KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL
By GRACE PALMER
When a girl grows up with three brothers, who were born with baseball gloves for hands, she learns a few things about the world: 1) Hot dogs are best eaten right off the grill—no condiments, 2) Befriend the children wandering around the alleys between the fields at the little league park and 3) If you want to know something about the game, you can’t sit in the stands. You have to go and stand with Grandpa, where the game is patiently explained over the course of a couple of decades. Somehow, by the time you are watching your brothers play college ball, still standing with Grandpa, you not only know a thing or two, you love the muffled crunch of peanut shells under your feet, the suspense of a fly ball that you lose in the sunlight, the poetry of a triple play—the intricate purity of the game—though you have no idea how it happened. You learn to love players and teams that play from their hearts, for the love of the game, and to fear the moments that bring a team to a turning point at which it must maintain its values or choose to play for new reasons.
Luckily, if you grew up in North Texas sometime after 1972, and your family was not composed of yellow-bellied traitors to our great state or America’s favorite pastime, you more than likely grew up with the Texas Rangers. You made the long drive to the Ballpark in Arlington, season after season, and you counted yourself lucky to watch the likes of Nolan Ryan (if you’re older) or A-Rod (if you aren’t) or Josh Hamilton (if you are a mere child). You also watched season after season slip through the collective fingers of a dedicated community of fans and the players they loved—each one starting well but trailing off, or opening with a struggle and ending strong, but never running smooth enough from opening day onward. You got used to staving off the hope that your beloved team often inspired in you, but loved them all the fiercer for it.
Last season, your years of loyalty were vindicated by not only a promising start but an even more promising close that landed the Rangers in the playoffs, where they beat the Yankees for a place in the World Series and a potentially redefining moment in the spotlight. By the time you were watching Game 5 early last November, you were so ecstatic over the awesome justification of your lifelong loyalty, that even the team’s ultimate loss (while it did indeed sting) couldn’t quite dampen your spirits. Somewhere in the back of your mind though, you were sad that you wouldn’t be rooting for the little guy anymore; you wondered how your team would change with this new found success.
To watch a team like yours make it that far—to be a part of America’s favorite storyline of underdog success—with the type of program that you had built together was a thing of beauty. Your team wasn’t suffering from an obese payroll (like the Yankees’ $206,333,389); it had built an exquisite farm system, voted the best by Baseball America in 2009, through which it groomed many of its players, like CJ Wilson, thus rewarding hard work within the organization with promotion rather than Yankee-ish trades. Your team wasn’t packed with superstars who eclipsed their teammates; it had a few big names that fit the character of the team (i.e. Josh Hamilton with his inspiring comeback story) and provided necessary leadership for the youngsters. Your team had won with good old American values—loyalty, humility, thrift, hard work—that the average fan could identify with. Ironically, winning brings all of the things (massive payrolls, pursuit of superstars, etc.) that seem to undermine them. Success brings money and money brings freedom and beneath freedom always lurks the potential for change, good or bad. So the question becomes: what kind of change is coming?
North Texas certainly has its wealth, but the fans who have supported the Rangers are more about baseball than celebrities (as I recall, Jay-Z “made the Yankee hat more famous than the Yankee can”). Anyone struggling with the current economy could appreciate the Rangers’ wise money moves over the last few years, most of which were possible as a result of investments in their minor league programs and the players that they raised there. The Rangers, in many ways, have come to epitomize the archetypal American Dream. The team spent years building and working and adapting so that it could use its money carefully when times got tough and—admittedly, with a bit of help from the MLB—rise above their bankruptcy and the financial struggles that have sent other teams to circle the drain.
But the Rangers won’t need to draw from their farm system or be thrifty so much anymore because they have risen above the hard times—they now have the big bucks to buy players like Beltre (at $80 million for five years, or $96 million for six years) their shiny new third baseman. The club isn’t exactly throwing money around just yet. Now that it is back in the black and has proven itself capable of being a real contender during the playoffs, lifelong fans can only hope that their loyalty will not be betrayed by greed. More money can have consequences for a team’s apparent values, which in the Rangers’ case, could estrange them from their loving but generally humble community.
The Yankees (every good Ranger fan’s arch nemeses) have built a bona-fide dynasty out of their success. Starting with their first MVP, Babe Ruth, the Yankees have claimed 22 MVPs and pulled down an astonishing 27 World Series titles. But somewhere along their gilded way, something about the team’s spirit seems to have fallen through. When you consider that Babe Ruth himself only made $80,000 per year (which would now have a purchasing power of about $1 million according to Sam Williamson, co-creator and President of MeasuringWorth), while A-Rod pulls down $32 million (which would now have a purchasing power of $32 million dollars, just FYI) you wonder what teams are playing for at the end of the day. Superstars and big money certainly draw a crowd and bring in even more money (making everyone, especially team owners, very happy), but where is the beauty in a game played for those reasons?
Clearly, money can take more than one course; it may bolster your program or it could shift your values—but money isn’t ever just money. The Rangers now have a board of deep-pocketed directors pushing from behind the scenes, controlling a relatively cushy new payroll. Though there were some shaky times last season, these directors—publicly represented by Nolan Ryan and (previously) Chuck Greenburg—placed the winning bid for the team. In many ways, these investors are clearly bringing new life to Rangers baseball, especially in a financial sense. However, since their ownership will inevitably influence the team, the values that the program previously lived by may shift away from the community, and towards the profit interests of the owners.
Ryan, one of the most legendary pitchers to ever take the mound, had already joined the Rangers Organization as President in 2008, at which point it was inevitable that his knowledge and solid leadership abilities would influence the team. Since 2008, Rangers pitchers are throwing more pitches per game—then leading starter, Millwood threw an average of 95 pitches per game in 2007, but shot up to 105 in 2009—and one-time relief pitchers like C.J. Wilson and now potentially Neftali Feliz have become successful starters and inevitably play more innings each game. This change seems indicative of Ryan’s influence on the team, since it is unlikely that the pitching coaches decided to make an interesting strategy shift just ever so coincidentally around the time that the man, whose strikeout record stands to this day, started making the calls. Now that the new owners have taken over, Ryan has more sway than ever. According to recent Sports Illustrated interviews with Rangers board members, formal partial owner Chuck Greenberg recently sold his share of the team to his partners as a result of differing management styles, which he noted, more specifically differed from Ryan’s. Since this second shift in ownership, Ryan has become president and CEO—thus taking on a major role in the leadership of the club.
In his autobiography (published in 1988) Ryan wrote, “I want my teammates to remember me as a gamer, as a guy who just went out there and did his best each time out. I want them to remember me as a pitcher who did everything in his power to keep his team in a game, to give his team a chance to win.” In fact, Ryan, despite his special treatment within some of the franchises that he played for, was known for this team-above-self mentality. However, now he is an owner, not a player, and has the team’s expanding budget, which is up from $55,250,544 on opening day last season to $92,299,265 this year, to throw around. Fans can only wait and see whether gobs of money and new found stardom will corrupt or strengthen the team that has been entrusted to these new owners.
When Ryan played, he clearly loved the game and said himself that he was concerned, not with money or stats, but with winning. His philosophy seems like a promising fit for the Rangers program that I have always loved and so far the team has benefitted from his leadership and even from its new payroll. However, I cannot help but feel worried when I think of dugouts from other one-time underdogs, now full of men but devoid of passion. I’ll be cheering for the Rangers every step of the way, every season for the rest of my life—only time will tell whether I will continue to do so proudly or not.