Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  These ladies were showing their support because they were certain that this Rangers team would refuse to quit and they were right, by God. This team wouldn’t quit until it had lost 105 games, the most in franchise history.

  Chapter 12

  On a plane ride to Oakland, one Ranger was talking to another about a recent occasion when he had not only “nailed a couple of fuckin’ dingers” off some pitcher but had “smoked his tits” as well. A big leaguer doesn’t simply hit an occasional pitcher hard. He “smokes his tits,” one of the milder expressions that color conversational patterns of players. In terms of social refinement, some of these sportsmen are not what might be recognized as finished products. Some are.

  The behavioral ethos put forth by the men of the ballyard was a significant departure from my earliest professional beat. For the previous five years a lot of my work as a reporter had been interviews with people such as Elizabeth Montgomery or Lucille Ball or Barbara Eden or Sally Field or Mary Tyler Moore, and these exchanges were happening at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel or maybe the veranda of the Royal Hawaiian.

  These job assignments occurred when I was employed by the Fort Worth Press, a storied little Scripps-Howard tabloid. I was writing some sports but mostly occupied myself in my other persona as television editor-critic. This was during the golden age of lavish junkets financed by networks and production companies. In the modern age of hypocritical newspaper “ethics,” the writers can no longer accept those kinds of freebies lest the partiality of the oracle become tainted. So a network or movie outfit or whoever would fly you around first-class and set you up in a five-star hotel with instructions to sign anything to your tab but prostitutes and alligator shoes.

  I can remember sitting with two other writers and a publicist in the Garden Room of the Century Plaza. We interviewed Dick Clark for about four hours and I signed a drink tab that exceeded $500, which was a hell of an accomplishment according to 1970 prices. I then left to have dinner with Lana Turner, who was starring in some prime-time soap that regrettably flopped on ABC after thirteen weeks.

  Why, you might well ask, would I want to trade what I will always regard as the greatest scam in the history of journalism for this baseball assignment, in which I spent my Saturday nights in pressboxes in towns like Bloomington, Minnesota (no offense intended) drinking Grain Belt beer and watching grown men hit foul balls? Two reasons. First, in 1971, the editor of the Press dropped dead and was replaced by a guy who wanted me to spend less time with Ann-Margret in Montreal and more time watching football practice at TCU. This editor, his name was Delbert, thought I might be having too much fun on the job (he was right, too) and told me that I lacked the dedication to make it in the “newspaper business” over the long haul. I told Delbert that I never thought of myself as being even slightly involved with the newspaper business. “And you ain’t either,” I said. “Some heir to the Scripps-Howard fortune, as we speak, is down on some private island with Miss Teenage Sweden and eighty cases of Dom Perignon. He’s in the newspaper business, Delbert. You and me are not.”

  Reason Number Two for slinking onto the Star-Telegram baseball beat like a starving rodent was the notion that the Press was about to fold at any minute. It actually hung on for three years after I left, but when Scripps-Howard finally did close the place at high noon on a June Friday, a few dozen of the most talented and loyal people ever involved in the newspaper “business” were given a whole week’s pay and told to get their asses out of the office pronto. Most of them didn’t even have time to finish the can of Vienna sausage they were having for lunch before the building was padlocked.

  Those were some of the quirks of fate that led me to the coffeeshop of a hotel near the Oakland Coliseum where the Rangers were about to play the A’s in a doubleheader. I was eating a bowl of Rice Krispies and listening to some woman who had sat down, I’ll swear, at my table after somehow guessing, perhaps by the cut of my jib, that I was connected somehow with the Rangers entourage. She was hoping that I might point out or somehow locate a particular Rangers pitcher whom she averred she wanted to screw. Just like that. This woman, I took it, was the Bay Area’s equivalent of Detroit Shirley.

  Without my asking, she proceeded to rattle off the names of her personal 1973 baseball all-star team, along with an MVP, a rookie of the year and a comeback player of the year. I was surprised that she didn’t also give a Sigh Young award. The criteria for making this all-star lineup didn’t, of course, include homeruns or batting averages but rather an array of skills that she described so graphically that my Rice Krispies became prematurely soggy. Then she mentioned the name of a fairly well-known player with the White Sox. “He wanted me to do a two-on-one with some other guy but, hey, my head’s screwed on way too good to get involved with something as kinky as that. I told him to fuck off.” Those were her exact words.

