Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  This prolonged separation from the Rangers’ ordeal had proved therapeutic for the spirit and cleansing of the liver. In late January 1974, however, I made one trip to Arlington Stadium. The occasion was a small party in the press lounge. It was scheduled for an all-important announcement: for the coming season, Schlitz had signed on as the main sponsor of games broadcast on the Rangers’ radio network. The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous was now also the official beer of the Texas Rangers.

  As far as media parties go, this one was not particularly lavish. Refreshments were the same as what you’d find in the bedroom of the average Texan—a washtub full of ice and beer cans and a bowl of potato chips. Several high-powered ad guys showed for the announcement party for some reason, account executives from Dallas, Milwaukee and New York.

  Ad guys and sportswriters are not always a safe philosophical mix in certain social circumstances. My partner on the Rangers newspaper beat, Harold McKinney, had in fact recently been decked by an ad guy at Harold’s second home, the Press Club in Fort Worth. Harold had no choice, he assured me, other than to retaliate by pushing the ad guy down a flight of stairs.

  Now I have no quarrels with individuals associated with the advertising industry, although the true value of their contribution to what they themselves might refer to as the highways and byways of American life is something that I do often find to be ill-defined and fuzzy.

  So there was absolutely no motivation to foment agitation and certainly not the smallest trace of what the courts call malicious intent when I embarked on a conversation with one of the Schlitz ad guys that I guessed was from New York. “These Schlitz commercials that I see on TV all the time,” I began, “they’re all filmed on big sailboats and you see a bunch of guys rigging the sails and diving off the deck and drinking Schlitz and having a great time and all, but you never see any women on the boat … and you don’t see any women after the boat is parked on the beach and the guys are having a clambake and they’re singing and throwing Frisbees and still drinking all that Schlitz. So I was watching some of those commercials on a football game and got to wondering if maybe Schlitz is going after the gay market with these TV commercials.” My intent in making these remarks was solely to inject some levity into what was shaping up as a colorless gathering, perhaps bring some life to the usually dismal small talk that happens among strangers, even when free beer is being served. It never occurred to me to notice that, like the Schlitz sailboat, there weren’t any women at this press party.

  The ad man seemed offended. Well, he didn’t seem offended, he was offended. “Listen … we just finished filming a new series of commercials in Tokyo,” he told me in a tone that carried a sharp edge, “and these spots feature a young actor … Michael … and let me tell you this … Michael is all man. Strong shoulders, beautifully sculpted back, trim hips, magnificent thighs. I’d like to see you call Michael a fag to his face and you’ll really get what’s coming to you—” Whoa. A tense moment. Fortunately, further discussion of the matter of Michael was cut off with the entry of Jimmy Piersall into the press lounge. Piersall had recently been hired by Bob Short in a public relations capacity for the Rangers. He was supposed to make speeches to civic organizations, hawking season tickets, telling funny stories and serving as the Rangers’ Ambassador of Good Will. This was the same colorful Jimmy Piersall who played centerfield so spectacularly during the latter-day Ted Williams tenure in Boston and the same Jim Piersall who was portrayed by Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame in the film Fear Strikes Out—the story of how Piersall had some kind of major psychiatric episode, then came back to play more baseball.

  Piersall was exactly the kind of person that Bob Short liked to hire—a name that carried celebrity connotation. The ad guy who was so disenchanted with me sure as hell knew who Piersall was. So he turned from me and said, “Jimmy! Have a Schlitz!”

  “I don’t drink that goddamn goat piss,” Piersall said, and kept on walking. Jimmy might have added that it wasn’t Schlitz, specifically, that he regarded as goat piss. Piersall didn’t drink alcohol—period. But the poor ad guy didn’t know that and his mouth fell open. I felt like rushing over to Jimmy Piersall and giving him a warm embrace, then decided against that, lest I wind up on a Schlitz commercial.

