UTA Archives/Star-Telegram Collection
Tom Vandergriff throws out the first pitch of the Rangers' first home game on April 21, 1972.
Editor's note: In honor of the Texas Rangers going to the 2023 World Series, we are re-publishing an article we ran last year in appreciation to the visionary who made it all happen.
The Texas Rangers this month will celebrate their 50th anniversary in Arlington with a home-opener first pitch against the Colorado Rockies on April 11.
Baseball in Colorado symbolizes how much has changed over the last 50 years. The Rockies weren’t even an NHL hockey team yet when the Rangers launched in 1972.
To the sports cynic in North Texas — there are plenty and for good reason — baseball in Dallas-Fort Worth is best summarized by the French wordsmith Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who gets credit in the box score for coining the phrase, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
On these shores, from east to west, it goes like this: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Which isn’t all true anymore. We’ve had some good baseball moments; though looking back on the Rangers’ golden anniversary, certainly not all the moments have been golden.
Yet, baseball has been exactly what the founder of baseball in North Texas dreamed the American pastime would be on the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike, a reflection of life itself, which includes its share of disappointment.
Getting baseball here was no different, a daily devotion for one man who woke up every day with a single purpose to see Major League Baseball in Arlington, Texas. He was met on most days with disappointment.
But Tom Vandergriff dared to be bold.
Vandergriff, the legendary mayor of Arlington from 1951-77, however, like any visionary, wouldn’t quit, even when just about everyone else had, though he had one very powerful ally, the “Singing Cowboy.”
“It became a reality to him once he got General Motors here,” says Vandergriff’s grandson, Parker Vandergriff, 35. “I think he saw the potential and possibility. He had the dream of seeing Major League Baseball in Texas. I think those early years as mayor he thought, ‘Man, I can do this.’”
The campaign began in 1958, and when he saw Gene Autry move the Angels to Anaheim in 1965, he began asking more earnestly, “Why not us?”
“Tom saw a prototype, I guess, of what could be in a small town in a large metropolitan area like Anaheim and what Gene Autry did,” says Jim Reeves, a former columnist of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who covered the Rangers as a beat reporter from 1975-86. “I think he used that as a roadmap or a model for what he wanted to try to accomplish here. Autry had Disneyland there and hooked it up with baseball. Vandergriff had the same thing with Six Flags here.”
Since 1958, Vandergriff had been the point man for the region’s ambition for the big-league ball. It was that year that he was selected chair of the Dallas-Tarrant Bi-County Sports Committee, which the next year commissioned a survey to be conducted by Edward Doody and Co. of St. Louis. Its clients included the Yankees, Cardinals, and New York’s baseball Giants.
It concluded that Dallas-Fort Worth was “ready, willing, and well able to support a major-league franchise.” Based on its conclusions, Vandergriff’s committee estimated generously that a team here would draw well more than over 1 million in its first year. (The Rangers drew 662,000-plus in their first year, 1972.)
A sub-commission of prominent residents from Dallas and Fort Worth was formed. It included the cities’ mayors, R.L. Thornton of Dallas and Fort Worth’s Tom McCann. Dallas business leaders Neely Landrum and B. Hick Majors and Fort Worth business leaders Amon Carter Jr. and Estil Vance rounded it out. Their job was to determine the most suitable site and size for a stadium and also seek out potential franchise investors, local or otherwise.
In 1960, the region applied for a team as the AL looked to expand. Carter was among the principal potential investors. Baseball turned down Dallas-Fort Worth in the early ’60s and again in the 1968 expansion set.
Charlie Finley had conversations about moving what was then the Kansas City Athletics here but, of course, settled in Oakland. (Imagine those possibilities: Reggie Jackson and World Series titles in Texas in 1972, ’73, and ’74!)
The what-ifs of the world are as plentiful as grains of sand on the beach of La Concha.
Then came the Seattle Pilots in their first season as an American League expansion team in 1969 and already in financial trouble. The Pilots had been given an ultimatum by the city on a Friday in September: Pay up on back rent for use of the 25,000-seat Sick’s Stadium, totaling more than $660,000, by Monday or face eviction by the city council.
