Wednesday night while the Texas Rangers were shoving aside the Arizona Diamondbacks to win the first World Series championship in the franchise’s 63 years, I was watching that history unfold with a couple of Rangers diehards I’ve known for eight years. We didn’t finalize our plans until earlier that day, when Milt Collins invited Jeff Rubinett, another friend of Milt’s and me to his house in north Fort Worth to watch Game 5.
After working that day at our UT Southwestern Medical Center communications/marketing team’s offices in Dallas, I knew I’d be cutting it close to dash home to SW Arlington, change clothes and drive up to Milt’s place before the game started a little after 7 p.m. Made it just in time for pizza, beer and opening pitch of the Rangers’ 5-0 shutout in Phoenix, wrapping up a 4-1 series conquest that came much easier than I expected. Incredibly, it marked Texas’ record-setting 11th road win of these playoffs against zero losses.
I had to do a Facebook search to jolt my memory, but my fortunate friendship with Jeff and Milt began in September 2015. That’s when my at-the-time Dallas Morning News colleague Jeff Cavallin (yep, another Jeff) and I attended a game between our beloved Houston Astros and the hometown Rangers at The Ballpark in Arlington (pretty sure the Astros won, right guys? 😉 ). When the game was several innings in, these two fellows – including Jeff Rubinett, he with the shaggy silver mane – sat down next to us and we all started chatting.
When I learned Jeff was a Texas A&M grad like me – and an Aggie veterinarian who’s owned a clinic in East Fort Worth for decades – I knew a long-term friendship had been born. Even if our choice of baseball teams clashed, although I’d also been a fan of the Rangers since moving to Dallas-Fort Worth in 1987 to work at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
That being said, although I’d rather the Astros were holding up a second straight World Series trophy, I’m genuinely happy the Rangers wound up winning it all and not some other team. The title stayed in Texas, and that’s fantastic for everyone who calls this great state home. Over the past 36 years, I’ve been to a lot of Rangers games and, when they weren’t in the same division as the Astros or playing them, I’ve done a whole bunch of cheering for them, too.
I want to give my sincere congratulations to Jeff, Milt and all the other dedicated, long-suffering Rangers fans who’ve been waiting 51 years for this to happen, since the franchise moved to Arlington from Washington, D.C., where the team had played as the Washington Senators since 1961. The Rangers came painfully close to titles in 2010 and 2011, only to lose to the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.
This year, they hired the manager who guided the Giants to that 2010 championship, Bruce Bochy – who, coincidentally, was a catcher on the 1980 team that made the Astros’ first playoff trip and included the great Nolan Ryan. Bochy helped bring North Texas out of the baseball wilderness with a Rangers team that lost 102 games two years ago and 94 games last season.
The turnaround, and the Rangers’ stunning playoff ride – going from a wild card that faded down the stretch to defeating the two teams with the American League’s best records before knocking out the defending-champion Astros to get to the World Series – is off-the-charts impressive. But to then crush the Diamondbacks, who had shocked the Los Angeles Dodgers and 2022 runner-up Philadelphia to earn their spot in the Fall Classic, with such dominance makes this Rangers run a truly historic one.
But back to my buddies who went bonkers after we watched the Rangers take home the trophy. Jeff’s been a fan since the team moved to Texas in 1972, the year he turned 18. He’d graduated from high school in Dallas in 1971 a few months after turning 17 and started college at the former North Texas State University, then transferred a year later to Texas A&M.
Milt, who turned 4 the year the Rangers moved to North Texas, grew up in the area and attended lots of games with his dad at the old Arlington Stadium in the ’70s. He went to college at the University of Southern Mississippi, graduating with a journalism degree like me and starting his career as a sports writer (also like me). Milt worked at the Albany (Ga.) Herald, where he wrote a column about Nolan Ryan’s epic fight with Robin Ventura of the White Sox in August 1993. That historic day played out in the 46-year-old Ryan’s final season and the Rangers’ last at Arlington Stadium – and my wife Kay and I (we were dating at the time) were there to see it. Milt also had a later stint at the Houston Chronicle.
Milt moved away from North Texas in 1990, came back in 2005 and has been an insurance claims adjuster here for years. He’s never stopped being a fan of the Rangers – even though during some of the down times in recent years, he’s feigned otherwise. I always knew better.
Like so many others, Jeff and Milt have been fans of the Rangers through lots of ups and downs. The team lost 100 and 105 games during its first two seasons in Arlington, didn’t make the playoffs until 1996 and didn’t win a playoff series until 2010 – a stretch of futility much like the Astros, the only team I’ve lived and died with most of my life.
Over the years, Jeff’s had Rangers season tickets several years, used to hang out with the team’s players at the Sheraton hotel bar near the ballpark, and still calls some of the old-timers friends. He has vivid memories of going to games when the late, legendary Billy Martin was managing the Rangers (1973-75) and Hall of Famers Fergie Jenkins and Gaylord Perry pitched for the club back in the day. Jeff is even Facebook friends with the great Denny McLain, the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season (1968). He also has some awesome baseball memorabilia and loves the game as much as anyone I’ve ever met.
Jeff remembers that during the summers of 1977 through ’79 when he was in vet school at A&M, he didn’t get to go to Rangers games and had to settle for listening to them on the radio. Not sure if it still is, but back then, vet school was a grueling, year-round commitment.
So, I can’t help being thrilled for these two great friends – and all my other Rangers fan friends, of which there are many – that their team has broken through to finally taste baseball nirvana. My No. 1 team, which came to be in 1962 and didn’t win a playoff series until 2004, finally won a World Series in 2017 (tainted though it is) and won another last year. The Astros also have advanced to an unheard-of seven straight American League Championship Series, a streak that surely will end soon.
All I know is that I can’t wait until next April 5-8 – that, baseball fans, is when the Rangers and Astros meet in Arlington in a rematch of the classic seven-game ALCS that preceded the World Series. If I can, I’ll be there for at least a couple of those games.
Congrats to the Rangers! The 2024 season can’t get here soon enough! 😊
A Life of Words 