It would be a hoot for any true baseball fan to belly up to the bar for a few cold Lone Stars with author Mike Shropshire. The onetime beat writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram lived among the dysfunction that was the Texas Rangers of the early and mid-1970s and he has quite the number of stories to tell.
In 2005, Shropshire wrote "Seasons in Hell," an account of the writer's first-hand odyssey covering the franchise he would later christen "the worst baseball team in history" — the 1973-75 Rangers. Three years later, he's back with "The Last Real Season" ($25.99, Grand Central Publishing), a lighthearted diary of the 1975 Rangers season that would also signal the end of an era when players put the love of the game ahead of the almighty buck.
It's not surprising that Shropshire would have enough material for a sequel given the central character of this chronicle is the fiery manager Billy Martin, or as the author aptly describes him, "the sporting life's version of Mount St. Helens."
Considered a genius on the field and a train wreck off, Martin's penchant for trouble was legend well before he ever donned a Ranger uniform and he clearly didn't disappoint those who were around the team in '75. When the author asks Martin in the spring how he plans to handle the controversial personalities on the team, the manager replies, "Who do they have who's more controversial than I am?"
Shropshire's "Ball Four"-like accounting of the team's off-the-field activities is often hilarious and revealing. For example, Martin's strained relationship with superstar outfielder Reggie Jackson when the two were later with the New York Yankees is foreshadowed by Shropshire in his recounting of a flight to Oakland where the Rangers were to play the Jackson-led A's.
"Jackson is an overrated right fielder, which goes along with his overall package as probably the most overrated player in the game today," the author quotes Martin as saying on the 1975 flight. "Reggie Jackson is as useless as tits on a Chinaman."
Based on the previous season's second-place finish, optimism that the '75 Rangers would challenge for the American League pennant ran high among people in the organization as well as those covering the team, Shropshire included. This despite the glaring fact, he writes, that Texas' pitching "remained thinner than Dust Bowl chicken soup."
It didn't take long for Shropshire to realize this edition of the Rangers wasn't going anywhere. It may have become crystallized on a June morning when Shropshire writes he shared a booth at a coffee shop with a Ranger infielder whose "eyes were the color of the rising sun on the Japanese flag, and his hands trembled so badly that he could scarcely read the menu."
The player confides he was at an establishment the night before called the Hairy Buffalo where he picked up a woman who "climbs poles for the telephone company," was "a heroin addict and liked to sweat."
Shropshire writes, "With men such as this taking the field for the Rangers, I then knew for sure that the material being generated for my newspaper regarding the team being headed to a World Series had amounted to the greatest fantasy since 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon.' "
The '75 Rangers would go on to lose 83 games and finish 19 games behind the division champion A's. Martin would be fired by team owner Brad Corbett in July, only to triumphantly resurface with his beloved Yankees later in the season.
"Journalism's most demanding job," Shropshire writes, "was covering a Major League Baseball season wire-to-wire. The work was tantamount to writing a soap opera with 162 subplots, using a cumbersome all-male cast."
Thankfully, Shropshire kept copious notes, for this soap opera makes for a breezy and entertaining read for even the most casual fan. It was a different game in 1975 and its players a different breed, and Shropshire's storytelling enables us to remember baseball as it was — in the last real season.
Double amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius, whose story was recently featured on an episode of ESPN's "E:60," has won an appeal that will allow him to compete for a spot in this year's Summer Olympics in Beijing.
