T.R.'s Memoirs: How Major League Baseball came to Arlington. Part II: Senators in session
The team that would become the Rangers stumbled through mismanagement and a lack of talent in the nation's capital.
Editor’s note: T.R. Sullivan covered the Rangers for 32 years and is sharing his memoirs exclusively with readers of this newsletter. This week: a three-part history that examines the long road baseball took to get Major League Baseball to Arlington.
The franchise that eventually became the Texas Rangers came to life on Nov. 17, 1960, when American League president Joe Cronin announced the league would expand by two teams. One team would be the Washington Senators, effectively replacing the team that had just fled to Minnesota.
This decision was painfully obvious. Baseball needed a team in the nation’s capital to placate real Senators and Congressmen who were debating whether the sport should keep its precious antitrust exemption.
The topic dominated baseball politics in the 1950s. The sport was awash with antitrust litigation all through the decade. A young lawyer named Bowie Kuhn began his baseball career litigating antitrust cases.
In Washington, congressional committees were constantly holding hearings on the subject with a parade of famous players and characters asked to testify. Commissioner Ford Frick spent much of his time testifying on Capitol Hill and placating lawmakers.
Cronin announced the league would also petition Major League Baseball to allow for expansion into Los Angeles, thereby frustrating the hopes of Dallas-Fort Worth officials who desperately wanted the second team. DFW appeared to be the front-runner until the Yankees – facing an invasion of their turf by a new National League team – decided to retaliate by placing an AL team on the Dodgers’ home turf in Los Angeles.
The American League needed to be on the West Coast, at that moment the exclusive domain of the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. Getting all that sorted out would take more time and wasn’t completed until Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley received $350,000 as territorial compensation.
The rush to expansion
The Senators encountered no such issues. Their leadership team came together quickly. Maybe too quickly, but everything about the creation of the Senators was happening fast and furiously.
Ret. General Elwood R. “Pete” Quesada would be the head of group of 10 investors and serve as team president. He immediately hired Ed Doherty, the president of the American Association, to be general manager. Mickey Vernon, who had been an All-Star first baseman for the old Senators, was named manager. Hal Keller, who was assistant minor-league director for the old Senators, joined the new franchise as head of their minor-league operations.
They were an odd bunch, thrown together only because baseball recklessly decided Washington needed a franchise right away. They were given less than a month to prepare for the expansion draft, collectively they had almost no experience in their new roles, and nobody had any real clue as to what was involved in creating a franchise out of thin air. There was no farm system and comparatively little money to spend.
Quesada had served with distinction for 25 years in the Army Air Corps and played a vital role in the development of close air support for ground forces during World War II. After the war, he went to work for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation before Dwight Eisenhower selected him as the first director of the Federal Aviation Administration. That’s what he was doing before becoming president of the Senators.
Doherty had been a newspaper reporter, Red Sox publicity director and president of a couple minor-league teams. In 1953, he became president of the American Association and a vocal opponent of major-league expansion. That antipathy didn’t keep him from jumping at the chance to be the general manager of the first expansion team.
Vernon spent 20 years in the big leagues, beginning in 1939, missing two years because of the war. He had nine at-bats in September, but did not play in the World Series when the Pirates shocked the Yankees. Five weeks after Bill Mazeroski’s home run, Vernon was named the Senators’ manager.
Keller, a minor-leaguer who never made it to The Show, was coaching high school baseball in Maryland when the Senators hired him as the manager of their rookie-league team in 1958. He was promoted to assistant farm director in 1959 and spent two years in that job before joining the new Senators.
Quesada ran the team like he was still in the military. He communicated by issuing military-style orders. Nobody was allowed to use his private elevator at the stadium, and scouts were told he had to personally approve any signing over $2,000.
Baseball’s first expansion draft was held Dec. 14, 1960, under unfavorable conditions, according to Eric Thompson and Andry Cue in their story Mis-Management 101 for the Society of Baseball Research. The eight American League teams were required to make just 15 players available. In future drafts, clubs would be limited to protecting 15 players.
Each team had to select 10 pitchers, two catchers, six infielders and four outfielders in that order. They got six more random picks after that. No established team could lose more than seven players. That kept the powerful Yankees from being ransacked. The Senators and Angels were each limited to taking no more than four players from any team.
The Senators’ first pick was left-hander Bobby Shantz, 35, who had been the American League MVP in 1952 for the Philadelphia Athletics but was now a reliever for the Yankees. Two days after the draft, the Senators traded him to the Pirates for three players. The Senators needed bodies, not over-the-hill stars.
The team seemed doomed from the start, but on June 2 they beat the Athletics, 12-4, before a modest crowd of 13,183 fans at Griffith Stadium. The win left the Senators 24-23 and in fifth place. They fell apart from there and finished 61-100, the first of four straight seasons of at least 100 losses. It was also the first of 10 losing seasons in the 11 years of the Senators’ second existence.
It would be easy to say those who were running the Senators were a bunch of blundering idiots who had no clue what they were doing. That is wrong. The group did the best with what they had and at least were able to do for an underfinanced franchise.
Bottom of the barrel
A big problem for the Senators was the lack of a productive farm system. Keller increased the number of scouts, but money was still tight and the Senators had far fewer teams than their well-financed competitors.
