SPORTS Major League-At Last

TOM GRIEVE LEFT HIS NEW APARTMENT AT Preston and LB) in Dallas and drove and drove. Weston 1-635. South down I-35E. West out 1-30. Mile after mile. It was the spring of 1972, and outfielder Grieve was looking for the new big-league ballpark he would call home. His Washington Senators had relocated to someplace called Arlington, Texas. “I had the vision of Texas most Northerners have,” says Grieve, who grew up in Pittsfield, Mass. “Stagecoaches and covered wagons.”

What seemed like an hour later, Grieve was out on the mostly undeveloped prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth when he finally saw it off to the left, just past Six Flags Over Texas. Arlington Stadium: “A nice little minor-league park that had been expanded by adding 17,000 bench seats in the outfield. It definitely had a minor-league feel. There wasn’t much around it but trees, a gas station, the Ramada. There was nothing on die west side of Collins, nothing across 1-30.” Grieve and his roommate and teammate, Rich Billings, had mistakenly believed the Texas Rangers were going to play in or near Dallas, as the Cowboys did. So they had rented an apartment at the Preston- and-LBJ epicenter.

They soon found they weren’t even in the right area code.

What? The Senators-turned-Rangers were going to play major-league baseball in some rinky-dink park in the middle of nowhere between Dallas and Fort Worth? This was as far from Yankee or Dodger Stadium as you could get. As bad as the Senators had been the year before, at least Grieve bad been able to drive past the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial on the way to RFK Stadium for every home game. For the home opener, the President always threw out the first ball before 55,000 fans.

The new Texas Rangers drew about 22,000 for their first game at Arlington Stadium. “What a letdown,” says Grieve.

For the next 24 years the Rangers would raise annual July or August doubts about their major-league status. They would lead the majors in only one category: letdowns. The heart and attitude of the players often would be strictly minor league-matched only by the rinky-dink stupidity of the owners.

Since the mid-’60s, Dallas and Fort Worth have hitched their civic pride to the Dallas Cowboys star. Football was all that really mattered to area sports fans. The Rangers were little more than a rite-or wrong-of spring. By the end of every spring training, Rangers fans always happily deluded themselves into thinking, “This is the year.” But deep down, they knew the Rangers would do nothing more than tease and eventually embarrass them. The Rangers became the stepchildren who were sent to their room the day die Cowboys hit training camp in mid-July. You could almost feel the seismic shift of the North Texas sports psyche from the little place in Arlington to the big news of Cowboys camp. The air went out of Arlington Stadium as if it were one big inflatable raft. Going to a Rangers game after the Cowboys began playing preseason games felt like going to the lake in the fall or winter. For most fans in these pans, baseball season ended with the All-Star Game in mid-July.

After all, the Cowboys have made the playoffs 24 of their 36 seasons; the Rangers are the only team in baseball that hasn’t ever made it to the postseason. Up until this season, the latest they were ever in first place was Aug. 18, 1977. It’s as if it would be sacrilegious for baseball to be played in North Texas in October.

“In the early years,” says Grieve, “baseball here was like a big-time minor-league sport. It was all football. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Call him Tom Grief: He has been affiliated with the Rangers for 24 of their 25 Texas seasons-24 long, hot summers of frustration and humiliation as Grieve went from player to farm director to general manager to, now at age 48, an analyst for KXTX-TV Channel 39 Rangers telecasts. If Grieve had general-managed the team as well as he manages a microphone, he’d probably still be GM. But, he says, “I don’t miss it.” Low points of Grieves GM tenure included being called to the clubhouse in the middle of games to talk childish stars out of quitting.

Yet broadcaster Grieve predicted from the start of the 1996 season that this Rangers team would win the American League West or at least make the AL playoffs as a wild-card team. Why? Because this one is different than any other Rangers team: It’s boring. “One thing about the Rangers through the years,” says Grieve with a wry chuckle. “They were never boring. ” But instead of trying to compete with the Cowboys for soap-opera headlines, these Rangers have been the unCowboys; humble, unselfish, noncontroversial, committed to playing sound defense, memorable only because they stayed in first place for so long.



FOR MANY OF THE 1972 RANGERS, A FUNNY thing began happening on the way to Arlington Stadium. “Guys started realizing this could be the best place to play in the big leagues,” says Grieve. “You could live two minutes from the park in Arlington, No traffic. No fans booing you, like in New York or Boston or Philadelphia. No one hassling you at the table when you go out to eat. Players started moving here and staying year-round.”

