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Rangers not exactly an overnight success

31.12.69

It was nice to see the elation at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington on Saturday night as the Texas Rangers earned a trip to the World Series. How can you not like Nolan Ryan and the way he still drawls like a true Texan?

But amid the red, white and blue confetti and the Texas flags waving in the crowd, you had to wonder how many of the fans truly appreciated what it meant for the Rangers to be in the World Series, two years in a row no less.

Because if you grew up in Dallas in the 1960s and '70s, a World Series, or even Major League Baseball, was pretty much a foreign concept, although I heard you could pick up Cardinals games on the radio. We were Cowboys, the NFL kind. And not the Cowboys of today, Jerry Jones and all. No, it was Tom Landry, Don Meredith, Bob Lilly. Texans. Football. Next Year's Champions for quite a while.

Baseball? Well, only the true fans would brave the Texas heat to watch minor league ball at the old Turnpike Stadium. I can remember making that trip once — Arlington sure seemed farther from Dallas than it does now — but probably wasn't quite ready to grasp the fact we were watching future stars of the Baltimore Orioles like Bobby Grich and Don Baylor. Heck, even Cal Ripken Sr. was once the manager of the old Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, the Texas League affiliate of the Orioles. No, if you wanted MLB in those days you had to go down to Houston, but despite players like Joe Morgan and Jimmy Wynn, the main attraction was the Astrodome.

Source: STLtoday.com