Our guy pounced.
“We will immediately wire the Seattle Pilots and suggest to them that a perfect site for the remainder of their home games would be Turnpike Stadium,” said Vandergriff, then in his 18th year as mayor. “I intend to tell them that I know we’d have people lining the fences, even though we couldn’t have seats for all of them.
“We’d have far more headcount than they could expect in Seattle for the remainder of their games.”
There wouldn’t be enough seats at Turnpike Stadium, in fact only 10,600 permanent and a little more than 3,000 temporary seats.
That would be enough, the mayor believed, for an “anxious” community hungry for big-league baseball to prove to the American League that it needed to be in North Texas.
“We’re certain that a brief experience in Texas would convince the league it should play a full complement of games here next year,” Vandergriff said.
Lamar Hunt — the Kansas City Chiefs’ owner, whose sports enterprises enjoyed the abundant seed of his wildcatter father, H.L. Hunt — and Tommy Mercer, a Fort Worth businessman, were eager, too. The owners of the minor league Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, who played in Arlington, were ready to make an offer the near-bankrupt owners of the Pilots could not refuse. Stable ownership with deep pockets has always been an issue with the Rangers. Among those have been Fort Worth-based ownership groups led by Brad Corbett (which included Carter) and Eddie Chiles, two eccentric sorts who had made their fortunes in oil and gas.
Tom Grieve, the Rangers’ general manager under Chiles, who bought the team from Corbett in 1980, remembers at meetings in the later years of Chiles’ ownership: “At almost all of these meetings as he was getting older he would say, ‘Brad Corbett was a terrible businessman, but he’s the best salesman the world has ever known because he sold me this sorry-assed baseball team.”
(Eddie was likely venting as the fortunes of his Western Company vanished in the crash of the mid-1980s. He was known to adore his baseball team and stayed on as chairman of the board after selling to the group led by George W. Bush and Rusty Rose in 1989.)
At any rate, an ownership group led by Hunt and Mercer would have likely dramatically changed the course of major league history in Dallas-Fort Worth.
“A Lamar Hunt-owned team would’ve been very, very good, I think,” Reeves says, “and given them a much stronger start than what they had.”
The Pilots ultimately went to Milwaukee, purchased by Bud Selig, and became the Brewers.
One guy who was not a fan of baseball expanding into Dallas-Fort Worth was Judge Roy Hofheinz in Houston. He believed the market — Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana — was property of the Astros. The Judge was determined to do what he could to keep baseball out of what he called “Hyphenville.” Vandergriff tried to convince him of the potential for income a rivalry between the two could generate.
Months after, Vandergriff told business leaders that one reason he had worked so hard to move a baseball team here is “because of one man in South Texas with a big cigar in his mouth and a covered baseball field that feels the entire state is Astro-land. This is not the case.
“When we get a team here, you are all invited — it will be the ‘in’ thing to do during the summer of 1971, and we’ll send an engraved invitation to Judge Hofheinz.”
Vandergriff even asked President Lyndon B. Johnson to try to persuade Hofheinz, but not even the “Johnson treatment” had any impact. (In 1971, President Richard Nixon was public about not wanting to see the Senators move to Texas.)
“It was a big blow for sure,” Parker Vandergriff says of those late 1960s attempts that fell short. “My grandfather said he would never step foot in the Astrodome or never go to an Astros game ever again.” The same for AstroWorld, a Hofheinz family-owned amusement park. Vandergriff believed it was an imitation of Six Flags Over Texas.
“He never had many enemies in life, and I think that was the only one,” Parker Vandergriff says of Tom, certainly a man affiliated with sainthood if there ever was a politician you could say that about.
Vandergriff went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and later as Tarrant County Judge.
“He was just an extraordinary man with incredible drive and perseverance,” Reeves says. “And the kind of man who could make connections and create relationships between rivals, even Dallas and Fort Worth. He could pull that together somehow. I don’t think anybody wanted to disappoint Tom. He was too nice. He was just the kind of gentleman you didn’t want to disappoint.”
