Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  After arriving at the mostly deserted ballpark about three-thirty, I walked into the pressbox elevator. One other person was also stepping into the same elevator—none other than Billy Martin. So when, I asked Martin, do you start? Billy was casual. “Tonight,” he said. “They’re sewing the old Number 1 on the back of my Rangers uniform as we speak.” We talked for about two minutes, and he assured the readers of the Star-Telegram that General George Patton was there and that the ranks of the old Rangers F-Troop, the Dark Command—beginning next season and not at the tail end of this now-forgotten campaign—would either shape up or consider a career in vacuum-cleaner sales.

  One more question was left to ask. “This team has some fairly controversial characters on it. How do you plan to deal with those people?” His eyes seemed to spark momentarily as he answered a question with a question.

  “Who do they have who’s more controversial than I am?” said Billy Martin.

  Chapter 16

  Certain architects maintain a distinctive talent for designing structures that actually seem to frown. Mostly, this look is reserved for criminal-court buildings, Internal Revenue Service offices and other such facilities that the average citizen attempts to avoid like the cholera. Pompano Stadium was probably the only baseball park that had that kind of ominous facade.

  Spring training, 1974, was about to begin, and the Rangers’ Florida headquarters exuded the same aura of defeat that had radiated such a striking impression when I arrived there exactly one year before. Even when this ballpark was full of people, which it always was when the Yankees rode the bus up from Fort Lauderdale for an exhibition game, the place still seemed somehow abandoned.

  On the field, the players went through the routine of the workouts with the same attitude of world-weariness, earmarked by a distinct absence of vigor and élan, and the same contagious ennui that had been so much in evidence the last season. The white home uniforms were the same, with red-and-blue trim and the word “Rangers” stitched across the shirts in that hokey-type style that sign painters in the Old West seemed to have favored.

  Old Captain Jack still maintained his vigil in the little lunchroom down the leftfield line, making sure that the hot dogs were the ones for which, in Bob Short’s estimation, there could be no ersatz replacement, no matter how well disguised. The palm trees beyond the fence still seemed to be battling tuberculosis and the kids from Pompano Beach’s talented and gifted magnet high school were still smoking reefers on top of the pressbox.

  Beyond the surface elements, however, the concept of change was manifesting itself in many critical areas of Rangers spring training. First of all, the “quality of life” of the 1973 season was mitigated this year. Essentials such as nightlife venues were limited because of the gasoline shortage brought on that year by the latest ceremonial war in the Mideast. Lines at the pumps in South Florida were absurdly long. Finally, the equipment guy of the Rangers, Smacko Macko, had arranged exclusive access at a Gulf station for the baseball “group” … as long as you showed up at three A.M., an hour at which I was hardly up to operating the pump. Another downside feature of that spring was a swamp fire just to the west of Pompano Beach that blanketed the whole area for the entire month of March with a god-awful stench.

  The most significant alteration of Pompano lifestyle was that my on-the-road partnership with Harold McKinney had been dissolved. During the previous year, the ownership of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and its TV station, Channel 5, had been transferred from the hometown Amon Carter group to Cap Cities in what at the time had been the biggest media sale in the history of the country. Cap Cities apparently employed something novel in its operational setup—people who were known as accountants—and when they began researching the bar tabs of the two Star-Telegram baseball writers, I am told that gasps could be heard throughout the corridors of Manhattan.

  So “the big boys in the home office” had ordained that McKinney and I would split spring training and all of the regular season road trips, an act that I regarded as benign, humane and entirely unnewspaper-like. It also meant double the workload on the road. Translation: I might have to cut my hours in the Florida bistros sometimes as much as one hour a day.

  The arrival of Billy Martin late in the 1973 season naturally meant that the working mood around the baseball team would be different, although one could not determine just how different from the pace of the new manager’s spring-training approach. During much of the off-season Martin had assured the good people of the Dallas-Fort Worth region that the burlesque show at Arlington Stadium was closing for good, to be replaced with a more sophisticated version of major-league baseball. Billy also told the people not to be surprised when his Rangers negotiated a Worst-To-First gambit—which the fan base and certainly the media cheerfully wrote off as the hollow and opportunistic rhetoric of a politician six points down in the polls. But Martin swore that the Rangers, fresh from a 57-105 showing in 1973, would, through the magic of a Billy Martin Makeover, contend for the division championship in 1974.

