Seasons in Hell

by Mike Shropshire

  Like I said, say what you want about Billy Martin, he was smart.

  Chapter 24

  The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and I parted company in May 1976. That made sense because I had moved out of Fort Worth two months earlier. According to some recent court documents I had become qualified to appear on somebody’s “Ten Most Eligible Bachelors” list and a town like Dallas is a better place to seek such an honor. Besides, my apartment in Fort Worth was next door to a drive-in theatre that showed Spanish-speaking movies. Around midnight the projector or the film would always break, people would begin honking their horns in angry protest and it was impossible to get any sleep.

  My departure was the only feature of my four-year involvement with the paper that did make sense. During the final year I was probably actually inside the building a total of about fifteen minutes.

  Some rumors were circulating that I had covered spring training from the Bahamas, just as there had been similar well-circulated fables that I had covered the 1973 World Series between the Mets and the A’s from a hotel room in Chicago. While it was technologically possible to accomplish that, I never actually did. I also never bothered to deny the slander because stories like that bestowed an element of panache to my otherwise bland persona.

  Most of the management people at the paper had been extraordinarily tolerant of my occasional outlandish behavior, which was unusual even in the context of the Seventies. They were genuinely worried that I might be a threat, as the old saying goes, to myself or society as a whole and if I ever did anything genocidal—I could just see the headlines: “Neighbors Describe Baseball Writer As Brooding Loner”—the Star-Telegram goddamn sure didn’t want it to happen on company time.

  I felt relieved when it was over, though probably not nearly as relieved as the paper. Even so, a reconciliation had been arranged with the paper’s new publisher, Jim Hale, a week after I was gone. But I never followed through with my part of negotiating a new “understanding.” Now the time had come for me to move forward with my new career as a scriptwriter for a commercial video company that some friends had just taken over in Dallas. They assured me that vast riches loomed smiling on the nearest hillside. Here, I would promptly learn that the ability to write a story about a baseball game did not necessarily translate into the skill of generating a TV spot that would satisfy the client. For instance, the people at a local bank simply couldn’t see the potential of an ad in which an actor wearing an Uncle Sam costume tells the viewer: “Strapped for cash? Then do what the government does … go borrow some!” The bank people were even less impressed with a vignette that included the line “Who was that masked man?” Another tip for anybody writing the narrative for a fund-raising film: The mental health and retardation people take a dim view of comedy as a promotional vehicle. A side venture, my “Don’t Blame Me … I Voted for George Wallace” bumper sticker, was not encountering universal acceptance, either. Fortunately, the company folded before anybody could find out the true depths of my ineptitude. Judging from client reaction to my work, instead of getting rich I was fortunate not to have gotten arrested.

  While all this was going on, people were asking me if I missed covering the Rangers. These were the same people who would ask a U.S. Marine if he missed Guadalcanal. What I did miss was spring training, the sun and the sand and not the baseball, and I arranged future ceremonial pilgrimages to the Surf Rider.

  I spent a month there in 1977 in order to prepare a page-and-a-half magazine article. My companion at the poolside bar one afternoon was the familiar figure of David Clyde, back in an abortive final bid for a spot on the Rangers’ pitching staff. A newly arrived Canuck sized us up and said, “You two are from Texas. I can tell by your accents, eh? Are you associated with the baseball team by any chance?”

  “Not for long,” I said. “He’s a washed-up pitcher and I’m a washed-up sportswriter.” The Canadian guy couldn’t figure out why David Clyde and I thought that was so funny.

  The visit also served to confirm that life with the Rangers franchise would never be normal. Frank Lucchesi, who normally resided at the opposite end of the spectrum from Billy Martin when it came to the controversy department, was still managing the team. Now even Frank, toward the end of the spring, was involved in a flap with a player. Lenny Randle had been bemoaning the fact that Lucchesi wanted to hand his second-base job to a promising rookie, Bump Wills, whose primary credential at the time was being the son of Maury Wills.

