An Ode to Tom Vandergriff: The Texas Rangers in Arlington Turn 51

Editor's note: Last year, the Texas Rangers commemorated their 50th anniversary in Arlington. Today, on the 51st anniversary, we are re-publishing an 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.”  

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All-Time Texas Rangers Team

C Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez: Pudge was one of scout Sandy Johnson’s finds in Puerto Rico, and he turned out to be one of baseball’s best-ever at that position. 

1B Rafael Palmeiro: Palmeiro’s career was tainted by a positive steroids test — after swearing in front of Congress that he had never used — but he hit 569 home runs with that sweet swing, most of them here.

2B Michael Young: This seven-time All-Star had 200 hits in six of his 13 seasons in Texas and played every position in the infield.

3B Adrian Beltre: A slugger and slick fielder, Beltre played the game with a child’s enthusiasm and as well as anybody at that position over the course of 20 years. 

SS Alex Rodriguez: Bad contract, but a great player. A-Rod earned his bloated paycheck with an MVP season and seasons of 47, 57, and 52 home runs. 

LF Juan Gonzalez: Among the best run producers of his era, Senor Octubre almost single-handedly beat the Yankees in the 1996 American League Divisional Series. 

CF Josh Hamilton: Hamilton could resemble Mickey Mantle, doing everything out there. He could hit, run, and throw. He was the American League’s MVP in 2010, the Rangers' World Series breakthrough season.

RF Jeff Burroughs: The Rangers’ first star, the AL’s MVP in 1974 with a league-leading 118 runs batted in. In seven seasons, he knocked in 412 runs. 

DH Ruben Sierra: A member of the Rangers’ Hall of Fame, this son of Puerto Rico somehow didn’t win the MVP in 1989 (finished second), despite an incredible season. 

SP Nolan Ryan: The flame-throwing right-hander brought magic to Arlington, throwing two no-hitters — with countless near misses — and recording career strikeout No. 5,000 and career victory No. 300. Oh, and he beat up Robin Ventura.

SP Fergie Jenkins: Finished second in the Cy Young Award voting in 1974 with a 25-12 record, 2.89 ERA, and 29 complete games. 

SP Charlie Hough: Knuckleballer was a mainstay for some bad teams in the 1980s and is the club’s all-time leader in wins, strikeouts, and innings pitched.

SP Kenny Rogers: 133-96 over 12 years and 21 complete games, including tossing the major’s 14th perfect game in 1994. 

SP Yu Darvish: The phenom from Japan had a 3.42 earned-run average of his five years and lots of strikeouts, including a league-leading 277 in 2013. He was an out from registering the major’s 24th perfect game against Houston in 2013.

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The Best and The Worst

Five Best Moments

5 Opening Day 1972 

The day many never believed would arrive was delayed by a players’ strike, but the home opener was finally set for April 21, 1972. And it rained. However, as if the baseball gods intervened, the skies cleared for sunshine, and baseball was played. Major League Baseball had arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Rangers’ victory was one of very few in 1972. “Let’s make our cheers heard all the way to Houston tonight,” Arlington Mayor Tom Vandergriff said, alluding to Astros’ owner Judge Roy Hofheinz’s efforts to keep baseball out of Arlington.

4 Kenny Rogers: perfect

In 1994, Rangers lefty Kenny Rogers tossed the 14th perfect game in Major League Baseball history, a 4-0 shutout of the California Angels in a game saved by Rusty Greer’s diving catch in center field in the ninth inning. The moment was a perfect storyline to go along with that season’s opening of the Ballpark in Arlington.

3 George W. Bush-Rusty Rose group buying the team

The group led by the President’s son gave the Rangers something it had never had: stable ownership. In a 1989 transaction, Bush and Rose bought the franchise from Eddie Chiles, becoming managing partners of an ownership group of 25 investors, including Bob Castellini and William DeWitt Jr., today owners of the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals, as well as Fort Worth billionaire Richard Rainwater and Fort Worth native Tom Schieffer, who would take on the role of team president.

That triumvirate of Bush-Rose-Schieffer built a foundation for the franchise’s first real success, division titles in 1996, 1998-99, and removed the club’s stadium albatross with the construction of the Ballpark in Arlington in 1994. 

Like all good things, that ownership stability would come to an end.

2 Nolan Ryan signing

Many believed the free-agent signing of the Express was a mere PR move for a player thought to be at the tail end of his career. But the Rangers’ scouts reported that Ryan was still among the five best pitchers in the National League. Ryan was far from done, pitching as well as he ever had for four full seasons in Arlington. 

