Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  But on one shining moment in 1962, the readers of the Press were given a once-in-a-lifetime treat. On the occasion of Richard Nixon’s defeat in his campaign for the governor of California, the Press ran a short UPI feature describing Mrs. Nixon’s disappointment at the setback. At this historic juncture, a headline writer at the Press composed the following masterpiece: “Pat Loses Composure As Dick Sinks.”

  Apparently Mrs. Nixon had become more accustomed to the sensation by 1974. She appeared rather serene on the portable set that everyone was watching in the pressbox at Arlington Stadium while the President told the nation that “I’ve never been a quitter, but …” Nixon’s speech took place during a Rangers-A’s game. In the bottom of the fourth inning the Rangers’ public-address announcer, Bob Berry, told the crowd that President Nixon had resigned, and I later read in some wire-service story that the folks in the stands in Arlington responded to the news with “hoots and catcalls.” I’m not sure what catcalls are, actually, but if the nation was “grief-stricken” by the event, as the media had suggested, then that part of the nation did not include Arlington Stadium.

  Baseball annals will note that on the night Nixon took a hike, the A’s beat the Rangers, 8-1. Afterward I approached Reggie Jackson, who next to Hank Aaron was the closest thing to a celebrity that baseball had to offer at the time, and asked him what, if anything, had crossed his mind out there in rightfield when it was announced that the President was no longer the President. Reggie Jackson looked at me like I was nuts. “Announcement? I didn’t hear any announcement, did you, Sal?” Jackson said, turning to the man at the adjacent locker, Sal Bando. Bando merely shrugged.

  “I get paid a lot of money to hit homeruns. I concentrate on that and nothing else. Why should I be interested in politics?” Jackson said. “Why worry about that crap? What I’m worried about is the Texas Rangers. We’re trying to win a third straight World Series and they’re not making it easy for us. They’re in the race and they’ll be in it until the last because if they were going to fold, that would have happened long before now.”

  I did not doubt for a nanosecond that Reggie Jackson was completely sincere when he said that this transcendent event—Watergate—was of absolutely no consequence to him. In the one-and-a-half years that I had been covering the Texas Rangers, the media had become habitually devoted to this story, but I had yet to encounter a baseball player who maintained even an obscure knowledge or interest in the topic of Watergate or could name even one of the people involved. If anybody in baseball was “grief-stricken” over the news events of that week, it was because Dizzy Dean had just dropped dead in Reno (pallbearers included Pee Wee Reese, Roy Acuff and Bear Bryant). And if ballplayers were absorbed by anything beyond their own stats, it was Evel Knievel’s upcoming jump across the Snake River canyon on a jet motorcycle.

  While Jackson meant what he said about politics, considerable doubt remained about the sincerity of his expressed concerns about the Rangers’ role in the pennant race. Still … the Rangers had been consistently chugging along in the A’s shadow, and as Billy Martin was pointing out—nightly and with great elation—the Rangers were not about to choke. Martin’s reasoning: There is no way to choke when you’re under no pressure.

  On the charter airplanes and in the bistros throughout the land, this new Rangers team was quick and willing to replicate the behavior of the 1973 outfit that was so well-suited for a side-show on the midway. On a trip into Boston in late July the team was sharing the Sheraton with a convention of the Massachusetts state-teachers union and perhaps 300 delegates. Like the Rangers, it turned out that some of these Massachusetts school teachers were no rookies in the party-league themselves. Around midnight I encountered a pitcher, Jackie Gene Brown, the pride of Weewoka, Oklahoma, in charge of a large hospitality suite and wearing a badge that identified him as Ernest Blumenthal of Brookline, candidate for treasurer of the teachers union. “The guy said he’d let me pretend to be him if I could get free tickets tomorrow,” Brown explained to me. “Come in and have a drink … and I appreciate your vote.”

  That same night another player told me of something harrowing that had just happened to him. “I was in the bar across the street and putting my best cheap moves on this gal with great tits and asked her to come up to my room,” the player said. “Then she … or it or whatever it was … said that she couldn’t because she hadn’t had her final operation yet. God awmighty. When I was dancing with her I felt a hard-on. But I thought it was mine.”

