In the spring of 1973, a Forth Worth-based TV columnist named Mike Shropshire was assigned to cover the Texas Rangers, then in their second year playing baseball in the Dallas Metroplex. For the next three seasons, Shropshire got to witness some amazing baseball feats. The Rangers lost 105 games in 1973, but then contended strongly for the AL West pennant in 1974 and didn't get eliminated until the final week of the season. In 1975, things fall back to Earth for the Rangers, and the author himself gets to claim partial responsibility for the Rangers firing their second manager in 24 months.
Baseball in the 1970s was much more vivid than the way the game is played today. Read
Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s
, and then compare that sport to the sterile, plastic version of the same game on offer now. The managers were much more unguarded with the media; the players were still relatively poor and didn't have agents and media handlers telling them how to behave; and, boy, did the alcohol flow freely. Shropshire recounts being late for his first day of work on the Rangers' spring training beat, and over the next three seasons, recalls his epic hangovers about as well as he does the various games he covered for his newspaper. Traveling with the team, he gets to witness (and recount, in funny prose) urban blight in then-benighted cities such as Cleveland and Baltimore.
You'll meet lots of memorable characters in this book: controversial (and quite successful) managers like Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin; painfully inept owners in Bob Short and Brad Corbett; long-past-their-prime players struggling at the back ends of their careers, like Rico Carty and Jim Merritt and Willie Davis; and up-and-coming future stars who would do their best work after Texas prematurely offloaded them, like Jim Bibby and Bill Madlock. And, in a class by himself, David Clyde: the #1 pick in the 1973 amateur draft who bypasses the minor leagues and goes straight to the Rangers, where he flames out in two seasons. A pitcher like Clyde would never be handled like this today. While his mis-handling is, 40 years later, one of baseball's great tragedies... it makes for much better writing than a book about Stephen Strasburg or Matt Harvey will probably produce in the year 2054.
While author Shropshire adopts the persona of a hard-drinking, back-slapping, fun-loving Texan, his literary merits shine through. Along the way, describing not only the booze and the women and the bad baseball, he also works in quotes from Terry Southern, the film
The Lost Weekend
, Ian Fleming,
Madame Bovary
, Shakespeare, and
The Grapes of Wrath
. Watergate is happening in the background, too, and there are brief cameos by the likes of Sandy Koufax and David Eisenhower. The fiery Billy Martin's voice is described as "misleadingly soft" and is likened to that of Mr. Rogers. There's a lot more to enjoy about the writing of this book than just the bad baseball on display.
It's interesting to note that Shropshire did not write this book immediately after leaving the Rangers beat. He wrote it 20 years later, months before the Rangers finally clinched their first-ever playoffs berth (and 15 years before they finally landed in the World Series). The narrative works much better this way, although his fact-checking could use some work (he wrongly blames a Willie Davis error for a memorable 1975 Rangers' loss, even though we know now from the Internet that Davis didn't play in that game). However, while Shropshire correctly predicts that the Rangers are never going to win a World Series... it's still nice to know that the current Rangers' manager, Ron Washington, is a throwback, whose open demeanor and unorthodox strategies would have made him a good fit with Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin. In that sense alone, not much has changed for the Rangers since 1973.
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Simon Parker
Absolutely brilliant read, very funny in parts and really got ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2015Amazon Customer
A good laugh-out-loud read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2015