  A brief conversation with Piersall did take place. He admitted that he would rather, by far, be associated with baseball on a more direct basis. But Jimmy said he had managed a team in the low minors and was disillusioned by the experience. He said that he suspected most of his players “were on dope.”

  Perhaps six weeks later, when I was billeted at Pompano Beach for spring training, some strange stories were filtering out of Texas concerning my new idol, Jimmy Piersall. According to information arriving at Pompano Stadium, the Rangers’ Ambassador of Good Will was successful in attracting attention to the ball club but was churning up some now heavy seas of discontent in the process.

  In a speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, Piersall supposedly castigated the group because of slow Rangers ticket sales in what is known (depending on one’s origins or view) as either the City Where The West Begins or Where The East Peters Out. “Fort Worth,” Piersall assured his audience, “is a horseshit little town. It even smells like horseshit.”

  Fort Worth people might echo such feelings to each other, but they do not take warmly to such an evaluation from an outsider. So the Rangers’ office in Arlington received perhaps a half-dozen complaints about Piersall, including a couple from individuals volunteering to come “whip the sumbitch’s ass.”

  Now Jimmy was on the prowl. In a speech to various Dallas big shots, Bob Short’s ambassador announced that cities like Dallas made him uneasy. The reason? Too many doctors and lawyers. “The only people more crooked than lawyers,” Piersall assured the group, “are doctors.” Not too many doctors were in the audience, but apparently, officers of the court were in plentiful supply and they were angry. More calls to Arlington Stadium, this time from insulted lawyers. They didn’t sue, but maybe they were thinking … How dare that man insinuate that doctors are more crooked than lawyers. I’m only partly joking.

  Apparently Jimmy had also found himself at times on the periphery and often at the core of some flare-ups around the Rangers’ officials. So Bob Short left spring training aboard his private Sabre Liner jet, traveled to Arlington and formally excommunicated Piersall from the Rangers’ temple. The ambassador’s credentials were jerked and he was to be deported.

  Piersall apologized to Short and swore to repent. So Short hired him back. “The poor guy is having all sorts of problems. I think he is going through a divorce and he told me he needed a heart transplant. He was in tears. How could I let him go?” Short was telling me all of these things during a party on his yacht back in Florida.

  In early April the regular season opened in Arlington with a good draw. Texas would open the grind with a weekend against Oakland, the same players that owner Charles Finley was paying bonuses for growing handlebar mustaches, which now stood above the rest as the prime attraction in all of baseball since the A’s had won another World Series with names like Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter. They blitzed Jim Bibby in the Friday opener, and in the press that night I was approached by Roy Parks, sales director for the Rangers’ radio network, and informed that “Piersall is really steamed at you.”

  Parks said that the ambassador had expressed dire displeasure over something that I had written in spring training. The gist of the story was that the players were sulking about catching a seven A.M. bus for an exhibition game against the Royals at Fort Myers … “at an hour when some of these players are used to getting in.” That’s what the story had said and that’s why Piersall was now angry. I wondered why. Closing time was four A.M. in Florida, after all, and by the time it took to find your car, it was not unreasonable to make it to bed at seven.

  On Saturday night Piersall, as promised, appeared in the pressbox, loudly offering, sure enough, a negative critique of that a
rticle. He began with an unusual preamble … “most of that shit you wrote down there was actually pretty fuckin’ good. I was using your stuff in my speeches. But that … that … crap about the players dragging in at seven in the morning … that really sucked.”

  “Well, Jimmy,” I said, “given the makeup of these teams that have been on display the last two years, we take a lighter view of things around here.”

  Piersall wasn’t through. “Listen. If I was still playing and you wrote something like that about me, I’d punch your fuckin’ lights out.”

  How does one respond to that? “I know you would,” I said. “I saw that movie.” Piersall’s mouth formed what I interpreted as a smile. Everybody else in the pressbox was smiling for sure and I thought nothing else of it.

