Ballgame!: A Decade Covering the Texas Rangers from the Best Seat in the House

By Josh Hamilton and Josh Lewin

Taking baseball fans behind the microphone, into locker rooms, and through the most memorable season in Texas Rangers history, this firsthand account from announcer Josh Lewin is both insightful and entertaining. Recounting the Rangers' struggles during their pivotal 2010 season—when the Rangers team was up for sale, drugs and alcohol threatened the team's biggest star and their manager, and reaching the Fall Classic for the first time—Lewin's bird's-eye view of Rangers baseball reveals an intimate and surprising portrait of a team that went from league joke to a serious contender in the World Series. Witty and original, Josh Lewin provides an engaging but balanced account of one of baseball's elite franchises.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781617496363

Book preview

Foreword by Josh Hamilton

There are certain things a ballplayer just can’t turn on or off, and one of those things is passion. Passion is something you either have or you don’t, and I have always respected people who nurtured their passions and listened to their hearts. Josh Lewin most certainly has passion for what he does. He loves baseball, as do I. He loves family, as do I. He has challenges, as do I, and as do all of us. But most of all, he knows only one speed, and he’s unapologetic about that. He broadcasts 100 mph because of his passion for the product.

It’s funny, but the very thing that I get criticized most often for is one of the things I’m most proud of. I get asked all the time why I can’t seem to stop running headlong into walls, why I can’t stop diving for sinking line drives, why I can’t stop diving headfirst on a close play at first, or why I can’t stop going in with guns blazing on a takeout slide at second. Well, it’s simple: I love baseball. I play it for keeps. I play it to win. In the heat of the moment, I can’t dial it down because that’s just not who I am.

I guess that’s why I feel a connection with Josh and the way he announced our games those first few years after I became a Ranger. I know there are some who would rather just hear the call of balls and strikes, but that’s not Josh’s operating speed. Just like fans and coaches have sometimes advised me to tone it down or take it easy, I don’t know that Josh could ever stop broadcasting as enthusiastically as he does. That enthusiasm may not be for everyone, but you can’t help but respect where it comes from—he loves the Rangers and wants us to do well every time we take the field. It’s appreciated.

The book you’re about to read contains a lot of information about the years before I ever made it to Texas. And as you all probably know about me, some of the things he writes about I never would have remembered anyway, fighting the demons I had to fight during that very challenging time of my life. You’ll be surprised to read that Josh also had to fight some pretty serious demons in his final few years as a Ranger. His struggles with depression and anxiety were never made public, and I admire him for having the courage to come clean in the following pages. Maybe some of you will identify with what he’s had to overcome, and if that’s the case, maybe his story will inspire you.

In the end, we are all fallible. None of us is perfect, nor are we supposed to be. There are Bible verses I could point you to, but I’ve already written and said a lot on that topic myself. Instead, I will simply encourage you to enjoy the trip down memory lane with Josh, as he writes in that colorful and unique style that is all his own.

—Josh Hamilton

Introduction

A called third strike in the bottom of the 11th. Taken right down the pipe by the face of the franchise, Michael Young, thus ending a seemingly random late September game between my Rangers and the rival Los Angeles Angels. It was also the ending of my decade-long tenure as the television voice of the team. I was the only one in the broadcast booth who knew that fact. Not my on-air partner, Tom Grieve, not my 12-year-old son, Coby, not any of the production staff, and certainly not any of the players on the field or in the dugout. Then again, none of those people knew about the end of my marriage, nor the silent, inner battle against anxiety and depression that I had been waging every night for the last several years. For a guy who’s known for letting it all hang out, I was doing a remarkable job of keeping it all in.

That is, until that called third strike. It was thrown by a rookie named Michael Kohn—for his first major league save. I took pride in the fact that other than Mrs. Michael Kohn and the dude’s own parents, I bet I knew more about that guy than anyone else in the ballpark. My thirst for knowledge and my joy of research had given me the ability to weave a bit of his backstory into the backdrop of a Rangers’ attempted rally—a rally that began after Texas allowed a Juan Rivera homer in the top of the ninth. (Side note: Rivera was a damn Rangers assassin. I always wondered if any other team got lemon juice in an open wound courtesy of Rivera, or if he only saved his diabolical plans for Texas.)