  Billy’s demeanor in his first spring training in Pompano was tactically keyed down. He well realized that the material on the field was fifteen percent silk purse and eighty-five percent sow’s ear. From all the way across the diamond, Martin could hear Lloyd Allen—one of the remaining refugees from Whitey Herzog’s Lost Battalion of Live Young Arms—warming up in the makeshift bullpen out by the leftfield flagpole. The sound was not the “thud” of Lloyd Allen’s sonic boom fastball into a catcher’s mitt but rather the “bang” of Lloyd’s high hard one hitting the fence after it had sailed several feet in various directions beyond the reach of the catcher.

  One of Billy’s ample corps of “trusted lieutenants”—Art Fowler—was openly appalled at what he was seeing. It was Art Fowler’s self-embraced destiny to follow the same checkered job path as Billy Martin—the Human Cannonball—to be hired and fired on the same day. Fired in Minnesota and on to Detroit. Fired in Detroit and on to Texas. Art, the pitching coach, traveled with Martin every step. Fowler, whose nose should have rated mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not as a replica of W. C. Fields’, wore a blank expression as he sat behind the plate and watched the Rangers mound prospects warm up.

  “Just throw strikes, kid,” Art would mutter, mostly to himself in a soft South Carolina lament. “Babe Ruth’s dead.” Art would shake his head, gesture toward a Lloyd Allen, a Don Stanhouse or a Steve Dunning and proclaim, “If these kids can’t get people out simply throwin’ the ball over the plate, then I’ll eat this batting cage. But …” Then another “bang” would resound from the fence behind the leftfield bullpen and Art would shake his head again. Billy Martin and Art Fowler could now readily understand why Whitey Herzog, at times, had been on the verge of storming the altar at a Billy Graham crusade, begging for salvation.

  Given the characteristics of the personnel at hand, Billy shrewdly abandoned—for spring training at least—his favored leadership techniques. Better Living Through Confrontation wouldn’t work down here. Billy usually liked to stress that “the way to a man’s heart is through his chest” but he would put that policy on hold, too. He told me that his only ironclad rule for spring training was this: anybody who missed a workout would be fined unless the player could offer proof that he had been fishing.

  Martin, this year, was Mister Congeniality, and that profile was on display nightly at the dear old Banyan Lounge at the Surf Rider Resort, right there at beachside on Highway 1. Billy was a regular there with his coaches and his ballplayers. Most big-league managers decree, as Baseball’s First Commandment, that the players’ cocktail-hour congregations be conducted anywhere but the bar in the same hotel where the team is located. The reasoning is simple. Often fans, autograph-seekers and assorted other curious members of the private sector are known to hang out at baseball hotels. Therefore, the Lords of Baseball are characteristically reluctant to allow the general public to witness the field hands at play. To express it bluntly, a gather
ing of five or more big-league baseball players in those days had the potential to make the U.S. Navy Tailhook convention look like a Mormon prayer convocation.

  Because of what Billy considered his natural paternal instincts, he professed that he felt more comfortable with his players lingering closer to the house. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to ride an elevator up to the room than it is to get back from a strange part of town,” Billy reasoned. “I don’t want to get any three A.M. phone calls from the cops or some shithead in an emergency room telling me that my cleanup hitter has driven up a telephone pole and that I need to come pick up what’s left of him.”

  So the Banyan Room then became the baseball hangout of 1974, but the ballplayers were the supporting cast. Billy Martin was the star. In the history of American celebrity-dom, there has probably never been a recognizable personality who went out of his or her way to be seen to the extent that Billy Martin did.

