Major League Baseball

Rangers' futility firmly behind them

Published Oct. 14, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

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These aren’t your father’s Texas Rangers.

These Rangers, who host the New York Yankees in Game 1 of the ALCS on Friday night, won the AL West by eight games over Oakland – the biggest margin of any division champion in baseball – and then knocked off Tampa Bay, which led the American League with 96 regular-season victories, in the opening round of the postseason.

Your father’s Rangers?

They were born as the expansion Washington Senators, a part of baseball’s expansion back in 1961 to appease a large segment of Congress that was irate over the original Washington Senators moving to Minnesota. They blew out of the nation’s capital themselves after the 1971 season, settling in Arlington, midway between Dallas and Fort Worth.

But then this is a franchise that in a one-week stretch back in 1977 went through four managers. On June 22 that season with the team in Minnesota, the Rangers fired manager Frank Lucchesi and hired Eddie Stanky, who had been coaching the baseball team at South Alabama.

One day later, after leading the Rangers to a 10-8 win against the Twins in his debut, Stanky said he was homesick and resigned. Connie Ryan was given the interim manager title, but turned down the job on a full-time basis. Harmon Killebrew also declined an offer. So the Rangers wound up hiring Baltimore coach Billy Hunter to take over the team.

In 1982, then-owner Eddie Chiles decided to fire manager Don Zimmer, but asked him to keep running the team for a few days so Chiles could have time to decide on a replacement. He narrowed the search to coaches Fred Koenig and Darrell Johnson, eventually opting for Johnson because Koenig accidentally suffered a black eye and Chiles didn’t think that would play well at a news conference.

Chiles' next challenge was telling Johnson. Problem was he didn’t know what Johnson looked like so he went down to the clubhouse and asked the man in front of coach Wayne Terwilliger’s locker where he could find Darrell Johnson.

"Right here,’’ said Johnson.

While the Yankees have won nine of their 27 world championships and 15 AL pennants in the first 49 seasons of the Rangers' existence, Texas' five-game effort against Tampa Bay in the last week was the first postseason series victory in franchise history. The Rangers became the 30th of 30 major-league teams to have done so.

They didn’t even make their first playoff appearance until 1996, which was the longest any of the 14 expansion teams went without playing a meaningful game in October. They still haven’t won a postseason home game and after winning their first playoff game ever (in New York in 1996), the Rangers actually lost nine in a row -- all to the Yankees -- in the first rounds in 1996, 1998 and 1999.

Bur then this is a franchise where one-time manager Bobby Valentine had to pull starting pitcher Bobby Witt after five innings of a no-hitter because of pitch count. Witt had 10 strikeouts that night in Milwaukee, but he also had walked eight batters, thrown four wild pitches and surrendered two runs.

At least Witt made it to the mound. That’s more than could be said for Roger Moret, who became a part of Rangers lore back in 1978 when he went into a catatonic trance in front of his locker, holding a shower shoe.

"I need a starting pitcher,’’ Hunter told the media, "and not a statue.’’

Whitey Herzog was the minor league director of the New York Mets before accepting the Rangers' managerial job in 1973. Having been with a National League team and running a farm system that had produced the likes of Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, Herzog was taken aback at the talent level midway through spring training. He claimed he called his old bosses with the Mets and offered to swap his big-league team for the Mets’ Triple-A roster. After 138 games and 91 losses into his first big-league managerial job, Herzog, an eventual Hall of Fame manager, was fired.

That was one of 17 seasons with 90-plus losses in the franchise’s first 49 seasons, during which they also had only 17 winning records. The 90 wins this season matched the second-biggest victory total in franchise history. They also won 90 in 1996, and set the franchise record with 95 wins in 1999.

But then this is a club whose doctor, while walking through the clubhouse in 1996,  glanced at a Baseball America issue that featured three pitchers from the University of Tennessee on the cover, and said that one of them appeared to be missing the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.

That one happened to be R.A. Dickey, recently selected by Texas in the first round of the draft and to whom scouting director Lenny Strelitz had offered $810,000 to sign earlier that day. Alarmed by the doctor's statement, the Rangers arranged for Dickey to undergo an exam. It showed he was missing the ligament, resulting in the Rangers dropping their offer to $75,000.

Twenty-three years earlier, the team’s first in Texas, attendance was so dismal that the Rangers drafted Texas high school wunderkind David Clyde and -- at the urging of crash-strapped owner Bob Short -- brought him directly to the big leagues. He was overmatched, but the Rangers averaged nearly 27,000 for his starts compared to 6,000 for their 75 other home games.

And then there was the case of catcher Ned Yost, who was struggling hitting pitches and throwing out base runners in 1984 when he was placed on the disabled list with what was described as "heavy eye lid tension.’’ Manager Doug Rader explained, "We’re going to treat it just like knee surgery.’’

The Yankees are baseball’s winningest team with an all-time winning percentage of .568, which is 30 points better than the No. 2 San Francisco Giants. The Rangers have a .471 all-time winning percentage, 27th of the 30 major league teams, ahead of only Seattle (.469), San Diego (.464) and Tampa Bay (.438).

But then this is a team whose current ownership group, fronted by Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, bought it in a bankruptcy auction after previous owner Thomas Hicks defaulted on $525 million in loans, and among his biggest creditors listed Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

Eddie Chiles owned the team from 1980 until selling it to a group headed by future President George W. Bush in 1989. Before Bush’s group emerged, Chiles initially had a deal to sell to a group headed by Frank Morsani, a Tampa-area automobile dealer. When speculation developed that Morsani was actually going to move the team to the Tampa Bay area, Chiles announced prior to an ownership meeting in Montreal that he would vote against the sale and urge other owners to do the same.

One evening, Randy Galloway, a Dallas sports columnist who also had a sports talk show, was on the air railing against Chiles’ attempt to sell the team to Morsani when he got word that Fran from Fort Worth was on the line. Fran turned out to be Fran Chiles, Eddie’s wife, and she was calling from the car phone on the way to Arlington Stadium for that night’s game.

"Randy," she said in the start of a defense of her husband, "you have to understand. Eddie doesn’t have any more money."

Chiles had made his money in the oil fields and when he first took over the franchise he wanted to bring a more business-like approach to the game. Upon hiring Don Zimmer as manager for the 1981 season, Chiles had a meeting where he explained in the oil business his employees began each week with a forecast of what their production levels would be. He wanted Zimmer to do that, and also have the players each week predict how many hits or wins or walks or home runs they would have.

That, however, is history.

These Rangers want to make it ancient history.

They already have won a postseason series for the first-time in franchise history.

Now comes the challenges of knocking "winning at home" off their postseason wish list and, who knows, maybe even knocking off the Yankees, the team that provided the dead end in the Rangers' three previous postseason experiences.

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