Owner Eddie Chiles had no money to spend, but Nolan wanted to leave Houston yet remain working in Texas. “When we presented Eddie with this opportunity, we explained that Nolan didn’t fit into the budget we had,” Tom Grieve, then the general manager, remembers. “Eddie snapped back, ‘Don’t tell me about the budget. Sign Nolan Ryan, and I’ll figure out how to pay him.’”

1 World Series

Long-suffering Rangers fans rejoiced as Neftali Feliz struck out Texas nemesis Alex Rodriguez in the ninth inning to close out the American League Championship Series, giving the home team its first berth in baseball’s Fall Classic in 2010. The moment was actually worth all those long-suffering years of futility.

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Five Worst Moments 

5 Beer me

What could possibly be wrong with Cleveland’s 10-Cent Beer Night? That’s right: 12-ounce beers for 10 cents. A week earlier in Arlington, the game between the Rangers and Indians included a bench-clearing brawl. Indians fans under the influence were ready for the rematch.

Throughout the first seven innings, several drunken fans ran onto the field, including a naked man who slid into second base. In the ninth inning, with the winning run at second for Cleveland, all hell broke loose.

A fan ran onto the field to try to steal right fielder Jeff Burroughs’ hat. Burroughs, trying to confront the guy, tripped. The Rangers, believing Burroughs had been knocked down, grabbed bats and came onto the field, their manager Billy Martin leading the way. 

A full-fledged West Side Story riot was underway with fists and chairs both flying and weapons flashed.

“I saw at least two knives pulled in right field,” said Nestor Chylak, the umpire crew chief who called the game a forfeit, awarding Texas a victory. “The Rangers conducted themselves in the best behavior throughout the game, and I had to protect them from those animals around that dugout.”

4 David Clyde

Owner Bob Short was “losing his ass,” as one former player described the Rangers’ owner’s bottom line in 1973. So, knowing he had quite the draw with a Texas high school player as the first overall pick in the draft, Short ordered him up to the big leagues immediately. It worked. An overflow crowd of 36,000 packed into Arlington Stadium to see the phenom go an unheard-of straight to the majors. The game was delayed as toll booths on the turnpike worked overtime with the increased traffic.

“I couldn’t wait to see what the best high school player in the world could do against a big-league team, and it was the Twins, a good hitting team,” says Tom Grieve, who was on that Rangers’ team. “At the same time, every one of us in the dugout knew this was not the best thing for his career.”

Instead, Clyde pitched parts of five seasons and never approached his potential. He was out of the league by age 24 in 1979. And the Rangers lost a potential significant long-term piece to their rotation for a decade. 

“The shortsighted decision was good for the bottom line, but a disaster in the long term. And not the right thing to do,” Grieve says.

3 Who’s in charge?

Simply put, 1977 was a terrible year for manager Frank Lucchesi, who began the season being pummeled in spring training at the hands of Lenny Randle, who was upset by two things: 1) being told he would have to compete with Bump Wills for the starting job at second base and 2) seeing Lucchesi quoted as saying, “I’m sick and tired of punks making $80,000 a year moaning and groaning about their situation.”

By June, Lucchesi had won too few games. Newspaper reporters broke the story that owner Brad Corbett and general manager Eddie Robinson were looking for a new manager without having informed Lucchesi, leaving the skipper hanging for several days.

Corbett wanted Eddie Stanky and hired him on June 17. Stanky, though, decided he didn’t want the job and quit after one game. Bench coach Connie Ryan managed for three games before Billy Hunter took the job on a permanent basis.

The Rangers not only broke an American League record with four managers in one season, they did so in one week.

“I sat up all night with Frank and Pat Corrales in Frank’s suite in Minnesota with a bottle of Jack Daniels,” says Jim Reeves, who covered the Rangers for the Star-Telegram from 1975-86. “Frank was an emotional guy and was pretty broken down already. It was really hard on him.”

2 Alex Rodriguez, cha-ching, cha-ching

In 2000, owner Tom Hicks made the splash he intended, giving free-agent shortstop Alex Rodriguez the largest contract in sports history, $252 million over 10 years.

It also turned out to be the worst contract in sports history, hamstringing the Rangers’ budget. A-Rod did his part, hitting more than 156 home runs and 359 runs batted in and a most valuable player award in his three seasons with the team. But the team couldn’t afford to put anybody around him.

“It was a nearsighted stupid move,” says Tom Grieve. “If you ever need the shining example of why one position player makes very little impact on the result of a team, it was the Alex Rodriguez signing. In three years, he put back-to-back-to-back seasons that compare to Bonds, Babe Ruth, and anybody else. And they got no benefit in wins and losses on the field.”

The Rangers finished last in the American League West in all three of Rodriguez’s seasons. Insult to injury: The Rangers are still paying Rodriguez, who will cash his last paycheck in 2025.