Of course, talking up Kohn while failing to talk up the Rangers’ own hitters was part of why I was at odds with some fans and some of the Rangers’ upper management in the first place. (And certainly, if I had given in to the impulse to yell Kohhhhhn! after an induced swing and a miss, man, you would have seen my head on a stick.)

I did my best to remember that even though the game meant nothing in the standings—the Rangers had clinched the 2010 division title in Oakland the previous weekend—somewhere out there, a Rangers fan was keenly interested in the outcome of the home team’s attempted rally. With two on and nobody out and the top of the order coming up, I felt great about my chances to end my Rangers’ career on the ultimate high note—calling a home-team walkoff victory, punctuated by the one word (or is it two?) that had gotten me noticed in the Dallas–Ft. Worth area and beyond.

As I pondered the irony of being able to make my last call as the TV voice of the Rangers in such a happy intonation, freaking Michael Kohn was carving up Michael Young. A few months later, Young would shake his own head at how the Rangers could do him like that after all those years of meritorious service, right out front…but we’ll get into that a little later.

Young got behind 1–2, and as the runners led off from first and second, I found myself rooting (silently, but literally rooting) for him to pound one of those signature opposite-field singles in between Peter Borjous and Torii Hunter. C’mon baby, I remember thinking. One last victory yell for the ages. You and me, Slick. You’ve had 7,000 Rangers at-bats in your career, and I’ve described about 6,600 of them. I was there when you scored the tying run in the famous 2004 David Dellucci Game. When you had the walkoff hit in that epic 16–15 win against Detroit. When you returned from witnessing the birth of your son Mateo and went 4-for-5 on 30 minutes’ sleep. We’ve been good for each other. Once more for old time’s sake, pal.

The pitch from Michael Kohn was a mid-90s fastball that roared right over the outside black. Ed Rapuano was the umpire, and all that labor-of-love research told me he’d assuredly ring him up, since Rap always sets up perfectly back there, eyeballing that outside edge, just over the catcher’s right shoulder. I could hear that strike three call all the way up in the booth, my senses heightened by the moment at hand. And as Michael Kohn celebrated his first major league save, and as Michael Young made that scrunched-up face he makes when he’s not pleased with something, and as TAG began to put his scorecard back in his carry bag, my voice cracked as I called my final at bat as Rangers announcer: And that’ll do it. Your final from Arlington tonight, in 11, the Angels 5 and the Rangers 4. But hey, the Rangers are still pointed toward their first trip to the postseason since 1999; it’s still all good...

Pure joy and unquenchable optimism is how the esteemed T.R. Sullivan had described my on-air work in a column—and I thought about how now, even in my dark, silent hell, I was somehow able to keep those embers flickering. I was glad that T.R. (and so many fans) had picked up on that vibe after nine years and close to 1,400 broadcasts. I truly did celebrate those Rangers wins as though I’d participated in them myself. It ran afoul of everything I’m sure they teach you in broadcasting school: stay dispassionate, stay neutral, and stay under control. I remember reading a book by the sportscaster Gary Bender when I was a teenager. Gary is a fine broadcaster, but his approach was so straightforward and linear it may as well have been a row of crops in Kansas. A sportscaster should simply be a talking bookmark, he advised, not a humorist, an entertainer, nor a purveyor of opinion. I remember reading that and deciding that if I ever met Gary Bender, it’d probably be a very quick conversation.

I felt the tears well up in my eyes, and stared straight ahead. I had a flight to catch at 6:30 the next morning, heading out to do a FOX network game in San Francisco, then down to San Diego for the Chargers vs. Cardinals radio broadcast. Those two assignments would force me to miss the last two regular-season Rangers games, and were part of the reason the ballclub and I were at odds. My son, Coby, was eager to get down to the field, where we would slip past the security guards who had made it their business to remind me that my son was no longer welcome at the playground to which he’d grown accustomed. The team’s chief lieutenant had quietly instructed those folks that Josh Lewin and his family had been downgraded from all access—no reason given. It was a Friday fireworks night, and I damn sure wanted Coby’s last memories at the ballpark with Dad to be pleasant ones, so I had already plotted a way to sneak past the po-po.