As a student at Southern California, Vandergriff in passing met Gene Autry, who had gained renown as the “Singing Cowboy.” The two formed a bond in the early 1960s as baseball expanded as a concession of sorts to a proposed Continental Baseball League, proposed by William Shea and Branch Rickey in 1958 in the aftermath of New York losing the Dodgers and Giants to California.
The original Continental league included teams in Denver, Houston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, and Toronto. By the league’s planned launch date of 1961, a team in Dallas-Fort Worth was set to be one of three additional teams to the pioneers.
Major League Baseball responded by placing a franchise in Houston and Washington, D.C., (after the original Senators moved in 1961). The Mets and Angels in Los Angeles were added next. Once Shea had his team, the CBL collapsed without ever throwing a pitch.
Autry got his team. Vandergriff was left out, thanks to his nemesis, Hofheinz.
Autry, a native of Tioga, Texas, became Vandergriff’s ultimate ally, his “deep throat baseball insider,” Parker Vandergriff says, the guy advising on “where to turn and where to go” in Vandergriff’s pursuit.
“Being from Texas, he wanted to see baseball here, too,” says Parker Vandergriff, who has much, perhaps all, of the correspondence Vandergriff composed or received during those years. “He was his ally from 1958 to the very end.”
Vandergriff and Hunt had explored pursuing a transfer of the Washington Senators as early as the early-to-mid-1960s, according to Parker Vandergriff, who has documentation asserting so.
In 1971, the campaign to bring baseball finally found reality after a meeting of American League owners in Boston. It wasn’t without its dirty dealing. Charlie Finley, the owner of the A’s, who had considered a move to Arlington only four years before, tried to corrupt the proceedings by holding his vote hostage. He would vote for owner Bob Short to move the Senators to Arlington only if the Senators agreed to trade him Jeff Burroughs, a good young talent who would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award in Texas in 1974.
Finley’s vote would have been decisive since one owner was absent. Autry had been hospitalized after falling ill. Owners in favor of a team in Texas went to the hospital to get a proxy vote from Autry, who happily signed off.
“Gene ended up saving the day,” Parker Vandergriff remembers his grandfather saying. “We [the Rangers] wouldn’t exist without Gene.”
Short called the agreement with Arlington the “most favorable of any club I know of in baseball.” His rental of Turnpike Stadium — renamed Arlington Stadium for major league baseball — was a $1 a year for the first 1 million in attendance, plus a share of concessions. The city of Arlington infused some instant cash into the team by acquiring the broadcasting rights.
The city would expand the stadium to 35,000 seats and a commitment to 45,000 the next season. (Arlington Stadium never reached a capacity of 45,000. The stadium was never sufficient to support a major league team financially with almost half of its seats general admission cheapies.)
It was, the mayor of Dallas said, the most consequential 24-hour period in the history of North Texas. That same day, Mayor Wes Wise and Fort Worth Mayor Sharkey Stovall had successfully obtained $100 million in bonds for the new “Dallas-Fort Worth regional airport.”
“This was the greatest 24-hour period in the history of Dallas and Fort Worth as a combination,” said Wise to the Dallas Morning News. “The successful delivery of $100 million in bonds for the airport Tuesday morning, combined with the acquisition of a Major League Baseball team franchise Tuesday night puts a new emphasis on an era of Dallas-Fort Worth cooperation and shows what teamwork can do.”
All through the resolve and staying power of one man. Tom Vandergriff was determined to go all nine innings.
Vandergriff’s final public appearance occurred in October 2010 at Ameriquest Field in Arlington, the successor to Arlington Stadium. He sat in the city’s suite watching the Rangers clinch a long-awaited World Series berth with a victory over the despised New York Yankees.
Vandergriff, suffering from dementia, died weeks later. Yet, he had at long last watched, even if for a moment, his beloved baseball team play in a World Series.
“Literally, his last public appearance was at the Rangers ballpark watching the American League Championship Series,” Parker Vandergriff says. “It really was poetic. We couldn’t think of a better way for him to spend his last moment in public. It was neat, honestly.”