1 Game 6, 2011 World Series

All you have to say is “Game 6” to make a Rangers fan wince. Texas, vying for a first World Series title, twice allowed two-run leads to disappear in what would have been a series-clinching victory. Instead, it was a series loss in seven games.

In the ninth, closer Neftali Feliz, protecting a 7-5 lead with two outs and runners on first and second base, gave up a long fly ball to David Freese that right fielder Nelson Cruz misplayed into a triple, allowing the tying run to score. 

“I can’t say anything bad about Nellie Cruz,” says Tom Grieve. “He’s one of the great personalities in the game, but he screwed that ball up in the right field. There’s no other way you can sugarcoat it. The ball was hit over his head. He had a choice: You either have to go for the ball and slam into the wall and try to catch it or wait back, play it on a hop, and keep the guy on first base from scoring. He got caught in no man’s land, had no chance of catching it. The way he went after it, the ball bounced over his head, and the tying run scored. I can see that play 100 times. That’s the only way you can describe it.”

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The Field Generals: The 16 permanent managers in Rangers’ history.

1972 - Ted Williams 54-100  

The Splendid Splinter was one of baseball’s greatest hitters, but, says Tom Grieve, who played for him in 1969-72: “As players, you could sense managing wasn’t on his bucket list. Occasionally after a game, you would walk into the clubhouse and see Ted’s jersey would be on the ground. You looked a little further, his sweatshirt would be on the ground, and then you got to his locker room and the reporters would say he wasn’t there after the game. He took his uniform off, put his clothes on, and left in a matter of several minutes.”

1973 - Whitey Herzog 47-91 

“It’s not far-fetched looking back that if Whitey Herzog was given five or six years to manage the Rangers, short term, we would have suffered, but long term, it would have been exactly what we needed to become a contending team,” says Grieve of Herzog’s philosophy of building a team of pitching and defense with hitting mixed in and building from within the organization.

1973-75 - Billy Martin 137-141

“By far the best manager I ever played for,” says Grieve. “If we’re playing a team with the exact same talent as us, we knew we were going to win because our manager was better. He was a fearless manager. He didn’t care what the owner thought, what the sportswriters thought, what the fans thought. He was going to manage the game the way he wanted to.”

1975-77 - Frank Lucchesi 142-149 

Lucchesi’s claim to fame was the dustup with Lenny Randle in spring training. He later sued Randle for $200,000, claiming the ballplayer cost him his job in Arlington. Also, “he carried around a stack of 8-by-10-inch [pictures] that he would sign in bars for people, especially beautiful young women,” remembers Jim Reeves, a newspaper columnist who covered the Rangers for 12 seasons.

1977-78 - Billy Hunter 146-108

No one doubted Hunter’s ability as a tactician, but managing personalities were clearly not the strength of this authoritarian. “He may be Hitler, but he ain’t making no lampshade out of me,” said Dock Ellis, who led a player revolt. Owner Brad Corbett sided with Ellis and fired Hunter.

1978-80 - Pat Corrales 160-164

“I supported Pat, but when the season goes as lousy as this one did, you couldn’t disagree with any baseball team that changes managers,” said Eddie Robinson of a 76-win team in 1980. 

1981-82 - Don Zimmer 95-106

Zim was as old-school as anyone. Jim Reeves remembers when new team president Mike Stone mandated player weekly meetings with players, who were supposed to go over goals for the week. “They would all say they were going to go 20 for 40 this week. Zim would tell me, ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’”

1983-85 - Doug Rader 155-200

Owner Eddie Chiles hired Rader over Jim Leyland and Bobby Valentine, primarily because of his score on an IQ test. However, Rader did not have the mind or character to be a major-league manager. “He had the same temperament as a manager as he did a player aggressive and angry. Rader was a brilliant man, but he just couldn’t control his emotions. There was a time he went into the clubhouse after an unhappy loss and ripped off his jersey and challenged any of the players to fight,” says Reeves.

1985-92 - Bobby Valentine 581-605 

Grieve, by now the Rangers general manager, was teammates with Valentine with the New York Mets in 1978. “I could tell from day one listening to him talk … he analyzed everything that happened in every game. Commented on strategy before and after it happened. I thought to myself there was no doubt Bobby was going to be a manager.”

1993-94 - Kevin Kennedy 138-138 

After a good first season, Kennedy came back a different manager for his second season. When his team failed in the strike-shortened 1994 season, Kennedy railed, looking for anybody and everybody to blame. He never took a look in the mirror. “Kevin changed after that first season,” said one person in the front office. “He was down-to-earth and happy to be managing in the big leagues. This last year it was like he decided he was one of the stars.”