Often for the wrong reason, big-name big-leaguers loved being acquired by Texas. Living and playing in Arlington was like semi-retirement. Summertime and the livin’ was easy. The high-priced stars brought to Texas during owner Brad Corbett’s late-’70s reign of error-Bert Campaneris, Dock Ellis, Fergie Jenkins, Mickey Rivers, Jon Matlack, Sparky Lyle, Gaylord Perry, Richie Zisk-never quite had one of their team-carrying seasons of the past. The Rangers were something like the wax museum down 1-30: Too many stars were mere likenesses of themselves.

They didn’t feel much pressure from the fans, who rarely made enough noise to provide much home-field advantage. “They were nice, cordial people,” says Grieve, “but they weren’t big baseball fans. It was a long time before they even began to resemble the partisan crowds in other big-league cities.”

Rangers crowds were an odd mix of blue-collar workers, vacationers and families who made the hour drive from Piano once or twice a season. Attending a Rangers game was mostly about relaxing in the night-time breeze, seeing stars from both teams, munching nachos, swigging a cold one and forgetting who won by the time you got home. Fans go to Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park to clap and whistle and scream and will victory. For years Arlington Stadium’s energy level was closer to Arlington National Cemetery.

But who really cared? It was a cozy little park in which to watch the Rangers lose. Rangers players who had come from tradition-steeped franchises knew in the backs of their minds that, playing for a rinky-dink front office in a minor-league park, they were eventually supposed to lose. Panicky trades cost the organization top prospects in exchange for established stars who struggled in Texas. Ron Darling and Walt Terrell were spent for Lee Mazzilli. Sam Sosa and Wilson Alvarez went for Harold Baines. But, perhaps the height of humiliation came in late July 1982. Manager Don Zimmer, who probably has more friends in more dugouts and front offices than any man in baseball, was fired by owner Eddie “If You Don’t Have An Oil Well, Get One!” Chiles. The punch line: Chiles asked Zimmer to stay on for a week or two while he searched for a replacement. “This has never happened in the history of baseball,” Zimmer said. “The Rangers are a laughingstock.”

The crazier, the better. The Rangers were actually more fun to follow because they were a real-life version of Bull Durham or Major League or any of the comically exaggerated movies about baseball characters. Fondest Rangers memories: Eddie Stanky taking the manager’s job and resigning the next day,,.Pitcher Roger Moret frozen in a catatonic state in front of his locker…Wonderfully Wacko Mickey Rivers blessing us with his presence from 79 to ’84 before returning to Pluto…Mazzilli calling left field “the idiot’s position”…Jose Canseco getting hit on top of the head by a fly ball…

Obviously, they were all suffering heatstroke. Summer after summer the Rangers blamed their second-half flameouts on the heat. Instead of installing a giant “hot box” temperature board that constandy reminded the visiting team it was 105 degrees-instead of saying, “We’re used to the heat. Pity the teams that have to come in here and play in it”-the Rangers constantly reminded each other and their fans that it was just too damn hot to think about winning baseball games, After all, the game requires so much running and constant exertion. While the Cowboys practice full-speed, full-contact football twice a day in the July and August heat, how could the Rangers be expected to play baseball at 7:35 p.m.?

“The heat,” says Grieve, “was just a convenient excuse to easily explain why the Rangers never won.”

Yet a strange thing began to happen: The more the Rangers didn’t win, the more fans they drew. These Rangers zombie fans continued following each other through the turnstiles even in August and September, with the Rangers hopelessly out of the race. Could it be? These had to be genuine, hard-core baseball fans. Grieve says, “More and more people were moving here, especially from the North, and they had come from generations of baseball fans who had lived and died with baseball,,,I would have been fired a lot sooner (he lasted 10 years as GM, until 1994) if we hadn’t been drawing 2 million fans a year.”

The good news: A tradition was growing. The bad news: Ownership realized that even if you don’t build it, they’ll come. Customers put no pressure on team owners to spend more money for star free agents, so the Rangers have operated through the ’90s with a self-imposed salary cap. Even The Franchise came cheap. Dumped by the Houston Astros in 1988, Nolan Ryan had only one other option if he wanted to stay in Texas. He was a bargain for the Rangers, who soon had a likeness of “Big Tex” about the size of the State Fair’s Big Tex hanging from the front of Arlington Stadium. Hurry, hurry, step right up and see Nolan pitch another no-hitter! (And forget the Rangers are 23 games out of first.)