For years our tradition had been to hang with the players, coaches, and their families on the grass just outside the dugout as the fireworks lit the sky. Then we’d scurry out through the clubhouse, into the parking tunnel, and beat the traffic by mere minutes, stopping at Sonic for watermelon slushies on the way back to Southlake. I was already missing that tradition, and the fireworks hadn’t even yet begun.

Within the week, I was going to have to tell my son, my daughter, and the rest of the world that my time with the Rangers was up. I was smoked out of the hole, given marching orders that those in charge knew I couldn’t possibly carry out. Telling my kids about moving out of the house was going to be a bear as well.

Y’all know the rest of the 2010 Rangers’ story. After two more regular-season games against the vanquished-rival Angels, Texas steered past the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALDS and then, stunningly, vaporized the hated Yankees to make their first-ever World Series appearance. Claw and Antlers T-shirts were jumping off the shelves. Rangers Fever was a full-blown regional outbreak. Never had Rangers baseball been more popular in the Metroplex, and the likable players were fast becoming movie stars from coast to coast. (Upon landing in San Francisco the following morning, I saw a young fan boarding a flight to Seattle wearing an Ian Kinsler jersey. That blew my mind.)

Against that backdrop of unbridled elation, I was plummeting headlong into a deep depression. The Chargers, the team with whom I’d hope to find some solace and escape, were in the process of starting their supposed run to the Super Bowl season 2–5, losing to the Raiders and Rams in successive weeks. I moved out of our stylish 5,500-square foot estate on two acres, and into a second-floor 900-square-foot apartment with a view of a fire station out the lone bedroom window. I was, above all, embarrassed that both my time with the Rangers and my time with my wife were ending simultaneously. Both moves were for the best; I knew that. For me, the Rangers’ 2010 slogan was stunningly and ironically accurate: It’s Time.

I’d asked the Rangers to please withhold the news of my departure from the team until the season was actually over. I didn’t want to be a distraction, or detract from the real story, which of course was Cliff Lee pitching his ass off, Ron Washington overcoming his detractors, and Elvis Andrus zooming around the bases like a Ferrari. However, to my chagrin and disappointment, the Rangers issued a press release just hours before the winner-take-all Game 5 of the series with Tampa Bay. It read:

ARLINGTON, TX—The Texas Rangers today announced that the club has signed Tom Grieve to a three-year contract extension as the club’s television analyst on FOX Sports Southwest and TXA21. It was also announced that television play-by-play announcer Josh Lewin will not return for 2011.

After several discussions over the last few months, the Texas Rangers and Josh Lewin have agreed to end their relationship and move ahead in different directions, commented team president Nolan Ryan. As a result, Josh will not be returning as the Rangers television announcer in 2011. We wish Josh the very best for the future.

I would like to thank the Rangers for nine wonderful years, said Lewin. I respect the team’s leadership and vision and wish them nothing but the best as well.

Some of that was true…some wasn’t. But it’s not my style to embarrass anyone or point fingers. The high road is sometimes a lonely one, but I am convinced it’s the only way to travel. In these next several pages, I’ll tell you about the things that are appropriate for y’all to know: how much I truly enjoyed my decade as the Rangers’ TV voice; about my relationship with one of the game’s true gentlemen, Tom Grieve; about the wild cast of characters who paraded through that home clubhouse in the 2000s; about the memorable and turbulent 2010 pennant-winning season; about the dramatic 2011 season that I watched from a very different vantage point; about how I got into the business and why I intend to stay in it until someone pries that microphone from my cold, dead hand.

The Rangers are a team with a somewhat unbelievable history, and a future that glistens like something hanging off of Lady Gaga’s neck. The Rangers’ history is as good a place as any to start this book. And since so many of you insist that I’m always quoting Seinfeld (actually, I only did that through the 2005 season, but some of you have really long memories), let’s begin with that simple, Seinfeldian question: Who are…these people?