1995-2001 - Johnny Oates 506-476

Hired by new general manager Doug Melvin, Oates led the club to its most fruitful years to date with three American League West Division championships, including a club-record of 95 wins in 1996. “We won because everybody worked extra hard, everybody watched out for each other, and we had a great leader,” said former player Will Clark.

2001-02 - Jerry Narron 134-162

The Rangers continued to be a disorganized mess as an organization in the final year of the Alex Rodriguez experiment, and, well, someone had to take the fall. Jerry Narron, come on down. 

2003-06 - Buck Showalter 319-329 

Over time, Showalter’s controlling and uptight methods came to grate more and more on his players. That description of his tactics, Showalter disagreed with, by the way. His was a more “passionate” approach. Sometimes you can simply spend too much time together before it becomes tiring.

2007-14 - Ron Washington 664-611 

The Rangers’ all-time leading general almost took the franchise all the way to baseball’s promised land. His tenure wasn’t without hiccups, including an admission that a failed drug test for cocaine was about to be red-flagged by the league. He also left suspiciously, resigning suddenly with no explanation in 2014. 

2015-18 - Jeff Banister 325-313

Banister seemed to be making the most of his first chance to manage in the big leagues with two division championships in his first two seasons. But those were followed by two clunkers. Ultimately, he was judged not the guy to rebuild the roster. 

2019-present - Chris Woodward 160-224 

The jury is still out on Woodward, who begins his fourth season in 2022 but with finally some players to compete with. He sent to the field mostly guys with cap guns his first three years.

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The Rangers’ Early Fort Worth Owners, Bigger Than Life

Brad Corbett and Eddie Chiles didn’t achieve in baseball, but it wasn’t for lack of desire.

The second incarnation of the Washington Senators was much like the first, which played under the shadow of a history of bad baseball teams.

“Washington: First in War, First in Peace, Last in the American League” was the slogan adopted by the wisenheimers.

By the time owner Bob Short, who moved the NBA’s Lakers from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, landed in Texas he had had enough of baseball ownership. He was losing more money than the Senators games, and that was hard to do for the Hindenburg of American League teams.

Tom Hicks of Dallas would rival Short in terms of bad ownership 30 years later, but in 1974 Short identified a local buyer who would cement Tarrant County and Fort Worth’s claim to the team: Brad Corbett, who with a group of businessmen, bought the Rangers for $10 million. Corbett had made his fortune in the oil industry in the pipe and plastics business. The group included Amon Carter Jr.

“Everybody was glad Bob Short sold the team,” remembers Tom Grieve, then a Rangers player. “No one had anything personally against him, but he spent every day bitching about there not being enough fans or money. We had the worst organization in Major League Baseball. Our spring training site was an embarrassment, and there wasn’t a high school field in Texas that wasn’t nicer than our minor-league facilities.”

Corbett was a charismatic, can-do risk-taker who was a multimillionaire by the age of 32. Corbett’s tenure as majority owner was marked by heavy roster turnover year after year. One notable trade occurred in the bathroom at the Swiss House restaurant on University Drive, sending Bobby Bonds and Len Barker to Cleveland for Larvell Blanks and Jim Kern. 

One of his first matters to deal with as owner was Billy Martin. The two got sideways with one another, the manager of the team saying at one point of Corbett, “He knows as much about baseball as I do pipe.” Corbett eventually fired him.

Corbett had setbacks in business, compromising his ownership. 

“I always wondered what if Brad Corbett had unlimited resources,” Grieves says. “He would have been a legendary baseball owner if he had a ton of money and stayed there a long time.”

Another eccentric, bigger-than-life Fort Worthian bought the team from Corbett in 1980. 

Legendary oilman Eddie Chiles, outspoken on just about every topic, including, in his opinion, the government’s infringement on business, later sold to George W. Bush and Rusty Rose, saying of the Rangers: “Next to my wife, Franny, it’s [the Rangers] the greatest love of my life.”

“He was a maverick,” says Jim Reeves, a former sports reporter. “He was used to doing things his way, and people snapping to his orders. It had worked for him.”

It didn’t work in baseball, however. 

To wit: A roasting mad Chiles flew up to New York to demand that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn end the players’ strike in 1981. To Chiles, Kuhn was simply another employee. And like others before him, he would fire Kuhn, if need be.

The baseball commissioner told him to leave. 

The oil crash in the mid-1980s did the Chiles' ownership in. The Rangers struggled throughout. Yet, the organization had one very important achievement: A mission statement that the organization would build its players from within the minor league system. 

He also directed Grieve, then the general manager, to sign Nolan Ryan even if it didn’t fit in the budget. Chiles said he would figure out a way to pay the legendary right-hander.  

He wound up not having to worry about when the Bush-Rose group emerged.