Seasons in Hell Read online

  Seasons in Hell

  With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and “The Worst Baseball Team in History"—the 1973-1975 Texas Rangers

  Mike Shropshire

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1996 by Mike Shropshire

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition March 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-261-1

  Why This Book?

  ​Like many, I watched Ken Bums’ baseball documentary on PBS in the fall of 1994 and found it, forgive me, just a trifle sappy.

  What qualifies me to offer that appraisal? For one thing, I doubt that Ken Burns ever experienced hours four and five of a cross-country charter with the Texas Rangers baseball team, when the back of that plane took on the carnival air of Field Day at Attica.

  Nor, I suspect, did he devote perhaps 1,000 semester hours to face-to-face encounters with the two greatest baseball strategists of all time, Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin—lecture sessions that were fortified with the sustenance that comes from corn and barley.

  For me, the most satisfying and worthwhile aspect of this experience was not the who and what, but the when. My exposure to the major leagues happened during that greatest of decades, the Seventies, when the nation was gripped by a mood of nothing in particular. There was that one crisis, when people in my part of the country slowed from 105 mph to 85, in the spirit of energy conservation. Other than that, no limits were imposed on one’s key personal objectives.

  I can happily report that I lived the Seventies like Audie Murphy lived the Forties and Fatty Arbuckle experienced the Twenties. That’s what this book is about and I thought it important to write it now, before the film archives of my memory and mind incur the ravages of smoke damage and theft.

  Author’s Note

  More than a few people have commented that I appear to have what they call “total recall.” Certainly, all of the twenty-plus-year-old events that are detailed in this book stand out as vivid personal recollections, although no extraordinary feats of memory were involved in that. I remember these experiences with the same crystal clarity that someone might remember being shot in the kneecap at Shiloh or having his luggage stolen on his honeymoon.

  When it comes to the concept of total recall, nobody can compete with the powers of retention stored upon the microfilm reproductions of newspapers and periodicals on file at the Dallas and Fort Worth public libraries. Names and numbers in major-league box scores are never embellished by the rapid passage of time.

  The large majority of facts and many of the word-for-word quotes appearing in this book were extracted from my actual daily accounts of the adventures of the Texas Rangers that appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

  Other material covering events not associated with the Rangers was extracted from wire-service stories and newspaper accounts. Additionally, quite a few of the scenarios recounted here, on and off the field, have been verified and fortified by recent interviews with many of the individuals depicted in the book.

  Some passages of dialogue have been reproduced from several dozen pages of typewritten notes compiled at the time (1973-1975), in the remote hope that I might someday sell them to anybody peculiar enough to want to write a book about the early days of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise.

  Additionally, I want to offer thanks to my wife, Karen, for her ongoing encouragement and support. I can confirm that this book would not have been possible without her, in a very literal sense, because the project was entirely her idea.

  —Mike Shropshire

  November 23, 1995

  Chapter 1

  Pompano Stadium, ordained according to the billboard in the parking lot as the Spring Home of the Texas Rangers, could be identified as one of those architectural curiosities that sometimes evoke sonnets and elegies from the disillusioned ranks of American journalism.

  Minor-league baseball parks, the old ones at least, inspire wistful reminiscences and an elusive kind of longing that gnaws into unexplored regions of the male psyche. The core of the thing involves a little boy’s relationship with his father that can never again be restored … the Dad that we all knew and treasured before he decided to move in with his secretary.

  Somebody even produced a book about various selected baseball fields, most of them ancient and abandoned but still standing, and called it Green Cathedrals.

  My initial impression of Pompano Stadium, as I opened the chain-link gate for my first day on the job in the big leagues, was that there was nothing cathedral-like about the facility. It reminded me, if anything, of the Yello-Belly drag strip in Grand Prairie, Texas. This Pompano Stadium, which was in fact a stadium in the sense that Ponca City, Oklahoma, is a city, obviously had a past, but had not aged gracefully. The grandstand consisted of two sets of bleachers, covered by a corrugated metal roof that extended along both foul lines only as far as first and third bases. The pressbox perched on the top row consisted of a peculiar white frame structure that looked like the sort of place the Japanese would put prisoners of war if they misbehaved. Atop the pressbox on this particular morning was the nation’s future. Three kids from the high school across the street were up there passing around a joint. The palm trees behind the leftfield fence were sort of bent over at mid-trunk, suffering from a mangy looking plant fungus that coated them. Adjacent to this was a smaller practice diamond that the ballplayers called Iwo Jima.

  Of the perhaps 1,000 or so baseball fields like this one scattered throughout the land, Pompano Stadium absolutely had to stand out as the only one void of character and charm. Actually the stadium pretty fairly represented the town of Pompano Beach itself, a community that served as the wrong side of the tracks for both Fort Lauderdale just to the south and Deerfield Beach in the other direction.