  I felt a strong urge to get away from the table. Not so much because I was afraid of compromising my potential placement in the hereafter but for the simple concern that this woman was probably an undercover cop. In light of the litigious realities of more up-to-date times, I am told that professional athletes largely tend to shun the “kindness of strangers” like the woman in Oakland in fear of being set up with rape charges and civil suits. And who has been most damaged by the lawsuit craze? The poor groupies themselves, mostly. Business has dried up in the lobbies and lounges of the nice hotels and the girls have been relegated back to the truck stops.

  Later, at the ballpark, having recounted that coffeeshop vignette to Harold McKinney, he said, “Hell, you should have turned her on to Bibby. Then she could claim that she not only scored another righthander but made it with Mr. Ed, too.”

  Down on the field, Whitey’s Rangers remained on a tear. With Sonny Siebert still on the shelf, Herzog was having to resort to random selection to fill out his rotation again. When Jackie Gene Brown of Wewoka, Oklahoma, had been called up from Spokane, his role was to replace Don Stanhouse on the roster in the bullpen.

  Now Brown was starting against the past, present and future world-champion Oakland A’s. Brown went the distance and pitched a shutout. In the second inning of the game, Sal Bando hit a ball that landed in the leftfield stands at least fifteen feet to the foul side of the flagpole. Frank Umont, also known to the players as Old Helmet Head, appeared to have been aroused from a short nap by the sound of the ball landing in the seats. Umont looked toward leftfield, raised his right hand and twirled a finger around, signalling homerun. It was, in fact, a two-run homer, and Bando could scarcely keep a straight face as he trotted around the bases.

  Jim Fregosi, playing third base, was not particularly amused. In fact, the usually blasé Fregosi had taken enough spins around the block in the major leagues to realize that disputes with umpires were not only futile but involved dialogue that was less than elegant.

  Now Fregosi was thrashing about in a self-choreographed performance punctuated with grief-stricken wails not put forth since Flaubert’s deathbed scene in Madame Bovary. For a moment, I thought Fregosi was about to put his hands around Old Helmet Head’s throat. The umpire quickly disqualified Fregosi from the remainder of the afternoon’s proceedings. Oakland went ahead and won by three.

  “I can’t remember the last time I got chased but I think it was when I was nineteen years old and playing for the Dallas-Fort Worth team in the American Association,” Fregosi would say later. “But I also don’t remember seeing an umpire make such a horseshit call.” Herzog seemed less agitated. “Ah, the old f—, wait a minute. You gotta be careful what you say about the umps,” Herzog said. Umont told me that the ball went straight over the top of the foul pole. And I asked him how in the hell such a thing was possible. If the ball had gone above the foul pole it would have landed in the parking lot. Bando’s ball came down in the lower deck.

  “But,” added Herzog philosophically, “that is exactly the kind of crap you can expect from the umps when you are a last-place team playin
g a first-place team. And”—Whitey concluded with an air of resignation—“the situation doesn’t look too good tomorrow, either. We’re catching Vida Blue. His record isn’t that good, but if I had my pick of any pitcher in the league, Vida would be the guy.”

  What I remember most about what happened the next night was that in the open-air pressbox on a midsummer’s night at the Oakland Coliseum, it is very possible for the visiting journalist to freeze his cojones off if he isn’t wearing attire suitable for an NFL playoff game in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  In the top of the first, Dave Nelson, Vic Harris and Alex Johnson each reached base against Vida Blue. Five nights earlier, Jeff Burroughs had hit the franchise’s first ever grand slam. That had come off Bill Singer. Now, after the first pitch, Vida Blue had yielded grand slam Number Two. That was a promising enough beginning. So I turned to Burt Hawkins, the traveling secretary seated to my left, and wisely noted, “The last time I was this cold was in New York.” The Rangers got ahead 7-0 that night and blew it.

