The home opener arrived a bit behind schedule that year — Apr. 21 to be precise — due to the first strike in Major League Baseball history. I was there as a fan on opening night, part of the crowd of just over 20,000 at barely modernized Turnpike Stadium as Frank Howard launched one over the center field fence and the Texas Rangers burst on the local scene.
I was there the next afternoon as an usher ($1.60 an hour, guaranteed four hours) as fewer than 6,000 fans showed up and I wondered if the team might be heading back to RFK Stadium anytime soon.
Through the years I have been there (and the two nearby stadiums that followed) as a fan for about a decade, then a beat writer (filling in eagerly but, perhaps, not so adequately for Tim Kurkjian in 1984-85), later as a columnist for the last 24 years and, along the way, as a father of fans and even a parent of a Dot Racer in the summer of 2013.
The thing that remains unchanged 50 years after it all began is that the Rangers will play their home opener Monday against Colorado without unveiling a World Series Champion flag. Over the last half century, only Cleveland has competed in the American League for so long without ending the playoffs on a winning note. The Rangers’ pain of 2011 in St. Louis is now the Guardians’ pain of 2016 against the Cubs.
As a reporter, I missed the bigger-than-life managers — Ted Williams, Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin all had their time in Ranger blue in the ‘70s. The first I interviewed was Doug Rader. It did not go well. It never went well. By the time I showed up as a columnist, the late Johnny Oates summoned me to his office one afternoon after an unpleasant initial visit the night before. When I arrived, he was on the phone and told his listener, “I need to talk to this reporter, he’s been promoted to columnist and said he doesn’t know anything about baseball.”
I explained that those weren’t exactly my words. It got a little better but not much. At least he was the first to guide Texas into the playoffs after an extended wait. In fact, the club has reached the playoffs just eight times in its 50 years here. Technically, that’s 49 postseasons because of the disaster of 1994 but it’s still a surprise when this club encounters anything approaching success. There is nothing on paper to suggest we are in for a shock that includes extended baseball in October this fall.
The Rangers have endured losing records in 56% of their seasons. That’s not shameful, it’s just a level of mediocrity that no one has ever dispelled for long. The team has never produced a Cy Young Award winner and that certainly won’t change in 2022.
Still, there is something very Ranger-like — and I mean that in a good way — about the approaching season. The spending spree that brought Corey Seager and Marcus Semien to town for the foreseeable future signals hope. And hope has always been just around the corner whether it was Ferguson Jenkins or Nolan Ryan showing up at the midpoint or twilight of their Hall of Fame pitching careers or a young Ruben Sierra or Josh Hamilton arriving in the outfield with unlimited promise that turned out to be all too limited.
In the case of Seager and Semien, they are proven commodities with years of production to showcase in their bats and gloves. How soon will it be a show worth watching? The Mariners won 90 games with a young squad last year. The Angels have the reigning MVP, the likes of which we have never seen, along with the best player of the last decade. And as far as I can tell, Houston remains equipped to keep going to World Series.
So “Better than Oakland” isn’t much of a promotion, but it’s the one this year’s Rangers can count on. The minimized optimism is reminiscent of those early days in another way. The original Rangers ventured down from Washington — carpetbaggers in reverse. The 2022 Rangers come from all sorts of places outside the organization. With the trade of backup catcher Jose Trevino to New York, the club does not have a single everyday player or rotation pitcher who was a Rangers draft pick. Only third baseman Andy Ibanez, signed out of Cuba in 2015, represents a homegrown talent although the Yu Darvish trade was so long ago that outfielder Willie Calhoun feels like one.
For that reason, these players feel like visitors almost the way they did back in 1972. We’re happy to have them, happy to have baseball at all under the circumstances. But it’s staggering to think how little has changed and what hasn’t been accomplished in the 50 years since they arrived in these parts.
Surely that championship will be delivered in the next 50, matching those captured by the Mavericks, eight years younger, and the Stars who came from Minnesota more than two decades after the Rangers.
Consistency is a wonderful thing unless it’s mostly a repeat of unmet expectations. The one thing that’s new is this Rangers team begins the year with five straight losing seasons behind them. That had never happened before. I wouldn’t expect any streak-busting in 2022, but at least they are getting close.