Still, says Grieve, “Before Nolan, I’m not sure our fans ever really thought, ’Wow, I’m rooting for a major-league team.’ Nolan helped legitimize everything. Then the new park took it to the highest level.”

The Ballpark in Arlington, which opened in ’94 and played host to the AU-Star Game in ’95, is arguably the most spectacular structure in baseball-an awe-inspiring blend of traditional and modern design, of Yankee and Tiger Stadiums and neo-Texas mansion. Families found The Ballpark as entertaining as Six Flags. The Ballpark offered such an array of big-league food, from pizza to chicken tenders to burritos, that the baseball was rendered almost irrelevant. The Ballpark, built largely with taxpayers’ money, became such a draw that ownership almost didn’t need a team. The Ballpark, with daily tours on the hour, was the star.

I HAPPENED TO BE IN NEW YORK IN LATEJULY when the first-place Rangers from the American League West arrived to play the AL East’s first-place Yankees. A playoff pre-view? No, there wasn’t a word in the New York papers previewing the three-game series. The Rangers have always been as underpublicized nationally as the Cowboys are overpublicized.

That night at Yankee Stadium, a security chief told me that Rangers visits are like nights off for his staff, The Rangers never inspire fights in the stands die way the visiting Red Sox or Orioles or Indians do, he said. Out of about 30,000 fans that night, I saw only one wearing a Rangers cap.

I still get cab drivers in various cities who think the Texas Rangers play in Houston, like the Astros. Unless they’ve been to Dallas-Fort Worth, many baseball fans around the country probably aren’t sure where the Rangers play. “And they won’t be sure,” says Grieve, “until the Rangers play in a World Series and Bob Costas and Tim McCarver go on and on about what a great place Arlington is.”



WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU READ about the Rangers owner? Wait, who is the Rangers owner? The general partners are Rusty Rose and Tom Schieffer, who together couldn’t compete with Cowboy owner Jerry Jones for exposure if they ran naked around the bases during the seventh-inning stretch.

In charisma and controversy, Cowboy coach Barry Switzer makes Rangers manager Johnny Oates seem no more interesting than a resin bag, Oates is a smart, tough Christian who has quietly been able to tame the wild stallion in the lone Rangers superstar, Juan Gonzalez. This year, Gonzalez finally has made headlines only with his bat.

Times have changed since GM Grieve’s baby-sitting days.

Grieve’s successor, Doug Melvin, is a nice, quiet, baseball-crazed Canadian who takes more pride in adding a small but valuable cog than in outbidding George Steinbrenner or Ted Turner tor some free-agent All-Star. Melvin took a chance on washed-up shortstop Kevin Elster, who had become an actor, and suddenly Elster’s part in Little Big League sprang to life. Starting shortstop Benji Gill was lost to a back injury, and Elster began providing a steady glove and timely hitting. A meant-to-be Rangers season? “These guys,” says Grieve, “have nothing to do with what has happened in the past here, and they have no idea about it.”

The most popular Ranger is about as far from Troy or Emmitt-in salary and ego-as rural Alabama is from Hollywood. Redheaded left fielder Thurman Clyde “Rusty” Greer, from Albertville, Ala., is no Ken Griffey Jr. He does no commercials. He’s camera shy. But he runs into walls to rob opponents of extra-base hits and wins games with late-inning hits of his own. Grieve says, “He epitomizes what Texas fans love. This team doesn’t have the selfishness, the whining attitude and the excuse-makers past Ranger teams have had. In some cases, the new players don’t have the physical talent of the players they replaced. No way do the Rangers have the five-player nucleus of stars (Griffey, Jay Buhner, Edgar Martinez, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson) that Seattle has; nobody in baseball does. But at least there’s no more soap opera here, no more bickering. In the past that was very evident to the fans, and it was a real turnoff.”

Grieve says he sees more families in the Rangers crowd than he does at any park on the American League circuit. If the Cowboys, he says, “continue to be the Roman Empire”

and fall from grace with area fans, “more and more people are going to be cheering for the Rangers.”

Will the Rangers dethrone the Cowboys in the D-FW sports psyche?

Get serious.

But they’ve come even farther than Grieves initial drive to Arlington Stadium 25 summers ago.