  In the bottom half of that inning Jim Bibby got Burt Campaneris to pop up, struck out Bill North on three pitches, all chest-high fastballs, and then got Sal Bando to swing late and pop up. After the inning Bando trotted past Hiller, who was going over to coach first, and said, “Don’t tell me he can throw that damn hard for nine innings.” Hiller looked at Bando and replied, “Just wait. He gets faster.” In the Rangers’ dugout, pitching coach Cha-Cha Estrada turned to Herzog and said, “Bibby’s got it tonight. They won’t touch him. I bet he pitches a no-hitter.”

  In the third inning, Ray Fosse finally hit a ball hard, but Pete Mackanin, still filling in while Toby Harrah’s broken hand was on the mend, made a slick play on the ball, moving to his right, and threw Fosse out. In the fourth Vic Harris, the centerfielder, got a decent jump on Deron Johnson’s looper and ran down the ball.

  Then, as the innings rolled by, Bibby was relying essentially on one pitch, the fastball, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that none of the A’s were up to the task of hitting the thing with any kind of authority. In the vernacular of the trade, Bibby was bringing serious gas.

  When he walked to the mound to start the bottom of the ninth, Bibby had walked six A’s, but according to the scoreboard, had yet to yield a run or a hit. The Oakland crowd of 23,000, with the A’s trailing 6-0 and now beaten, was on Bibby’s side now. They wanted to witness a no-hitter. So did Catfish Hunter, watching from the A’s bullpen. “The game was out of reach so why not?” Hunter would say. “I know how the kid felt. I’d been there myself.”

  The “kid” that Hunter was watching was actually twenty-eight, had served a tour in Vietnam and two years earlier had been bedridden for weeks after undergoing a spinal fusion. With one out, Bill North walked. Now Reggie Jackson was up and Bibby’s little flirtation with history had reached its point of crisis. On a 3-2 count, Jackson swung, literally, from the heels, and then sat down. “That,” Jackson said afterward, “was the fastest pitch I ever saw … or rather … never did see.”

  One out to go now, and Gene Tenace lifted a pop fly into short right center. This was a ball that I had seen the Rangers misplay with numbing frequency. Sure enough, second baseman Dave Nelson was backpedaling, and just as the ball reached his glove he was rammed by the on-rushing Harris. “Dave was calling ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ but the crowd noise was so loud I never heard him,” Harris would say later. Somehow, though, the ball stuck in Nelson’s glove, and Bob Short’s last-place team was back in the national sports headlines.

  Billings, the catcher, was availing himself of Charlie Finley’s lavish post-game spread of Velveeta and white bread, drawn from the menu of maximum security, and raving about Bibby’s effort. At what Billings conceded was “the twilight of a mediocre career,” the last thing he expected was to catch a no-hit from a Rangers pitcher. “The big guy was absolutely unbelievable,” Billings said. “I don’t think there is a man in baseball who could have touched some of those pitches. I’ve never seen smoke like that.” Bibby had thrown 148 pitches and struck out thirteen A’s.

  Now Bibby himself was virtually alone in the dugout, wearing earphones and transmitting his thoughts to the folks back home in Texas on the Rangers’ post-game radio show. Actually, Rangers’ broadcasts were carried on a clear channel AM that, this time of night, could be picked up throughout North America. At this peak moment in his career, Bibby had one thought on his mind. “Man, it was cold out there when the game started and I thought I was gonna freeze my ass off,” he informed his audience. “But I bet I lost ten pounds by the time it was over. But I’m gonna get it all back in the clubhouse with some of that good cold beer and I’m ready for it right now.”

  Bob Short was on the trip, probably, I presumed, to consult with Finley about any possible good ideas on how best to unload the franchise. Short, at least, had the good luck to be around to see what would certainly now stand out as the premiere on-the-field moment of his ownership tenure. He might have been taking a colossal bath with this thing, but Short walked up to Bibby in the clubhouse, hugged him and handed over a bonus check for five grand. The spectacle of a no-hit game was hardly a commonplace event in the Texas-Washington franchise. Bibby’s was the first since a Senator pitcher named Bobby Burke accomplished the feat in 1931. The only one prior to that happened in 1920 and was thrown by Walter Johnson.