  Off the field it was the same act as 1973. On the field, the team stayed four to six games above .500. Fergie Jenkins would stand out as the root cause. Jenkins, certainly, ranked as a paradigm alternative to the “live young arms” of the previous season, the ones who had given Whitey Herzog cause to consider seeking electroconvulsive therapy to help him through the campaign. But Jenkins could only pitch every fourth or fifth game. What this new 1974 contingent, deemed “The Turnaround Gang” by the Rangers’ pre-season media publication, amounted to was an ensemble of players—Lenny Randle, Cesar Tovar, Alex Johnson and Toby Harrah—who were getting on base consistently, and Jeff Burroughs, who was driving them in. Burroughs, in June, came within a game of tying an American League record, shared by Jimmy Foxx and Lou Gehrig, for RBIs in consecutive games.

  Beyond Jenkins, Jim Bibby, Steve Hargan and Jackie Brown were pitching just consistently enough to avoid calamity. Steve Foucault, the only Ranger who would someday become an Arlington cop, was a one-man bullpen.

  The added factors that enable teams to win pennants—pitching depth, quality defense and a reliable bench—remained in absentia. Billy Martin’s centerfielder, Tovar, had been colliding with other fielders so frequently that the manager employed an emergency measure. He tied a whistle around Tovar’s neck with instructions “to blow the shit out of the thing whenever he was chasing a fly ball.”

  The new catcher, Jim Sundberg, up from AA, was measuring up to standards and would actually be selected to the All-Star game. “That makes me the second most famous native of Galesburg, Illinois,” Sundberg was fond of telling people. Numero Uno was George Reeves, TV’s original Superman, who blew his brains out during a party at his house in Beverly Hills. Another welcome asset was the first Texan in the history of the franchise, one Dudley Michael Hargrove. (David Clyde had gone to high school in Houston but was basically from Kansas). Hargrove was the product of Perryton, Texas, a Panhandle community isolated away in the most primeval regions of the vast Texas Outback, a town where all of the little old grannies have the slogan “The Only Good Indian Is A Baptist Deacon” embroidered in needlepoint and hanging over the mantel.

  Hargrove had been invited to spring training on the basis of having hit .365 for the Rangers the previous season—the Gastonia Rangers in the Western Carolina League. “In spring training the guy [Hargrove] tells me that he was destined to be a Ranger,” said Billy Martin, “because his team in high school was the Rangers and then he’d gone to some hick college in Oklahoma and they were the Rangers, too.” Martin rolled his eyes. “I figured I’d have to locate some team called the Rangers back in the Lickskillet League just to accommodate him. And then I saw him hit.”

  Sharing first base with Jim Spencer, Hargrove hit over .400 for the first half of the season, and the average was not tailing off too considerably with the stretch drive now in plain sight. Hargrove maintained a country boy awshucks attitude about the whole thing. Joe Garagiola interviewed Hargrove before the Rangers’ first-ever appearance on the NBC Game of the Week (the world was starting to notice this team) and Hargrove said, “Well, I’ve been flat lucky this year … a bunch of chinkers have fallen in for me.

  Chinkers. Joe Garagiola could talk about little else for the next three months. The chinkers just kept dropping for Hargrove, who, despite the naïve front that he was employing for his first season in the majors, was actually (as they like to say back in the Panhandle) tougher than a bus station steak.

  The one player
in this Rangers’ alignment not experiencing an exceptional season was the salvation of the franchise himself, David Clyde. As Martin’s fifth starter, Clyde had gotten out of the gate nicely with a 3-1 record that included a complete-game shutout against New York at Shea Stadium, where the Yankees were temporarily playing their home games while Yankee Stadium underwent structural renovation. As the season progressed, Clyde was less and less effective and, on certain mornings on the road in hotel coffee shops, took on something of the air of Jack Lemon in The Days of Wine and Roses.