  Frank didn’t like Lenny’s attitude. “I’m tired of all these $90,000 a year punks complaining all the time. That’s a quote. Print that,” Lucchesi told some sportswriters. Frank apparently did not realize that the term “punk” had taken on a new context, a sexual one, in certain quarters. Randy Galloway told Lucchesi that calling Randle a “punk” might not be a prudent idea. Frank didn’t get it. “Just like I said before—a $90,000 a year punk. That’s what he is.”

  A punk was what Lenny Randle was not. Randle—introspective, soft-spoken, intensely bright, a martial-arts expert who never touched alcohol—took extreme offense at Lucchesi’s comments. So, about an hour before an exhibition game against the Twins at Orlando, Lenny approached Lucchesi, who was still in street clothes, and in less than ten seconds literally beat his manager senseless, then nonchalantly jogged to the outfield and began running wind sprints.

  I arrived at the park about a dozen minutes after the assault and discovered Lucchesi in a tunnel behind the dugout. His bloody head was in trainer Bill Ziegler’s lap. Frank looked like he had been run over by a beer truck. The Rangers immediately suspended Lenny Randle and then sold him to the Mets.

  The following day, before an exhibition game against a new team, the Toronto Blue Jays, one of the Toronto sportswriters was heard to comment: “Jeez. I guess that’s how Americans settle everything these days. With violence, eh?” To which, Bob Lindley, of the Star-Telegram, replied. “Yeah. If Randle had hit him with a hockey stick he’d only have gotten a five-minute penalty.”

  Lucchesi filed a civil lawsuit against Randle and won, but the jury only awarded $25,000. Poor Frank. A warm, outgoing and caring person, it was not his fault that he looked and talked like one of the bad guys in The Godfather and did not come across to the jurors as a sympathetic figure.

  At mid-season Brad Corbett rewarded Lucchesi for his pain and suffering by firing him. Eddie Stanky, fiery and aggressive when he had managed the White Sox over a decade earlier, was lured from professional retirement to replace Frank. Stanky proved to be the most prudent of all the Rangers’ managers. After three days he quit. At seven A.M., following a night game at Minneapolis, he called three players (Harrah, Hargrove and Sundberg) from a pay phone at the Minneapolis airport to inform them that he had stared into the abyss of life in Rangers-land and not liked what he had seen. Why, somebody wondered, would Stanky just call those three players? Randy Galloway had a theory: “Maybe he ran out of quarters.”

  Another highlight for the Rangers’ Cuckoo’s Nest happened before a game in 1978. Roger Moret, a pitcher, seemingly the victim of an evil spell, fell into a deep trance and stood rigid, motionless and buck-naked for over an hour with one arm extended straight in front of him gripping a shower shoe in his hand. Manager Billy Hunter was summoned from his office to view the weird scene. Hunter, a man of compassion, stared at Moret in bewilderment, then intoned, “What I need is a good lefthanded starter, not some damn statue.” Moret was led off to a hospital and never again pitched in the big leagues. Once again, the fact was underscored that the Texas Rangers were not really a baseball franchise but rather a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

  My final visit to Rangers spring training happened in 1982. Now writing features for the Dallas Morning News, I had traveled to Florida to write a heartwarming article about a sportswriter for the Clearwater Sun who as a senior at the University of Texas had strangled his date after a Christmas party and received a life sentence but was sprung after eight years. Jim Hale, my would-be benefactor back
in Fort Worth, had been running the Clearwater paper at the time and hired the guy straight out of the joint. “He told me he was a first offender,” Hale said, “but he didn’t say what he had done.” Later, the sportswriter’s mother threatened to commit suicide if my article ran. It was a hell of a mess and probably the only time I ever wished I was covering the Rangers again.

  By now, Brad Corbett had sold the team to yet another Fort Worth character, Eddie Chiles, who was famous, among other things, for the advertising slogan of his energy-supply business: “If you don’t have an oil well, git one!”

