A Life of Words

When I moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in April 1987 for a newsroom position at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I was a 26-year-old who loved sports and had just spent four years as a sports writer in the football hotbed of Odessa in West Texas. My team allegiances were pretty uncomplicated: Houston teams and Texas A&M, my alma mater.

But when it came to the team I wanted to win the most, one rose far above Houston’s Oilers, Rockets and the Aggies. It was then, had always been and has remained the Houston Astros.

When I was a little boy of no more than 6, I became attached to the Astros. During my early childhood, my family lived just 5 miles from the Astros’ home ballpark, the Astrodome, which gave us a chance to spend a pittance per ticket to see them play in a stadium where every level of seats seemed a different color of the rainbow.

My family always listened to the games on the radio, and my heroes quickly became guys like Joe Morgan, Larry Dierker, Don Wilson, Doug Rader, Rusty Staub, Bob Watson, Jimmy Wynn and Denis Menke. They lost a LOT of games, but that didn’t matter to me. I loved these guys.

And that loyalty, that devotion, that bond, has never come undone – although when it was revealed in early 2020 that the Astros had broken baseball’s rules to steal opponents’ pitching signs on the way to a World Series title in 2017, my commitment was finally tested – for a while. When the team made the 2020 playoffs with a sub-.500 record, my disappointment subsided.

But back to 1987. Upon arriving in D-FW, I added a new team to those I cheered for and whose games I attended: the Texas Rangers. For the next several years, I lived in Grand Prairie and Arlington, a short drive from the old Arlington Stadium where the Rangers played. Ticket prices were still reasonable then, so I went to several games a year and rooted for the Rangers.

My college buddy Gerald Gummelt, who’d grown up a huge Astros fan even way out in the Odessa area, lived in Arlington at the time. We went to Rangers games with his adorable young children, now 38 (Haley, who lives in Tacoma and ran the Chicago Marathon last week) and 35 (Russell, father of two precious little boys).

To further cement my ties to the Rangers, I was in attendance at two of the more significant games in the franchise’s history.

Gerald and I, knowing it was imminent (or at least strongly hoping) Nolan Ryan would notch his 5,000^th strikeout against Oakland on Aug. 22, 1989, managed to score centerfield tickets to that game – for the whopping price of $4 apiece. We yelled loudly with the rest of the crowd of 42,869 as Nolan struck out Rickey Henderson on a 96-mph fastball leading off the fifth inning for No. 5,000. Nolan finished with 13 K’s but lost 2-0 as Bob Welch silenced the Rangers.

The second big Rangers game I was extremely lucky to attend also involved No. 34, and it came four years later in what wound up being his retirement season. Sadly, I never witnessed one of his seven no-hitters, but this one did involve hitting – the pummeling Nolan inflicted on White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura.

My wife Kay and I, who were dating at the time, attended the game on Aug. 4, 1993, with a bunch of my Star-Telegram colleagues where the never-to-be-forgotten fight broke out after Ryan hit Ventura with a pitch in the third inning. Ventura charged the mound, and the 46-year-old Ryan put the 26-year-old Ventura in a headlock and punched him six times, prompting a benches-clearing brawl for the ages. To this day, I still can’t believe we were actually there.

So here we are, 30 years later, and the two baseball teams I’ve supported the most are about to meet in the playoffs for the first time when the American League Championship Series begins Sunday in Houston. What a fantastic event for baseball, for these two fan bases, and especially, for our great state.

The question of which team I’ll be pulling for doesn’t even exist, since I’ve lived and died with the Astros for in the neighborhood of 55 of my 62 years. I did back the Rangers for a number of years, but once the Astros joined the AL in 2013, becoming division rivals and creating a true Lone Star/I-45 rivalry, I turned off that switch.

Bad blood between the two teams, and their fans, has boiled over with various on- and off-field events. Everything – emotions, drama, intensity, cussing, the desire to win – will be amped up for this series.

Astros fans show up big at games in Arlington, as I’ve seen when I attend Astros-Rangers games in the city where we live. The Rangers and their fans are hoping that won’t be the case in this series if enough home fans bought up the tickets during the team’s presale available to season-ticket holders and frequent attendees.

I was surprised to receive an email informing me I was eligible for the presale when I attended only four Rangers games this season (three against the Astros), but it enabled me to purchase tickets to Game 3 on Wednesday, which will be the series’ first game at Globe Life Field in Arlington.

Just a bit of Rangers-Astros series history to illustrate how close it’s been: Since their first meeting on June 8, 2001, in Arlington (a 5-4 Astros win), the teams have played 266 times, with the Rangers holding a 134-132 edge. In the annual Lone Star/Silver Boot Series, the Astros have won 10 times, the Rangers nine and there have been four ties.

How much closer can it be?

In this shocking postseason, when all the teams that won 100-plus games in the regular season have gone home and the teams left won 90, 90, 90 and 84 games, we’ve already seen upsets galore. Not that it would be a surprise to see the Rangers defeat the Astros, who have won two World Series since 2017, are 56-34 in the playoffs in that stretch, and are in their seventh straight ALCS. The Rangers are peaking at the right time, and I believe they’re entirely capable of keeping the Astros from defending their crown.

I’m just hoping for a clean, competitive series that doesn’t get ugly because of the animosity these teams feel toward each other. Just play baseball, and may the guys who play the best baseball – which may not necessarily be the best team – prevail.

Of course, I’ll be wishing, hoping, even praying that team will be the one from H-Town, where my love of baseball, and the Astros, first started blossoming so many years ago.