  Clyde avoided missing a morning charter flight from Boston to Detroit only because the plane was late taking off and escaped a substantial fine. Martin said he later learned Clyde himself had called the airport gate and successfully convinced someone to delay the charter for a few minutes. “I’ve got to hand it to him … Clyde saved himself a couple of grand,” Martin said. “But that’s about all he’s done right lately.” The fact that Clyde might actually have sacrificed a sterling career so that Bob Short could secure emergency funds at the box office was of no consequence to Billy Martin. He wasn’t around when that happened. What Martin cared about was that his fifth starter was a wreck.

  And this team didn’t require any novelty attractions to bring the fans in. When Bob Short brought the franchise to Arlington, he said the break-even point rested at 800,000 paid attendance for the season. In the first and second seasons the Rangers’ sad numbers had not surpassed the 570,000 mark. Now, with Billy driving the bus and the team actually winning, the 1974 team would bring almost 1.2 million paying fans into Arlington.

  Brad Corbett, the point man on the new ownership regime that bought the Rangers from Short in April, was in ecstasy. Corbett, as owner, had not yet advanced past the fan stage. The players were his idols and on off-nights Corbett had been hosting huge parties for the team at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, an exclusive layout on Roaring Springs Road in West Fort Worth that happened to be the only locale where Ben Hogan would still agree to play golf. Brad bought Billy a membership in the club, and Martin later denied to me—more or less—that he and Mickey Mantle had almost run over Hogan one day in their golf cart. (Now that Billy and Mickey have been reunited in the hereafter, one wonders if they have golf carts in heaven. If so, watch out.)

  Martin did confirm that some event had taken place that had demoted him to persona-non-grata status at Shady Oaks. “Look at this,” he said in his office one day as he showed me a delinquent food-and-drink tab of over three grand from Shady Oaks. Billy grinned. “How in the hell do they expect me to go out there and pay that bill if I am no longer welcome on the premises?”

  In his exuberance Corbett was offering players off-season jobs with his company, Robintec. “Brad asked me if I knew anything about irrigation,” Steve Hargan said the day after another soiree at Shady Oaks. “I told him that I’d had my bladder irrigated one time and he said, ‘You’re hired!’ He’s a hell of an owner.”

  Corbett’s principal investment partner in the Rangers deal was considerably less conspicuous. That was Amon Carter, Jr., who was still the figurehead publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, although he had recently sold the paper. Carter’s father had been the original media magnate of the Southwest, owning not only the paper but also the first radio and TV stations in Texas. In Fort Worth the name Carter was on a par with Rockefeller in New York and everything from the TCU football stadium to an airport to a YMCA camp to a blood center was named after Amon, Sr.

  When Amon, Jr., was captured by the Germans in World War II, his father actually arranged to fly to Switzerland to “bail my boy out of that German jail.” But when he arrived overseas Carter, Sr., was told that “little Amon” had already escaped. He was recaptured and later related to a friend that the Germans “told me that if I ever tried it again they’d shoot my ass off.”

  This was a great and colorful family. Actually the only conversation that I can recall having with Amon Carter happened in the pressbox at Arlington and was nickle-dime stuff. “I worry about all these foul balls. Those baseballs are more expensive than you’d think,” he told me. “But I’ve noticed that three or four cups of beer are knocked over by people scrambling for the foul ball and then they all buy another beer, so I guess we just about break even.”

  What stood out in the early phases of the new operational package that had taken over from Short was that this group had absolutely no background in the arcane world of baseball ownership. An experienced and talented marketing executive from Fort Worth, Jerre Todd, approached Brad Corbett with what Todd called “a comprehensive promotional and advertising plan” to provide the team with a better image and take full advantage of the revenue potential not just from Dallas and Fort Worth but also from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

  “I made my pitch to Corbett thoroughly and elaborately … it was a damn good plan,” Todd told me, “and then Brad got this faraway look in his eye and he yelled, ‘Parking lot! We’ll have a big barbecue in the parking lot!’ And he sent me away and that was that.” Corbett, as well as every Rangers owner before and after him, was chronically retarded when it came to baseball-marketing insight. But Corbett did bring forward one strategically wise decision during the ownership transition. He convinced Dr. Bobby Brown, a cardiologist in Fort Worth, to suspend his medical practice, temporarily at least, to join the Rangers full-time with the title of president.