  Surveying the premises, I had to remind myself of what I was doing here. My job was to produce articles for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and chronicle the spring training exploits of an American League baseball team, the Rangers. There had been a couple of reasons for accepting, with reluctance, this assignment, and those entailed first-rate travel accommodations to some of the finer urban venues of our land (I’d never been to Cleveland or Milwaukee, for instance). Also, I was to be fortified with a constant cash flow source from a generous expense account. And I was to receive baseball’s off-season as an extended paid vacation.

  In return, the lone requirement was simply to file some reasonably accurate accounts of the activities of this peculiar baseball team. As I approached Day One of spring training 1973, however, it became apparent that this task would not be so easy.

  I’d already missed the first workout, having spent most of the morning at the American Express office on Atlantic Avenue, getting due reimbursement for $1,300 worth of traveler’s checks that had somehow disappeared the night before. (I should note that, in those days, I was what is known in some quarters as a drinking man.)

  Most of the players were already gone, along with most of my newspaper competition, so I headed down to the little lunchroom that was stuck at the end of the bleachers on the leftfield side. Inside was Bob Short, the fascinating character who owned the Rangers. I was relieved to see Short in there, because I desperately needed some good quotes from a key source for my world premiere article as the baseball writer for the Star-Telegram.

  Short lived in Minneapolis, where
he owned a trucking line and some hotels, and it was his proud distinction also to serve as Hubert Humphrey’s bagman. His association with the Happy Warrior had been gratifying. While moonlighting as the national treasurer of the Democratic Party, Short had concocted a grand scheme in which he would buy the congenitally threadbare Washington Senators, wait a couple of years, then shift the franchise to some prosperous Sun Belt locale—it didn’t matter where—and then sell the team at a substantial profit to some ego-crazed locals who were fair busting at the seams with ready cash.

  Bob Short’s plan was running perfectly according to schedule with the Senators relocated in North Texas, but on this particular morning in the Pompano Stadium lunchroom, his private universe was etched with concern. Short, a tall, stoop-shouldered man who favored pastel sports jackets, was addressing Captain Jack, a delightfully spry little character who couldn’t have been a day under eighty-five. Captain Jack’s job was to cater the free lunchroom for the ballplayers and assorted other people like me.

  “Uh … Jack,” Short was saying. “What happened to those frankfurters you had in here last year? These here … they’re not the same.”

  “Well, Mr. Short, I have to order those out of a deli wholesaler down in Miami and it’s a three-hour round trip. With the traffic and all I just didn’t have time to get down there this morning.”

  Short nodded, then said, “Jack, you worthless old fart, I want you to get your ass down there and get those frankfurters … NOW!” Then Short marched out of the lunchroom, slammed the screen door and was gone.

  Jack, a treasure of a human being endowed with a bottomless lagoon of wisdom that he mostly chose to keep to himself, gazed for a moment at the spot where Short had been standing, lit up a Newport menthol cigarette and said, “Cocksucker.”

  It occurred to me then that transcribing this vignette into my bright and breezy Ranger Notes column might prove challenging, so I ventured over to Whitey Herzog’s office and dressing room next door in search of hard news.

  Like me, Herzog was on his first day at work on a new job; in his case, as manager of the Texas Rangers. As farm director of the New York Mets, Herzog had produced the likes of Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver. But that had been in the National League, and now Herzog was observing the talents of his Rangers personnel for the first time. I was eager to gather some of his first-day insight, but was less than happy to see David Fink already in his office.

  Fink, who covered the Rangers for the Dallas Times Herald, employed an interviewing technique that was stylistically consistent with the good people who conduct audits for the IRS. He would peer over his horn-rimmed glasses in a practiced, prosecutorial manner and submit questions in tones that were etched with skepticism. “And I suppose you can provide receipts for these co-called business expenses? Ha!”

  Herzog sat naked at his desk, stroking a cold, sixteen-ounce can of Busch Bavarian, smoking a cigar and gazing at David Fink with the sort of expression a man might muster after discovering that somebody had spray-painted “Eat Me” across the side of his new car.

  Fink had his notebook open. “How about some first-day evaluations, Whitey … ahem … any surprises?”

  Herzog leaned back, gazed at the ceiling, and finally said, “Yeah. I was surprised to see that Bill Madlock is black. Mostly, blacks don’t go by Bill, you know. They call themselves Willie.”

  Fink, never known to his working associates as David or Dave or El Finko or the Finkster but always and simply as Fink, scribbled those comments into his notebook and waddled out, presumably to phone his paper with instructions to stop the presses.

  That left me alone with Herzog, who gave me a more indepth evaluation of the talent pool, beginning with the backbone of the franchise, the starting pitchers. “They didn’t tell me that Mike Paul and Rich Hand were a couple of shitballers,” Herzog offered cheerfully. “Or that Pete Broberg was a big cunt.”

  And, as I was leaving … “Oh. And I noticed that one of my outfielders looks kind of, uh, tentative out there, but he told me not to worry. He said his epilepsy medication makes him feel sluggish sometimes.”