  On the flight to Anaheim (actually Los Angeles, followed by about a ninety-minute bus ride to the outskirts of Disneyland, after which I had to find my room and write three stories about the no-hitter … it was two hours earlier in Texas and my deadline for the first P.M. editions was fast approaching … talk about a suck-ass job), I was wondering how many more total improbabilities this team might have left in it. For a team that was essentially DOA, it still persisted in making a ridiculous amount of noise.

  According to the blueprint, the Rangers should quickly return to the basic, feeble performance standards in Anaheim. “Don’t,” Herzog had been quick to remind me before the series opener against the A’s, “go expecting too many more fucking miracles out of this bunch.”

  That much was evident in the latest candidate in Whitey’s Amateur Hour auditions for starting pitcher, a lefthander from the Cardinals minor-league system. His name was Don “Bull” Durham. Bull had a lousy outing, but the organist at Anaheim extracted some convincing “m-o-o-o” sounds from his instrument.

  Then here came David Clyde. When the Kid was on top of his game, it had already been demonstrated that Carl Yastrzemski couldn’t hit him. Neither, then, could the Angels’ Richie Scheinblum, Art Kusnyer and Rudi Meoli. Clyde gave up one run in a seven-inning outing, and now the Rangers had won nine out of their last eleven games! One night later, on an all-night flight to Chicago for a weekend series, one of the veteran players handpicked by Herzog to act as a father figure to the teenaged pitcher, came to Clyde and offered him a traditional big-league performance booster. He slipped a black capsule into Clyde’s hand and said, “Here, kid. Take this and you won’t have to go to bed for a week.”

  Harold McKinney had a cheerful reminder for David as well. “Just remember,” he told the pitcher, “that on the twenty-seventh of this month the legal drinking age in Texas will be lowered to eighteen.”

  Chicago stood out as a favorite stopover for many of the Rangers players. The City with Broad Shoulders offered many attractions, and the one most appealing to many of the Rangers caravan was that Chicago was the home of Channel 61, the Action Channel, they called it, that showed nothing but Superman and Spiderman on a twenty-four-hour basis.

  The Rangers finally began to flounder at Comiskey Park, that grand old South Side arena surrounded by tough dives owned and operated by women all named, it seemed, Wanda Skutnik.

  Burroughs, on Saturday, hit his third grandslam in ten days. By now, Burroughs had decided not to surrender to the bedeviling winds back in Arlington and try to become a singles hitter like Wee Willie Keeler. “Well, the club expects me to h
it homers,” Burroughs conceded, “so I might as well try.”

  But the team, like some of the suits the players had purchased at Hot Sam’s in Detroit, was rapidly coming apart at the seams. On Sunday, they got beat in the ninth inning on a hit provided by the unknown shortstop of the White Sox, Bucky Dent. “Bucky Dent?” wondered Dave Nelson after the game. “What kind of wimp name is Bucky Dent? Sounds like some kind of kid in a cartoon. It’s embarrassing to lose to a Bucky Dent.”

  On Monday, another scheduling diversion awaited the Rangers. They flew to upstate New York to play the Pirates in the exhibition game that always accompanies the Hall of Fame inductions at Cooperstown. That year’s group included Warren Spahn. During his acceptance speech, a man in the front row pitched over with a heart attack. Spahn stopped in mid-sentence, looked into the audience and said, “Oh my God! It’s George.” George was Spahn’s brother-in-law. The only way a Hall of Fame induction ceremony could be screwed up, it seemed, would be with the Rangers in town.

  The long long road trip finally was ending. In New York, on the bus ride to the stadium from the Essex House Hotel up through the Bronx, we passed by a standard Seventies American Gothic street scene. Two representatives of the nation’s future, waving what appeared to be machetes, were attempting to assault a leader of tomorrow who was actively fending off the other two with a broom handle. Alex Johnson, the stoic outfielder, spoke rarely but when he did his message was usually profound. The kid swinging the mop had caught AJ’s eye. “I guess he’s the designated hitter,” Johnson said.

  Yankee Stadium, like everyone in the Rangers traveling party, had seen better days. At the end of the season, it would be shut down for two years for much needed renovations while the Yankees played their home games at Shea Stadium.