1. The Ballclub

My initial impression of the Rangers and their fans was not overwhelmingly positive. I was born in Atlanta but grew up in Western New York, where the nearest cattleman was hundreds of miles away and chewing tobacco was something one had to import, not just run down to 7-Eleven to pick up. When I came through Arlington as a broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers in 1998, our production crew decided after our first game we should head out for a beverage or three. We chose Humperdink’s over by Cavender’s Boot City off Centennial Drive. The cowboy hat–wearing cabbie dropped us in the parking lot, where my Jewish, female, 90-pound producer and I passed a couple tobacco-chewing, Wrangler-wearing drunks on their way out of the place. "Sheeee-yit, one said to the other, spitting a stream of brownish juice through his teeth and onto the pavement beside us. Playin’ that Top 40 bool-shit. That wuddn’t no country bar…that was a faaa-yag bar." And as they moseyed away, we couldn’t help but notice that not only were they wearing cowboy boots, but they also had actual spurs on them. Oh yeah, said the producer, looking me over and giving me her best My Cousin Vinny. "You blend."

Once I had become the Rangers’ TV voice, I often thought that the franchise put itself at a distinct disadvantage in its pursuit of free agents by having visiting teams stay at the nondescript three-star hotel across the street from the sad little restaurants near Six Flags amusement park—the Steak ’n Shake, the run-of-the-mill Chinese place, and the Trail Dust steakhouse, where they proudly boast that if you come in wearing a tie, you leave wearing half a tie, because they’ll scissor off the bottom half and let you keep the stump around your neck as a monument to your big-city idiocy. Twenty minutes west, the honkytonks and friendly folks of Fort Worth are a welcome rest stop for a weary traveler; twenty minutes east, the big-city clubs of Dallas pump out that nntz, nntz music while the fake-breasted beauties flash their perfect smiles, and sometimes the aforementioned fake breasts. Twenty minutes north, the visiting teams could luxuriate in Las Colinas, golfing at the Four Seasons or getting a massage and a seaweed scrub. Until recently, most visiting players had no idea that Fort Worth, Dallas, or Las Colinas even existed—what they assumed is that if you’re a Ranger, you bake in the hot sun during most ballgames; that the landscape is flat, brown, and uninteresting; and that if you’re not careful, you may get your neckwear ginsu-ed off by some yokel in a Western shirt.

Arlington’s lack of a city center is not exactly a selling point, nor is the traffic getting to and from the stadium. Most people assumed that Cliff Lee didn’t want to re-sign with the Rangers in 2011 because he didn’t like the heat, didn’t like the American League, or was allergic to Mitch Moreland or something. Actually, what his parents, wife, and kids all hated—especially during the playoffs—was the lack of public transportation. One thing about Cliff Lee is that he doesn’t tolerate delays. Rain delays, flight delays…heck, you can see it in the way he goes about his business on the mound. To steal a line from Vin Scully, he pitches like he’s double-parked. A couple of hour-long waits to get in and out of the parking lot for Cliff’s family during that 2010 ALCS did more to damage the chances of the Rangers’ re-signing him than any wayward Chuck Greenberg airplane trip to Arkansas.

Anyway, putting one’s best foot forward is a chamber of commerce must, and for years, both on the field and off, the Rangers—as an organization—were operating like a double amputee.

When you think about it, even the way the Rangers franchise arrived in North Texas in the first place was awkward. The team had been playing as the second incarnation of the Washington Senators for 11 years, not producing much on the field except for the occasional Frank Howard bomb of a home run. Owner Robert Short was looking to negotiate his way out of the nation’s capital and he found an eager if not desperate business partner in Arlington mayor Tom Vandergriff. I only had the pleasure of meeting Mayor Vandergriff once before he passed on in late 2010—his name was everywhere in Arlington, from Vandergriff Plaza at the center-field entrance of the stadium to the car dealerships up and down the I-30 service roads. He was a gentle and humble fellow.

Vandergriff had tried in vain for a dozen years to bring the majors to the Metroplex. Opposition came in various forms, most aggressively from down I-45 in Houston, where Judge Roy Hoffheinz was determined to keep his Astros a statewide baseball monopoly. There was also the matter of funding a stadium to lure a team, and Dallas money and Ft. Worth money never mixed. Thus, the compromise was made to expand rickety Turnpike Stadium in Arlington and bring it up to big-league code.

I’d read the fascinating history of how the Senators became the Rangers long before I landed in Texas, but the more I talked to the locals once I arrived as play-by-play announcer, the more the stories took on an almost fictional hue.

