the starting lineup that the American League would put on the field at the major-league all-star game in Kansas City, and American League manager Dick Williams had invited Whitey to serve as his third-base coach.
I suspect Williams had, at least in part, extended that honor as an act of compassion. Everybody in the league seemed moved by the dignity that Whitey had shown while playing with the cards he had been dealt in his first managerial post. Of course, not everybody had been exposed to Whitey backstage and after hours, when he was saying what he actually thought about his extended baseball family of yo-yo’s and castaways. So, in Kansas City, Herzog was like a soldier with a three-day furlough, soaking in the R and R of all-star talent before returning to another ninety days of digging latrines.
Some personalities of interest stood out among the National League contingent, too. Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Ron Santo. But this was the summer of 1973, which meant that the barbaric media horde would be ignoring most of this collection of smokeless tobacco luminaries and cluster at the feet of Hank Aaron. The mob had gathered around Aaron’s locker and the NL clubhouse looked like the banks of the Ganges on a holy day. I don’t know to what extent the average fan had been consumed by Aaron’s inexorable advance on Babe Ruth’s career homerun record, although nobody could doubt the depth of the media’s obsession with what amounted to the changing of an historic statistical guard.
Aaron seemed to withstand the mass interrogation with all the patience that he could reasonably muster, but he also, upon reading his quotes from afar, seemed to me to be becoming a trifle peevish. For one thing, he had been receiving considerable written correspondence from some Mississippi barnburners and others of that ilk who were unhappy that a black man was encroaching into the hallowed homerun territory of the Great White Hedonist himself, the Babe. But what, I think, Aaron found to be far more burdensome was simply enduring the task of answering, again and again, the same questions from these reporters. Only in this case, he was repeatedly faced with the same question (singular), and that question always began with the word “when.”
He told the mob in Kansas City that the anxiously awaited “when” of homeruns Numbers 714 and 715 would not happen in the season of 1973 but more likely early the next year. That satisfied the troops and most soon abandoned the area. I stood among perhaps a remaining dozen when Aaron said something inte
resting. He had just smacked Number 700 off George Brett’s big brother Ken of the Phillies. And now Aaron was seriously miffed at none other than Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball.
“I got dozens and dozens of congratulatory telegrams when I got the 700th,” he said. “I got one from Jesse Jackson. I got one from Chub Feeney [National League president]. But I didn’t get one from Bowie.” Aaron then paused and for the first time all day, he smiled. “I didn’t get one from Nixon, either,” he said, “but I wasn’t expecting one from him.”
Having finished listening to Hank Aaron, I also needed to extract some comments from two all-stars wearing Rangers uniforms. One was Dave Nelson, whom Dick Williams had selected for the team because, according to the guidelines of the event, at least one player from every team had to be included. Then, just the day before, Carl Yastrzemski was out of the contest because of an injury. Maybe Yaz had popped a gut string trying to hit David Clyde. Whatever, Dick Williams stunned the baseball world by naming Rangers first baseman Jim Spencer as Yaz’s emergency replacement.
Spencer, who had joined the Rangers from California in May in the swap for Mike Epstein, seemed as flabbergasted as anyone else. I asked Spencer to explain to my readers What Being In The All-Star Games Means To Me, in twenty-five words or less. “Messed up some plans,” he answered. “We were having some people over to watch it on TV.” He also volunteered deeper reflections on this 1973 season that had brought him such a large serving of the unexpected.
I recalled the expression on Spencer’s face that afternoon in Anaheim when I ventured into the clubhouse to get his reaction to being traded to Texas … and it wasn’t the reaction that I had anticipated. “Trade? What trade?” Spencer had said. Nobody from the Angels had gotten around to breaking the news to him. “Guess somethin’s up, huh? I better go talk to [Manager Bobby] Winkles.”
Spencer had seemed cheerful enough when he came back out of Winkles’ office. “I’ve played over there before,” said Spencer, groping to locate a bright side. “El Paso, in the Texas League. The ball carried damn good and the fence was only about 280 feet down the rightfield line. I poked a bunch of ’em out of that place and whenever I did, these Mexicans would stick dollar bills through the backstop and I’d trot over there and gather the cash. Do they do that in Arlington?”
In his first and last career at-bat in the all-star game, Jim Spencer almost hit a homerun. His deep fly ball hooked past the wrong side of the flagpole by about three feet. In the end, while Herzog and Spencer might have been sharing the dugout with a dream lineup, the results were all too familiar. The American League got stomped, 7-1.
Back in Arlington, after the traditional three-day all-star break, the Rangers’ clubhouse was alive with what is now known as an attitude. Buoyed by the three-game streak against the Tigers, the players seemed actually to be strutting. Plus their sense of honor had been violated by something that had appeared in a newspaper.
Their recent ex-teammate Mike Epstein was the printed source of some surprising declarations appearing in a Washington paper—not the Post but the Star, that would eventually be replaced by the Moonie-owned Times. Both Washington papers had mostly been covering the Orioles since Bob Short had moved the Senators to Arlington. Epstein’s history was kind of odd. He had actually worked for Bob Short twice and been a Senator in the Ted Williams regime before Short had traded him to Oakland; then he had rejoined his ex-boss for his brief tenure in Texas.
Epstein, now playing with the Angels and on a road trip to Baltimore, made these comments to a Washington writer: “Getting out of that Texas mess was all I could ask for this year,” Epstein was quoted as saying. As for the trade that had brought him to Texas, Epstein said, “I never did go for that deal. Short said that things had changed since Ted was gone and I said, ‘No, Bob, they haven’t.’ Oh, the faces have changed and Ted is gone, but the attitude is still the rotten same. Those guys don’t pride themselves on anything but getting to the ballpark. Some guys can adjust to that and live with it, but I can’t.”