  It now seemed apparent that whenever I was around spring training, something strange was about to happen. In this case, the Rangers lost thirteen straight games early in the season and went downhill from there. The 1982 Rangers desperately lacked hitting and pitching. So Eddie Chiles, being a baseball man, brought in a motivational speaker and rumor had it that a hypnotist was on his way. When Don Zimmer, the then manager, raised some objections, Eddie fired him. Then Chiles asked Zimmer if he might not mind sticking around for a couple of weeks until he could locate a replacement. This 1982 crew would fail to lose as many as 105 games like my all-time favorites, the 1973 Rangers, but they gave it their best shot.

  The passage of years has seen the franchise struggle toward respectability. Nolan Ryan’s heroics were of benefit in that regard and now the team is housed in a real honest-to-God major-league baseball stadium. What used to be Arlington Stadium is now a parking lot. Amazing, isn’t it, how so many memories can be so quickly and efficiently bulldozed into oblivion in the name of profits and progress.

  When the Seattle Mariners won the American League West in 1995, the Rangers would stand out as the only existing big-league franchise that had never, not once, participated in post-season play.

  That new ballpark in Arlington was the site of the 1995 major-league all-star game. Will the place ever see a World Series? During the wild and nutty spring of 1975 I asked a female British psychic who also tended the poolside bar at the Surf Rider if the Rangers might win the pennant that year … and if not 1975, then when? This woman predicted that Billy Martin would someday get killed in a car wreck, along with some other off-the-wall visions that were coming true at the time. She knew her stuff. Madelyn peered into the future but at the exact instant that the World Series issue was coming into focus in her mind’s eye, my friend Curly Dick (yes, that was his real name), an older guy who sold cars in Canada, played the guitar and knew how to yodel, leaned too far backward on his barstool and fell into the swimming pool while his banana daiquiri set sail and landed in inverted form atop Madelyn’s lovely old head.

  That caused Madelyn to lose her concentration. So as far as the question of the Rangers and the World Series goes, I guess we’ll never know.

  Gallery

  Billy Martin turns on the charm at the Rangers Women’s Club picnic.

  Ted Williams shows off his Texas-style baseball shoe, opening night, 1972. Arlington mayor Tom Vandergriff is in background.

  LEFT: Jim Bibby demonstrates his “no-hitter” grip to Martin. CENTER: Billy Martin. RIGHT: Whitey Herzog presides over a comedy of errors in 1973.

  LEFT: Jim Merritt owned up to throwing a greaseball. RIGHT: Rich Billings, behind the plate for Jim Bibby’s no-hitter.

  Owner Bob Short (right) talks over the plight of the team with Herzog and general manager Joe Burke (left).

  LEFT: Future manager Jim Fregosi provided personality to the early Rangers. RIGHT: Jeff Burroughs overcame the ill winds of Arlington to win American League MVP honors in 1974.

  The REAL Texas Rangers of law-enforcement fame seem dubious of their baseball namesakes.

  The new Texas franchise joins the rodeo.

  Baseball history and empty seats—a Rangers tradition.

  LEFT: Bugs outnumbered the fans in the early days of the Rangers. RIGHT: David Clyde, teenage rookie sensation.

  Fans and media went nuts over David Clyde’s big-league debut.

  Rangers cheerleaders were a temporary novelty.

  Arlington Stadium in midsummer—one hell of a place.

  The TV Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, offers Jim Sundberg more ammunition.

  Owner Brad Corbett and Rangers are host to the President, Gerald Ford, who threw out the first pitch opening night, 1976.

  From left: David Clyde, future Rangers general manager Tom Grieve, coach and future A’s manager Jackie Moore, Billy Martin, coach Merrill Combs and another future Rangers manager, Frank Lucchesi.

  Connect with Diversion Books

  Connect with us for information on new titles and authors from Diversion Books, free excerpts, special promotions, contests, and more:

  @DiversionBooks

  www.Facebook.com/DiversionBooks

  Diversion Books eNewsletter

  www.scribd.com/DiversionBooks