  Understand that Herzog’s immediate predecessor in this Rangers managerial assignment had been Ted Williams. Yes, that Ted Williams, the man often described by the most knowledgeable critics of the game as—even though modifiers like “arguably” and “many insist” are employed as preambles—the most talented hitter in the century-and-a-half-old history of the North American version of the sport. The immortal Teddy Ball Game had not, despite the rumors, been driven babbling into voluntary confinement at the nearest madhouse by the habitual flair of the Rangers for less than mediocre public display. More than anything, Williams had quit because of a personal malediction to the thermal excesses of the Texas summer. Now it was Whitey Herzog’s turn in the barrel, and the early chapters of the initiation process had left the skipper on edge.

  On the way out of Pompano Stadium, I recognized one of the new players, Bill McNulty, refining his game in the outfield. His golf game. McNulty was lining seven-iron shots over the fence and into the mosquito-infested field of swamp grass that adjoined the stadium.

  McNulty would be my first player interview. I knew nothing about him, other than he had been traded over from the Oakland A’s in the off-season. But like virtually every candidate for the Texas Rangers roster, McNulty was in Pompano Beach for a reason.

  “Yeah, Oakland called me up from AAA at the end of the season,” said McNulty. “I got messed up on one of the flights and spilled my drink all over [manager] Dick Williams. Not all over him, actually. But some of it got on him … enough to punch my ticket to Texas.” McNulty laughed heartily.

  Back at the team-and-media-housing compound, a glorified flophouse known as the Surf Rider Resort, I initiated a ritual that would be repeated countless times for the next four years. First, I bought a six-pack of Löwenbräu (remember, this was no Pabst Blue Ribbon expense account), and then I retreated to my room to practice my craft. At the time, articles were composed on a portable standard Smith-Corona typewriter and transmitted back to the paper on a Xerox telecopier, a device more commonly known now as a fax.

  Forty-five minutes later, half of the Löwenbräu was gone and the paper in the typewriter remained blank. Back in Texas, the Star-Telegram was about to be distributed to a quarter-million households and there was an empty hole at the top of the front page of the sports section.

  I began to type. I wrote about Whitey Herzog and how he saw some things in rookie Bill Madlock that made him stand out from the crowd. I wrote that Whitey, after only a day, had already established a keen feel for the strengths and weaknesses of his pitching staff. I wrote that slugging outfielder Bill McNulty carried himself with the confidence and poise that came from his experience with the reigning champion Oakland A’s. I wrote about three and a half pages of that crap and proceeded directly to the Surf Rider’s Banyan Room Lounge to celebrate the completion of my first day in the big leagues. The Banyan poured the hard stuff until four A.M., and that morning a manager, three coaches, perhaps a dozen players and a handful of sober and cerebral professional sports journalists were there to shut it down.

  In the immediate days ahead, I actually began researching the talent pool around the American League and from that attempted to produce some radical thesis leading to the astounding proposition that the Rangers might not finish last. What I learned was that virtually every team the Rangers would face that year in the American League employed some personnel that would either wind up in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown or in the nearby outskirts.

  Oakland had won the World Series the previous season, would win it again this season and the season after that. Why not, with the likes of Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, Sal Bando and Joe Rudi?

  The White Sox offered personalities such as slugging Dick Allen (formerly known as Richie when he was the home-run terror of the National League). Minnesota came to the table with H
armon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew and the best “young curve ball pitcher in the game” (according to Herzog), Bert Blyleven.

  Kansas City seemed eager to show off the skills of rookie third baseman George Brett, and the California Angels had a pitcher about to experience the best year of his career—Nolan Ryan—who threw two no-hitters and struck out 383 batters in 1973.

  The Baltimore Orioles would win the Eastern Division again, with Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer, Dave McNally and company. Carl Yastrzemski and Carlton Fisk anchored the Red Sox. Al Kaline, Mickey Lolich and Bill Freehan were some of the names that adorned the Detroit roster. Even Cleveland, a team thought capable of perhaps challenging the Rangers in the loss column, offered names such as Gaylord Perry and Frank Robinson to attract paying fans through the turnstiles.

  And the Rangers? Well, they had an infield candidate whose name now tragically eludes me who claimed to have been born with two spleens. As a teenager, he told me, he had appeared, appropriately, as a guest on “I’ve Got a Secret.”

  Chapter 2

  As a connoisseur of essentially unhistoric details of modern Americana, I would rate 1973 as a year of outstanding vintage. Vietnam was winding down and Watergate was heating up. The national attitude that the media now falsely associates with the era known as the Sixties did not reach fruition until the early and mid-Seventies. Look up the Class of 1968 in every high school or college annual and you’ll see that all the boys have haircuts like Forrest Gump’s.

  The so-called hippie attitude was reaching its zenith in 1973 and, although the lens on my retrospective processes might be a trifle blurred, it seemed then that almost everyone tended to agree that life was too short and therefore should be enjoyed to the maximum extent. Not like the sober Nineties, when—because of the economy and AIDS—everybody’s getting laid off and nobody’s getting laid. Not like now, when wellness is next to godliness.