Several of the Rangers got steamed up when that clipping was passed around, suggesting that Epstein had hardly busted his ass during his truncated stay in Texas. These guys were accustomed to being kicked around in the papers by sportswriters, but who cared about that? Most players regarded journalists as a besotted assortment of old poofters who didn’t know shit from wild honey. Like Dave Nelson cheerfully told me one time: “The only reason you’re a sportswriter is because you’re too damn stupid to operate a forklift.”
But catching grief like that from a fraternity brother ranked as the ultimate insult. Catcher Rich Billings said, “You might think that he was misquoted, but that sure sounds like the way Mike articulates himself.” Lloyd Allen, the pitcher who was involved in the four-player trade that sent Epstein to Orange County, recalled that, “He [Epstein] walked up to me in the Angels clubhouse after the deal was done and said, ‘You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I want to assure you that you’re going over to one of the best organizations and best owners in the game.’ Looks like he changed his mind.”
A scheduling irony placed Epstein and the California Angels in Arlington for a double-header on the Thursday night that opened league play after the all-star break. The pitching match-ups came with real marquee value for a change. Big Tex himself, Nolan Ryan, already with two no-hitters for the season and enjoying a record-pace strikeout binge, would pitch the opener for the Angels. Bill Singer, the ex-Dodger now scorching the American League with a 15-5 record, was due in the second game.
Herzog was impressed. “Phew. Ryan and Singer. Next to Jack Daniels and I. W. Harper, that’s about as potent a combination as I can think of.” The Rangers would counter with two hot arms of their own, Jim Bibby and David Clyde. Up until now, and I had written this in the Star-Telegram, they could have taken the love scene from Deliverance and used it as the Rangers’ highlights film. (That observation managed to find its way into print because the person working the copydesk that night was not a moviegoer). Now, inspired by Mike Epstein’s put-down, the Rangers took on the aura of a team on a mission.
The F-Troop, by God, wasn’t going to take it anymore. In the opener, Nolan Ryan would retire twelve straight batters at one point, but in the seventh the Rangers finally stopped shooting blanks. Vic Harris whistled a triple to left center. Alex Johnson followed with a double into the same territory. Then Larry Buttner, a lefthanded hitter with a stance so open he looked like he was straddling a creek, ripped a liner that banged off the centerfield fence on the fly. Winkles, the Angels manager, was not used to seeing his ace get kicked around, and certainly not by this gang of vagabonds and buffoons, the Lost Tribe that Epstein had described. Ryan was pulled from the game before his psyche was further damaged.
Jim Bibby, and not Ryan, looked like the pitcher with the Hall of Fame fastball. He paralyzed the Angels with eleven strikeouts, gave up three hits and the Rangers breezed, 7-1. Happily for ownership, a crowd approaching 30,000 was there to witness the feat. This was Farm and Ranch Night at Arlington Stadium, and the first 10,000 paying customers got a certificate they could redeem for a free bag of Rangers fertilizer.
Between games, in an exhibition of udder (sorry) nonsense, Angels pitching coach Tom Morgan beat Rangers pitcher Jackie Brown in a cow-milking contest. Whitey Herzog missed that. He was back in his office enjoying the final results of the Ryan-Bibby match-up. “That wasn’t the real Nolan Ryan out there tonight,” he said, “but by God, it was the real Jim Bibby. He threw 150 pitches, but hell, I’ve seen him pitch 200 in the minors and keep on coming. He’s big, he’s strong and he can throw with any of ’em when it comes to strength.”
Whatever interplanetary force-field that had pulled the earth so drastically away from its customary flight plan in the first game was also at work in Act II. Jeff Burroughs, whose soul had been so tormented by the malignant Texas south winds that had snuffed the life from so many of his best whacks, connected with a grand-sl
am homerun—first ever by a Ranger—in the first inning off Bill Singer.
Meanwhile, the Angels seemed just as helpless against David Clyde as they had when Jim Bibby was pitching. True, the Angels lineup consisted of the once-great Frank Robinson—who, like most of the designated hitters that year, was getting on—and eight nobodies. But they wore major-league uniforms with haloes on their caps and they scarcely touched David Clyde, who pitched seven scoreless innings and gave up three hits and three walks, striking out five. This would be just about the last flare in the cartridge of David’s 1973 Roman candle, but he picked an ideal night to fire the thing off. Jackie Brown had sufficiently recovered from his disastrous loss in the cow-milking competition to come in and pitch two scoreless innings in relief and the Rangers won, 8-0.
Texas’ “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” cavalcade beat the Angels again the next night, 5-3, and Diamond Jim Fregosi was batting .400 since coming over from the Mets. So the Rangers not only had their revenge on Mike Epstein, they’d also won six straight.
In Dallas, people were rioting in the streets. Not because of the Rangers’ winning streak but because a Dallas police officer (he would eventually be convicted of murder) shot and killed a twelve-year-old Mexican-American boy who was sitting handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car.
At the airport, though, as the Rangers left for a four-city, two-coast road excursion, there were indications that Rangers Mania was taking hold in this area known as the Metroplex. A cheering crowd of well-wishers met the team at Love Field in Dallas (D-FW wouldn’t open for another six months) carrying signs with “Go Rangers!” type messages.
Well, maybe not actually a crowd. It was about a half-dozen sweet-looking old ladies who probably should have been at home watching Lawrence Welk. These were not exactly the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. And probably it would also be less than accurate to say that they were cheering, although they were smiling.
Seasons in Hell Page 10