When it comes to books about the Texas Rangers baseball club, one takes what one can get. What one can get is mostly comprised of an “authorized” book (and I’m generally leery of what authorization entails) and maybe a few passages out of Canseco’s tell-alls. For that reason, alone, Mike Shropshire’s Seasons In Hell is worth a look. This is a franchise that, for most of its history, nobody but its most irrationally devoted fans have cared about. As such, very few have written about it.
When I was a child, the Rangers were my favorite team, and Oddibe McDowell was my favorite player. I think there was something formative in this, a lesson in faithfulness. It was probably because I was little, had been raised on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, and had a fascination with baseball (in and of itself, rather than as one amongst many sports) but the Rangers’ lack of success never made any difference to me. They were my favorite team. They were my team. As I developed opinions and ideas that were distinct from the ones my parents imparted, I even developed something of an affinity for the Rangers’ unenviable status as Major League Baseball’s most consistent also-rans. But there’s something else about this team and its history, some loveably seedy character to it that extends from the historical nightmare known as the 1970s right on through the 2000s, a thirty year history of an image barely noticeable enough to clean up, but not really dirty enough to be all that interesting, anyway. I guess the yin and the yang of the Rangers being the Rangers has been symbolized best through cranial traumas: we’ve taken great pride in Nolan Ryan’s beating-about-the-head of Robin Ventura, and we sheepishly grinned in embarrassment while watching replays of that ball bouncing off Jose Canseco’s head and over the wall. Until now, those events were the bookends of a rather brief highlight reel. To be sure, the lights never got too high.
Seasons In Hell provides a pretty entertaining snapshot of just how low this franchise has been from the start. The subtitle is, “With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and ‘the worst baseball team in history,’ the 1973–1975 Texas Rangers.” It’s a funny book, but maybe never funnier than the Herzog quotes that make the back cover, including, “Defensively these guys are really substandard, but with our pitching, it doesn’t really matter.” Herzog’s exasperated wit (or witty exasperation) is something kind of stabilizing to the narrative. Once he’s fired, the story starts to feel less like a drunken night and more like a hungover morning. The metaphor is apt, because, beyond baseball Shropshire also captures (from the “frontlines,” so to speak) the ethos of the 1970s. It’s an insight that makes me grateful that I only had to live through two years and two days of that decade, and also helps me start to understand how things have gotten to a point where people turn to radio shock jocks for political and religious leadership. The narrative, itself, is depressing enough, but Shropshire’s style (which, in the words of the back cover copy, is that of a “gonzo sportswriter” writing a “behind-the-scenes account” — a thoroughly Baby-Boomer-esque affair) is a real drag, in its own right, even where it’s funny and/or interesting.
I read this book about “the worst team in baseball history” in May 2010, toward the beginning of what turned out to be the best season in the history of the Rangers’ franchise. For the first time ever, the Rangers won the American League pennant and appeared in the World Series (which they lost in five games to a very good, very interesting team in the San Francisco Giants). This season was not an overnight success story, a stroke of luck, or a case of a team playing above its level. This was how it was supposed to happen. I remember telling people in 2008, “Next year, maybe 2010,” because I believed in the way general manager, Jon Daniels, was developing the team. Fans have every reason to remain hopeful for years to come. With Daniels and his front office, a balanced team at the big league level (for once, there’s no amount of truth to Herzog’s ’73 evaluation), one of the best minor league systems around, and new ownership, this looks like a reborn franchise.
If I’m right, and if this is a new age for the Texas Rangers, it’s exciting to be here. It’s not exciting in the “sports” kind of way, into which so many fans got raptured as the Rangers made clear that they were for real, but in the baseball way: a slowly developing, grassy, poetic, mathematic way; the only way that can inspire PBS documentary schmaltz and complex statistical formulae simultaneously. Even if I’m wrong, and this is just a short respite from the platonic reality of “being the Rangers,” the excitement of this moment in time is just the same. A 3–2 count is exciting whether it results in a strikeout, a walk, a home run, or a pop fly.
No Comments