They began with just two affiliates in 1961, both at the rookie level. The Senators moved up to five teams in 1962, a Triple A team in Syracuse that went 53-101 and four rookie-league teams. The Yankees had eight. They needed nine in 1964 and ’65. As late as 1966, the Senators had just four teams.
The Senators were at least able to put together a competitive pitching staff. Dick Donovan, the 56th player taken in the expansion draft, led the American League in ERA in 1961. During the season, the Senators made two notable trades in obtaining right-hander Tom Cheney from the Pirates and young left-hander Claude Osteen from the Reds.
Cheney made MLB history on Sept. 12, 1962, when he struck out a record 21 batters over 16 innings in a 2-1 victory over the Orioles. Osteen pitched 18 seasons in the big leagues, was a three-time All-Star, a two-time Cy Young winner and a key part in the biggest trade in the Senators history.
The Senators were able to move into a new stadium in 1962. It was initially known as D.C. Stadium but later was named in honor of the late Robert F. Kennedy. The Senators, last in attendance in 1961, enjoyed a 22% increase in the new stadium. But the 729,775 fans ranked them just eighth out of 10 teams. They sunk back to last place in 1963.
Instead of being the solution, the stadium proved to be part of the problem. RFK Stadium was the first of the new multi-purpose “cookie cutter” stadiums designed to accommodate all sports. As such, it lacked the charm of old Griffith Stadium and was located in a bad part of town already dealing wit urban decay.
At the end of the 1962 season, Quesada asked Doherty for his plans to improve the team. Doherty recommended Vernon be fired. Instead, Quesada fired Doherty, kept Vernon and hired Orioles field coordinator George Selkirk as general manager. Selkirk was promised a free rein by Quesada.
Change at the top
Quesada followed Doherty out the door. In January 1963, there was a protracted fight for control of the team, according to Andrew Sharp in this article for SABR.
Eight of the original 10 investors wanted to sell to a group led by the original baseball maverick Bill Veeck, who had previously owned the Indians, Browns and White Sox. The two holdouts – investment bankers James Johnston and James Lemon – were able to fight off the Veeck bid and take control of the team.
They had three other investors but eventually bought them out as well.
Johnston and Lemon brought the promise of stability. Johnston told the Washington Post that the new owners would take a hands-off approach except for financial matters and allow Vernon and Selkirk a free hand.
Vernon lasted 40 games into the 1963 season before Selkirk fired him and hired former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman Gil Hodges. Like Vernon, Hodges had almost no experience in managing a team. He was still playing for the Mets when the Senators acquired him in a trade on May 23 for outfielder Jimmy Piersall.
The Senators really needed his old bat more than his fledgling managerial skills, but Hodges did bring a semblance of respectability to the Senators. A blockbuster trade after the 100-loss season of 1964 helped considerably.
Osteen, infielder John Kennedy and $100,000 went to the Dodgers for outfielder Frank Howard, third baseman Ken McMullen, first baseman Dick Nen and pitchers Pete Richert and Phil Ortega.
The deal was a steal, even if Osteen helped pitch the Dodgers to a World Series in 1965. Richert and Ortega were productive starting pitchers, and McMullen had a five-year run as one of the league’s better third basemen.
Howard was the key to the deal, a power-hitting outfielder whose 237 home runs from 1965-71 ranked fourth in the majors. The Capitol Punisher became Washington’s first and only superstar.
The Senators climbed to 76 wins in 1967, good for sixth place. It was their best showing to date, but Hodges, who never really cut his ties to Brooklyn, left for the Mets after the season. Then, on Dec. 28, 1967, Johnston died of cancer.
James Lemon became the principal owner, and Selkirk hired Jim Lemon – no relation — as manager. The manager was a slugger for the old Senators in the 1950s but ill-equipped to manage. The Senators fell to last place, and James Lemon put the team up for sale.
Coming up Short
Veeck once again expressed interest. So did Bob Hope, the famous comedian whose road buddy Bing Crosby was part owner of the Pirates. The winner was Bob Short, a Minneapolis businessman who bought the team for $9.4 million.
Short had once owned the Minneapolis Lakers of the NBA and moved them to Los Angeles without changing the nickname. That should have been a portent of his actual plans.
Short, who had come up short in a bid to become Lt. Governor of Minnesota in 1966, tried to make an immediate splash. The Redskins had just hired Vince Lombardi as their coach, so Short looked for someone just as big.
He found his man. The great Ted Williams took over as Senators manager in 1969 and was an immediate success. The Senators won a franchise-high 86 games in 1969 and Williams was Manager of the Year.
But it brought only temporary relief to the franchise. The Senators were still losing big money, and Short grew frustrated with the situation.
Down in Texas, Tom Vandergriff and officials from DFW were still looking for a major-league team. They had two targets.
One was Charlie Finley, who was slowly accumulating impressive talent while thoroughly infuriating the entire baseball establishment from the moment in 1960 when he bought the Kansas City Athletics.
The second was an expansion team. Baseball was getting ready to expand again in 1969, and Vandergriff wanted that team in Arlington. The long wait was soon coming to an end.
Tuesday: Part I
Thursday: Part III