  The “Little Dago”—he persisted in calling himself that even though persons familiar with Billy’s lineage believe him to be more Portuguese than Italian—adored his fans. At least, he did until exactly seventy-five minutes past midnight. Then Billy would undergo a swift transformation of personality in which he suddenly became the reigning poultryweight champion of the world and apt to practice uppercuts and jabs into the faces of some of these same adoring fans. He didn’t require New York’s Copacabana nightclub to stage the main event of the evening. The County Line Tavern in Grand Prairie, Texas, could serve as a more than adequate facility. Indeed, any old dive would do. But that aspect of Billy’s enigmatic disposition would not come to the fore until much later in the season. The Billy that everybody encountered in the Banyan Room in 1974 looked and acted like a man playing the lead in a toothpaste commercial.

  And why not? In Texas, Billy was in everyday sipping proximity to his adored companion, Mickey Mantle, now immersed in his golfing retirement in Dallas. Billy was avidly proclaiming to the world that Texas was his kind of place. He wore Levis, cowboy boots and occasionally even a cowboy hat. All that was missing was a set of pearl-handled six shooters. “The Little Dago” appeared at home in his new identity as “Bronco Billy,” the Baseball Bushwhacker. Martin’s black Lincoln, seemingly as long as Bob Short’s yacht, was conspicuous by its presence in the Banyan Room parking lot, with personalized Texas license plates emblazoned with the numeral “1.”

  Martin further realized that he had stumbled into the closest facsimile to a “win-win” managerial situation that baseball had to offer. The Rangers had only one direction available to them and the one man who might enable Martin to punch the “up” button was now at work in a Rangers’ uniform. The trade that Whitey Herzog had initially orchestrated with the Cubs had, indeed, taken place over the winter. It was not quite the deal that Whitey had outlined. Herzog had a tacit agreement from Chicago to send Alex Johnson and Vic Harris over in exchange for the treasure in the deal, Ferguson Jenkins. Instead, the Rangers retained Johnson but parted with Harris and Bill Madlock, the prime prospect in the Rangers’ farm system. Madlock wound up winning three National League batting championships.

  That seemed inconsequential in 1974. Standing among the kamikaze corps that was competing for jobs on Martin’s staff, Fergie Jenkins appeared to have drifted down from another planet. He could throw strikes and he had long ago mastered the nuances of the craft of pitching that seemed so baffling to the majority of the cast assembled in Pompano Beach.

  This man alone meant that the Rangers figured to be at least fifteen wins better than the 1973 season. He sure as hell looked the part of a man who would eventually surpass the hallowed 300-win milestone in the major league. Almost six-foot-seven, his towering presence on the mound could petrify the hitter.

  Jenkins now sat serenely atop the picnic table down the leftfield line that served as the pressroom at Pompano Stadium. He watched a rookie centerfielder field a line drive during an intra-squad game and then run about eight strides forward before relaying the ball back to the infield. “That young man apparently thinks he’s involved in a javelin competition,” Jenkins observed.

  I sat there scribbling notes, trying to collect items for a Sunday article on Jenkins’ life story. He told me that he had played for the Harlem Globetrotters for a season before deciding that pitching baseballs would become his life’s work. Born in Chatham and having grown up on a farm in Ontario, Jenkins also said that scouts assured him he had all the necessary requirements to become the first black star in the National Hockey League. Jenkins laughed and said, “Now why in the world would I want to do that?”

  Billy Martin, naturally, was delighted that a force like Jenkins was working for the Rangers. What Billy saw in Fergie was a Manager of the Year plaque. It was obvious that Jenkins and Jim Bibby would constitute a two-man starting rotation for this team, and the candidates for the fill-in spots gave Martin some interesting choices.

  One was David Clyde. “Having saved the franchise, David Clyde now tries to make the team.” I wrote that in the Star-Telegram one afternoon, after my sensitivities had been heightened by a husky cabernet and some expensive incense provided by a New Age woman—in those days, I think they were still known as hippies—who was sharing my room during this spring training of 1974.

  Clyde would indeed make the team and not, Martin assured me, “because of who he is but because he’s got guts, throws hard and is one of the few who appears to know what he’s doing.”