  Ferguson Jenkins was making his first regular-season appearance in a Rangers uniform and performing as advertised. Jenkins, a precision marksman, was pop, pop, popping away and hitting his spots with the nonchalance of a darts hustler in a Manchester pub. Jenkins toyed with Oakland’s powerhouse lineup like a mean kid pulling the wings off flies. When Jenkins finally completed this preliminary demonstration of his throwing technique to the American League, he had fashioned a two-hit shutout.

  The finale to the series was a day game on Sunday. They played a few of those in Arlington in April, before the heat became too insufferable. After the seventh inning I ventured back into the lounge area for a quick shot of liquid anesthetic and was followed in there by who else but Jimmy Piersall. Once inside, Piersall exploded and I suspected for a moment that he might be about to redecorate the walls and ceiling with the contents of my skull. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that Al Panzera of the Star-Telegram, a man who claimed with some justification to be the best sports photographer in the United States, had picked up a butcher knife from the barbecue buffet table. I yelled at Piersall: “For God’s sake, Jimmy. Keep your voice down. Can’t you see? People are trying to drink in here!” Piersall, thankfully, stomped off.

  Al Panzera promptly assured me that “if Piersall made a move, I had the knife and was ready to jump him from behind.” I suspected that Al’s actual motive here had been self-preservation. Panzera figured that after Piersall had finished me off, he might well turn his attentions to Al. After the game, en route to the Rangers’ clubhouse, I literally bumped into Bob Short under the stands and told him that his ambassador might be suffering some sort of meltdown. Well, not that term, exactly. The miracle of American nuclear engineering technology had not quite advanced to the point where “meltdown” was in common-place usage in the modern vernacular.

  Ten minutes later in the clubhouse I was asking Toby Harrah to tell my North Texas reading audience all about how he had gotten the game-winning RBI off the A’s. All of a sudden, an expression of distress crossed Harrah’s face as he took note of Piersall’s arrival. “Short just fired me and it’s your fault, you son of a bitch!” Piersall said. I presumed that he was once again addressing me. He looked about to charge. Harrah jumped in front of me, holding a bat, and then Billy Martin heard the commotion, came out, grabbed Piersall around the shoulders and pulled him into his office. Conflict and friction are territorial hazards in the working life of the sportswriter, but I hadn’t encountered it in a dosage like this since I’d found a death threat under my windshield wiper six years earlier. A reader was planning my demise because I had suggested TCU might win more games if the school offered scholarships to black athletes.

  The next day, Monday, was one of those all-too-rare off-days that happen during the regular season and still, the shadow of Jimmy Piersall was refusing to vanish from my life. All day, the phone rang at my house. People from news outlets around the country were calling to find out why I had wanted to thrust more difficulty into Jimmy Piersall’s already troubled life. My response to all was the same: “What in the hell are you talking about?” I was not aware, at this point, that David Fink had prepared an essentially erroneous account of the whole sorry episode that ran in the Dallas Times-Herald and was picked up by the wire services. The last thing, the very last thing that a sports-writer desires is to see his own name appearing in the news columns. According to Fink’s account, I had gone running to Bob Short, demanding that Piersall be axed. At least, that’s the way I interpreted it. There was nothing in Fink’s story about how Piersall, within the month, had already been fired and defired. Now I knew what it was like to be screwed by a newspaperman.

  The next time I encountered Fink I did my best to evoke an icy tone. “I ‘demanded’ that Short fire Piersall? If I’d known I had so much influence over Short’s personnel decisions, then I’d be managing the Rangers instead of Billy Martin. Get your facts straight!” This was my message to David Fink. And the real facts in this case were that I actually liked Jimmy Piersall and hated that he was fired. Besides, what other team in baseball had a guy who viewed his full-time job as going around telling lawyers and ad executives to fuck off?

  One week into the 1974 regular season, the happiest event in Bob Short’s life took place.

  When Short had confirmed in late September 1971 that he was moving the Senators franchise to Texas, a fan crept into his box at RFK Stadium and dumped a jumbo-sized cup of beer on Bob Short’s head. For Bob Short, the months that followed brought a procession of events filled with ridicule and humiliation. Now Short was finally attaining his long-term goal. He was unloading the franchise on some Texas people who had tapped on his door and offered cash.