Short, from all accounts, was a man who never could quite understand the inherent differences between his trucking business and the baseball business. He had a difficult time of it in Washington, and began exploring ways he could move his operation somewhere else—years earlier, as the owner of the Minneapolis Lakers, he had moved the team to L.A.

When native Texan Gene Autry heard that Short was looking to cut bait in D.C., the Singing Cowboy brought his good buddy Mr. Vandergriff up to speed quickly. Ironically, north Texas baseball fans had no bigger booster than the owner of the Angels, the team that would emerge as the team’s chief rival before too long. Autry had previously whispered in Vandergriff’s ear about potential grabs of the Seattle Pilots (who became the Milwaukee Brewers instead), the Cleveland Indians (who stayed put), and the Kansas City A’s (who moved to Oakland). But once Short decided he was done in Washington, Autry knew this was the deal to be made.

The power elite in the nation’s capital was none too pleased, and all the way at the top off the political food chain, President Richard Nixon dispatched his son-in-law David Eisenhower to pay Short a visit in his office. Eisenhower reportedly shook his finger, scolded, blustered, pontificated…every imaginable anger-tinged verb you could imagine. Short stood his ground, politely but firmly, listening respectfully, but making it clear he was a businessman and would do what any good businessman would do when faced with a chance to turn a loser into a winner. That was certainly good news to an interested observer who just happened to be hiding in the closet at the time: Tom Vandergriff.

The mayor of Arlington got his team, over the 11th-hour protestations of the maverick A’s owner Charlie O. Finley. Finley tried to blackmail the soon-to-be-renamed Rangers by insisting that the only way he’d cast the deciding yes vote for the move to Texas, was if the Senators/Rangers handed him the rights to future All-Star outfielder Jeff Burroughs. (Say what you want about Finley, but the guy had balls!) As it turned out, the deciding vote to guarantee the move would be cast by Autry himself, who had to do it from a hospital bed where he was laid up with pneumonia.

The Senators played their last game in Washington on a rainy, dismal Thursday evening in late September 1971. Dick Bosman, who would later become a popular and successful pitching coach for the team in Arlington after starting the first game in Rangers’ history, drew the starting assignment. I was angry, he said. I was resentful. Washington was…my first major league club, my first major league ballpark. I met my wife and got married there. I was angry we were leaving.

As Bosman warmed up, he could tell immediately that the 14,000 fans who were chanting and hanging obscene signs, were angry and resentful as well. The Senators fell behind the Yankees 5–1 then rallied behind Frank Howard’s 26th homer of the year to go on top 7–5 in the eighth.

At that point, Del Unser was in right field for the Senators and noticed the fans gathering along the right-field line. A few of them had run onto the field before the inning began and were cleared off when an announcement was made, warning that the game would be forfeited if they didn’t leave. In the ninth inning, Bobby Murcer bounced back to the mound for the second out, but the chance to get the third never came. The fans poured onto the field and essentially turned the place into Fred G. Sanford’s front yard. Unser ran for the dugout. I saw them going crazy, and I just hoped I could get to the dugout, he later said. It was basically you just grab your hat and run for it. It was a little broken-field running through the crowd, but nobody was after us, they were after souvenirs from the stadium.

Let the record show that Joe Grzenda, a 34-year-old left-handed relief pitcher, threw the Senators’ last pitch in D.C. It would be 34 years before another regular-season pitch would be thrown at RFK Stadium, when the Montreal Expos relocated and became the Nationals.

Those ’71 Senators were the seedlings that would grow up and become the ’72 Rangers. They’d been a lackluster team that finished 63–96, and then somehow regressed once they moved their gear to Texas.

Oh, they arrived with plenty of bluster and whooptie-doo. For the home opener, the players all took the field wearing 10-gallon hats. Their manager was the Splendid Splinter himself, Hall of Famer Ted Williams, and there was enough pomp and circumstance to light up the Texas night. The 1972 opener was a typical mid-’90s Rangers game: 7–6, with a lot of windblown nonsense once the ball was in the air. The Rangers homered twice to overcome four errors.

(Somewhat incredibly, when the team had debuted on the road six days before that anxiously awaited home opener, the first game in franchise history was scoreless into the bottom of the ninth. For all the