For years, the decorations at the Texas Rangers’ spring training complex in Surprise, Ariz., were all wrong. Like every organization, the Rangers hoped to establish a winning tradition. But they could not display photos of playoff celebrations, because they never won a postseason series until last fall.
As a result, said Jon Daniels, the Rangers’ general manager since 2005, the team was best known for individual achievements. Texas players had won several Most Valuable Player awards, thrown a few no-hitters, collected batting titles and Gold Gloves. But as inspiration for young players, the images were hollow.
“We always had the pictures of the best players and the best moments in franchise history, and the reality is, as we get better moments, they change,” Daniels said Thursday, before Game 6 of the World Series at Busch Stadium. “Right now, all the pictures are of the last couple years. As a team, that’s what it’s all about.”
The Rangers must summon all of their mettle to recover from one of the most devastating single-game collapses in World Series history. They blew the lead with two outs and two strikes in the ninth inning on Thursday — and then did it again in the 10th. David Freese’s homer off Mark Lowe won it in the 11th inning for the St. Louis Cardinals, 10-9, setting up a seventh game here on Friday.
Two clubs have waited longer for a crown: the Chicago Cubs have not won since 1908, the Cleveland Indians since 1948. Three others — the Houston Astros, the San Diego Padres and the Milwaukee Brewers — have never won a title and began in their current cities before the Rangers arrived in Texas in 1972.
But the Rangers date to 1961, when they began an uneventful 11-year run as the second edition of the Washington Senators. They moved to a minor league ballpark in Arlington, Tex., slapped extra bleachers beyond the outfield, and struggled to gain a following in football country. Ted Williams, in his final season as a manager, was not much of a draw.
“I was in the supermarket one day, sometime that April or May, and a lady said, ‘You don’t sound like you’re from Texas,’ ” said the former pitcher Mike Paul, who took 9 of that team’s 100 losses. “I said, ‘No, ma’am, I’m with the Texas Rangers.’ She said, ‘Well, how long have you been in law enforcement?’ That’s how much they knew about baseball back then.”
Statistically, Paul was the team’s best player, contributing 2.9 more wins than a typical replacement would have, according to Baseball-Reference.com. But the team drew fewer than 9,000 fans a game, allowed the most runs in the league and scored the second fewest.
“They scheduled day games on the weekend, because they had them in D.C., and it was just cooking,” Paul said. “On Saturdays and Sundays, it seemed like the only two guys who cared were the starting pitchers. The first team to score won. Guys would go up there hacking at the first pitch, trying to get out of the heat.”
The Rangers won 94 games in 1977, and a few Hall of Fame pitchers — Bert Blyleven, Ferguson Jenkins, Gaylord Perry — drifted in and out of Arlington in the mid-to-late 1970s.
But the heat became a convenient excuse for the character that came to dominate the franchise for much of the next three decades. The Rangers collected sluggers, including several later implicated in a steroids scandal, and dared you to outhit them.
“You just had to try to stay in the game with them offensively,” said Manager Ron Washington, who faced the Rangers often as an American League infielder in the 1980s. “You ended up playing 10-9, 12-11 type ballgames, and now we’re a different club. We can play according to the way it’s presented to us.”
The Rangers are now run by a former pitcher, Nolan Ryan, the chief executive and president and the only player in Cooperstown with a Rangers cap on his plaque. A former Texas catcher, Jim Sundberg, is the team’s senior executive vice president, and the highly respected Mike Maddux is the major league pitching coach.
The Rangers have finished in the top five in the league in earned run average in each of the last two seasons. When they lost their ace, Cliff Lee, to free agency last winter, they covered for him with standout performances from the young starters Matt Harrison, Derek Holland and Alexi Ogando, who are all under the club’s contractual control for at least three more years.
“It’s been a lot of fun to be a part of a team that’s really enjoyed an organizational transformation over the last couple of years,” said first baseman Michael Young, the franchise record-holder for games played, hits and runs. “We pitch extremely well. Now, you become part of this staff now, you’re expected to go out and have success. The bar has been raised. It’s a lot of fun to be part of a team like that.”
The Rangers might never displace the Cowboys as the most popular team in Dallas/Fort Worth, but the fans have caught on. Attendance has risen three years in a row. Decades from now, when the Rangers of this era get together, there will be no need to wonder why.
In the late 1980s, Paul said, Tom Grieve tried to stage a reunion of the original Rangers. Grieve played for that team and was serving as general manager. Paul was skeptical.
“Why do you want to bring us back?” he told his old teammate. “We were so bad we made the world’s greatest hitter, Ted Williams, quit.”
Grieve assured Paul there was no reason to worry. “Nobody remembers,” he said.
These days, the Rangers are giving their fans a team they can never forget, finally joining the major league elite.
“I don’t want to say our team was lost in obscurity, but it’s kind of true,” Young said. “Other teams are consistently competing for championships, especially teams that have built up winning traditions for years. It’s exciting for us to be a part of the team that’s going to kick that off for baseball in Texas.”
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