  The true story was that Bob Short’s lawyer, friend and trusted ally, Frank Ryan, was between flights in the Atlanta airport and waiting in the bar when he overheard a man with the kind of voice that fills a room tell another traveler of his growing desire to purchase an existing franchise in the National Basketball Association and transfer it to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Ryan approached the man in the airport bar, introduced himself and said that while he could be of no assistance in the world of hoops, he could provide quick access to somebody with a major sports product.

  After a negotiation that lasted less than two weeks, Bradford G. Corbett, an individual bearing a remarkable resemblance in face and torso to modem-day actor John Goodman, would head an investor group that had obtained necessary financing to take the Rangers off Bob Short’s hands.

  Corbett, who lived in Fort Worth but was a native of Staten Island, had started a chemical company called Robintec with a Small Business Administration loan. Somehow, Robintec had perfected a patented process that could mass-produce polyvinyl-chloride pipe that met recently imposed and rigid environmental standards. With the oilfield service-supply industry now at its zenith, Corbett had turned Robintec into a publicly held company, had become rich and now wanted to have some fun.

  That was to be anticipated from a man who had grown up in modest circumstances and gone on to achieve the big financial hit while still on the cool side of forty. Corbett told me that when he was going to school in New York State at Wagner College he was hopelessly, terminally in love with a striking Norwegian beauty named Gunnie who was the school homecoming queen. “I helped push Gunnie’s float down the street in the Wagner homecoming parade,” Corbett told me one time.

  Homecoming queens traditionally marry into the family that some large campus building is named after, and failing that, they might marry the president of the Young Republicans or perhaps even the quarterback. Homecoming queens do not marry float pushers. But Corbett persisted and eventually claimed his prize. Now Brad was lusting to own a big-league sports franchise.

  At the press conference called to announce officially that Bob Short could now safely evacuate the badlands of Texas and return to the Land of 10,000 Lakes with his head high and his bank account sufficiently nourished, Corbett was accompanied by a few other well-heeled wheelhorses from Fort Worth and Dallas who had bought into the Rangers deal. One was Amon Carter, Jr., the publishing heir who had recently sold to Cap Cities the paper that employed me. Another was Ray Nasher, a dapper little man
who had developed North Park, the first massive shopping mall in Dallas.

  The new Rangers deed-holders at the hastily arranged meeting with the media were woefully ill-prepared to answer any specific questions concerning who actually owned what and how much they had paid for whatever it was that they weren’t sure that they owned. Corbett was asked when he expected to receive formal approval of the franchise sale from the American League. He shrugged and rolled his eyes, as if to say, “You mean the league has to okay this deal? Nobody told us that.”

  But Corbett could definitely confirm one item that was a side-issue to the sale. A former Rangers employee had been hired by Corbett’s company Robintec. Jimmy Piersall was going to work as a plastic-pipe salesman.

  Piersall spent a lot of time at the ballpark for the remainder of that 1974 season and treated me like a long-lost brother. “Jesus … Corbett’s paying me twice what I was making with Short and the Rangers,” he told me. “What a deal.”

  Indeed.

  Chapter 18

  “In this day and time, people are excitable and it doesn’t take much to set them off.”

  —Dick Butler,

  Supervisor of American League umpires,

  June 1974

  Billy Martin was perplexed.

  For much of the entire month of April, the Texas Rangers remained listed in first place in the baseball standings for the American League West, just like Billy Martin had said they would be. In Texas, the fans were responding. Attendance might not have been skyrocketing, but a persistent pulse rate was at least in evidence in the turnstile-count at Arlington Stadium.

  Only now, in late May, Martin was being beleaguered by a problem fan—a season ticket holder who sat behind the Rangers’ dugout shrieking obscenities at the home-team manager and bewailing his every strategic ploy.