  Jim Merritt—sans greaseball—was back by popular demand, although his starting assignments would be widely spaced to mostly coincide with the appearance of comets and an occasional lunar eclipse. The remaining starting job was being won by a righthander who had come to the Rangers via the team’s favorite talent pool—the American League’s “physically unable to perform” list. Steve Hargan, another rehab project, told me that he had been delivered to Pompano Beach “in a truck from Goodwill Industries.”

  Like Jim Merritt, Hargan had compiled a winning major-league track record until his arm had blown up. Now he was attempting a comeback in Texas. The mainspring in Steve Hargan’s pitching arm might not have been as tight as it once was, “but,” he said, “at least I can throw again without my shoulder making noises like somebody stripping the gears on a Model T.”

  Hargan showed right away that he enjoyed natural instincts that enabled him to excel not only on the pitcher’s mound but also in what is known as the Game of Life. Such people also tend to be endowed with inquisitive minds. Hargan, for instance, was devoting an afternoon to patronage of the poolside bar at the Surf Rider when he encountered a Canuck whose bathing suit emphasized a physical configuration that was strikingly similar to that of a showgirl who had been Jack Ruby’s top stage attraction in Dallas: Chris Colt and her twin 45’s. The pitcher gazed at the lady’s God-given assets in admiration and wonderment and finally asked, “Don’t you ever let the air out of those things?”

  Billy Martin had little doubt that Steve Hargan would conform nicely to this unit that might be described as “The Little Dago’s Foreign Legion.” Like the 1973 Rangers, this group was largely composed of outcasts and renegades, but Billy had hand-picked a few operatives who were proven survivors in the big-league jungles. One of these was Cesar Tovar, who had been one of Martin’s key guys when he won the division with the Twins. In Minnesota, Tovar had once played all nine positions for an inning apiece in a single game. The quintessential blithe spirit, Tovar insisted that everyone call him “Pepi,” although other names probably came into use as well since it was rumored that he was married to three women in three different countries when he joined the Rangers.

  If such was the case, Tovar apparently was recruiting a possible Number Four after the Rangers had won their exhibition season opener against the Yankees. At the Banyan Room bar, he sat beaming next to what Hargan described as a “pageant-quality” Scandinavian woman. “Tovar have good day,” he explained. “Get two hits and score blonde.”

  One of the h
oldovers from the Rangers’ shipwreck of 1973, Jim Fregosi, was also assured membership on Billy’s somewhat modified and redecorated Texas roster. Fregosi had agreed to a reduction in his previous salary of $90,000—a fat salary in the paleolithic, pre-free-agency era of major-league baseball. “You have to figure out how to prolong your shelf life. That’s the key to longevity in this racket for players like me,” Fregosi insisted. “Don’t get pushy at contract time and wear out your welcome. Baseball players are just like motor oil and toilet paper … a commodity with a set market price. If more players thought like I do, they’d last longer.”

  Fregosi, of course, was another of those troops who adhered to the label of “the kind of guy Billy likes to have around.” There was still some life in Fregosi’s bat, he knew how to play the game and could hold his liquor. Not only that, Fregosi ranked near the absolute top of the major-league heap when it came to overall handicapping skills at the horse and harness track.

  Above all else, Fregosi, with his perspective built from years of service, was simply happy to be a Ranger. “That team last year … I’ve been in the majors a dozen years and I’ve never been around anything like that,” he reflected. “That was not only the worst team I’ve ever been associated with, but also it had the best morale, far and away. Very loose. Imagine how much fun it would be around here if these guys actually started to win a few?”

  Chapter 17

  Somebody once defined the meaning of life as “the interruption of an otherwise peaceful nonexistence.” My extended off-season vacation, mandated by company-calculated “comp” time, had amounted to exactly that, a peaceful nonexistence devoted mostly to playing tennis and working on the original draft of my first novel, Teenage Milkman, a title that I must confess was supplied by Rangers outfielder Jeff Burroughs. He recommended another one as well—Nurses On Horseback.