  This was the same Bobby Brown who had played third base for the Yankees during the late Forties and early Fifties, the tail end of the Joe DiMaggio era of postwar baseball when the Yankees were at the absolute pinnacle of public esteem. Brown was leaving the Yankees just as Martin was arriving. Bobby Brown, with his air of dignity and smarts, commanded the total respect of everybody associated with the team—including Billy Martin. So Doctor Brown was the ideal person to be at the controls whenever Billy began to exhibit his “authority problem” as ultimately he always would. In early August Martin decided to ship David Clyde to the minor leagues. “What I’ll do is send him for less than a week and then bring him right back up … but I’m not going to tell him about the recall,” Martin told the Texas sportswriters. “Sort of like what they do to little hoodlums. Send them to prison just long enough to give them a taste of what it’s like and then turn ’em loose so maybe they’ll learn their lesson. If I do that with David, maybe he’ll wake up.”

  When Bobby Brown got word of Billy’s scheme he called Martin and told him that he was vetoing that plan. “David Clyde has done too much for this franchise to be manipulated like that,” Brown ruled, and now the first traces of friction in Martin’s Texas Era had become evident.

  As Billy’s 1974 Rangers established themselves as a team that would refuse to turn back into the pumpkin of 1973, and probably even something more than a complete imposter in the American League West, Martin began to assert himself more frequently in his more familiar role of instigator-agitator.

  At a Sunday doubleheader in Milwaukee, when Martin took out his lineup card for the pre-game meeting with Brewers’ manager Del Crandell and the umpires, he casually announced to Crandell that “your pitcher threw at our shortstop four times yesterday. So I’m telling you now that your shortstop [rookie Robin Yount] will be going down today.”

  According to the unwritten rules of baseball there are two things to which a manager must never confess: marital infidelity and intentionally throwing at an opposing batter. In the sixth inning of the opening game at County Stadium, as advertised, Rangers’ pitcher Pete Broberg zinged a fastball directly at Robin Yount’s chin. After the game, in which Crandell’s Brewers had responded in kind, home-plate umpire Ron Luciano became livid over Martin’s pre-game declaration when he said that he intended to launch a beanball conflict. “Martin and Crandell both manage their teams with an iron hand and it really pisses me off that they’d go out there and intentionally create a situation like that.”

  WE CAN’T HAVE THAT SORT OF THING!

  Martin got a three-g
ame suspension from the American League office for his part in the subplot in Milwaukee, but now that he had whetted his built-in thirst for controversy and conflict, Billy wanted some more.

  Chapter 20

  In his book, The American Scene, published in 1919, the late H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, expressed his disdain for American journalists. Stupid Philistines, was his judgment. And many would agree that people are attracted to journalism because they are too lazy to work at the post office but not lazy enough to become lawyers.

  Hell, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that H. L. Mencken was talking about me. Even more, he might have been targeting the Baseball Writers Association of America and a clique within that group known as the Seamheads. Since Mencken lived his life in Baltimore, the womb of organized ball, it’s a real possibility that in his harangue against the American newspaper, the Seamheads were who he had in mind.

  To the Seamheads, baseball is their passion, their opiate, their universe. There is no statistic too remote to remain unexplored by the Seamhead as long as the figures relate to baseball. Seamheads call other Seamheads at three A.M. to talk about how, say, the Braves are hitting .213 with runners on first and third with less than two out, except, of course, against lefthanders and then, hoo boy, that’s a whole ’nuther story.

  I envied the Seamheads. I really did; the same way I envied the rock hounds who majored in geology in college as they blissfully wandered through creek beds in search of Precambrian shale. If somebody earned a living writing about baseball, imagine the delightful circumstance—being so absolutely absorbed by the topic—of living all day, every day at the ballpark. But there was no chance in hell that the Seamheads would ever allow me to become part of their society, not even as an apprentice or on some other provisional basis. A Pima Indian would be elected to the board of the Los Angeles Country Club before they’d let me call myself a Seamhead.