Enjoy the Party, Eddie Chiles

During a conversation more than a year ago, Tom Grieve recalled when as general manager he attended an organization meeting in the 1980s that included club owner Eddie Chiles.

Chiles was venting, Grieve said, something he was noted for doing during a rags-to-riches career in oil and gas. His “I’m mad” radio commercials ranted against big government and liberal politicians, leading to “I’m Mad Too, Eddie” bumper stickers adorning cars far and wide in these parts.

He did not contain today’s shiny, polished MBA credentials, but he did have a degree petroleum engineering from Oklahoma. (He had hitchhiked to get to Norman.) And he had built the Western Company of North America into an empire. 

“Brad Corbett is the best salesman the world has ever seen for talking me into buying this shitty baseball team,” Chiles said, as Grieve recalled and the author (me) paraphrasing only slightly.

He could have been speaking for all the rest of us long-suffering Rangers diehards who learned the game, as well as a subculture of humanity in the bleachers of old Arlington Stadium. It was a web of customs, cultures, and hidden truths our mothers all tried to conceal from us, all gathered in one place.

In truth, Chiles, like all the rest of us, loved the Rangers.

In fact, when he later sold the team to George W. Bush and Rusty Rose in 1989, he remarked: “Next to my wife Franny, it’s [the Rangers] the greatest love of my life.”

More than 500,000, the city of Arlington estimated, gathered as the Rangers celebrated a World Series championship with a parade in Arlington — something once thought to be as far-fetched as, say, me dating Jennifer Aniston — I’m thinking about Eddie Chiles, whose ownership, despite it failing in every way in terms of wins and losses, was consequential.

With Grieve as general manager, the Rangers drew up a mission statement: The organization would build its players from within the minor-league system. It would also be among the first, certainly the most aggressive, to tap into the talent pipeline of the Caribbean, setting up sophisticated scouting platforms in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, where baseball is part of the fabric of life. Some children went to great extremes to play, even playing in sugar cane fields with gloves made of cardboard.

That effort produced some great talent, including Ruben Sierra, Juan Gonzalez, and Pudge Rodriguez, among many others.

When Grieve came to Chiles, who died in 1993, with a proposal to sign Nolan Ryan, despite a very lean budget, the owner said to quit talking about it and pull the trigger.

“When we presented Eddie with this opportunity, we explained that Nolan didn’t fit into the budget we had,” Grieve remembered. “Eddie snapped back, ‘Don’t tell me about the budget. Sign Nolan Ryan, and I’ll figure out how to pay him.’”

Ryan built on an already legendary career and all those young players came of age just after Chiles sold to the Bush group. What a fun time that was. The Rangers were better but never broke through, but what fun it was to watch such good young talent or on the edge of your seat as Ryan took no-hitter after no-hitter into the late innings, or achieved career benchmarks of 300 victories and 5,000 striketouts.

As Rangers fans, we started to see what actually could be.

The second incarnation of the Washington Senators was much like the first, which played under the shadow of a history of bad baseball teams.

“Washington: First in War, First in Peace, Last in the American League” was the slogan adopted by the wisenheimers.

By the time owner Bob Short, who moved the NBAs Lakers from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, landed in Texas he had had enough of baseball ownership. He was losing more money than the Senators games, and that was hard to do for the Hindenburg of American League teams.

Tom Hicks of Dallas would rival Short in terms of bad ownership 30 years later, but in 1974 Short identified a local buyer who would cement Tarrant County and Fort Worth’s claim to the team: Brad Corbett, who with a group of businessmen, bought the Rangers for $10 million. Corbett had made his fortune in the pipe and plastics business. The group included Amon Carter Jr.

“Everybody was glad Bob Short sold the team,” said Grieve, then a Rangers player. “No one had anything personally against him, but he spent every day bitching about there not being enough fans or money. We had the worst organization in Major League Baseball. Our spring training site was an embarrassment, and there wasn’t a high school field in Texas that wasn’t nicer than our minor-league facilities.”

Corbett was a charismatic, can-do risk taker who was a multimillionaire by the age of 32. Corbett’s tenure as majority owner was marked by heavy roster turnover year after year. One notable trade occurred in the bathroom at the Swiss House restaurant on University Drive, sending Bobby Bonds and Len Barker to Cleveland for Larvell Blanks and Jim Kern.

There was also lots of drama.

One of the first matters he had to deal with as owner was the incorrigible Billy Martin, who was beyond reform the day he appeared on earth. The two got sideways with one another over Martin’s role and voice in the direction of the player roster. The manager at one point said of Corbett, “He knows as much about baseball as I do pipe.”

Corbett eventually fired him, the last straw, of all things, being Martin demanding John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” be played during the seventh-inning stretch.

Simply put, 1977 was terrible a year for manager Frank Lucchesi, who began the season being pummeled in spring training at the hands of Lenny Randle, who was upset by two things: 1) being told he would have to compete with Bump Wills for the starting job at second base; and 2) seeing Lucchesi quoted as saying, "I'm sick and tired of punks making $80,000 a year moaning and groaning about their situation.”

By June, Lucchesi had won too few games. Newspaper reporters broke the story that Corbett and general manager Eddie Robinson were looking for a new manager without having informed Lucchesi, leaving the skipper hanging for several days.

Corbett wanted Eddie Stanky and hired him on June 17. Stanky, though, decided he didn’t want the job and quit after one game. Bench coach Connie Ryan managed for three games before Billy Hunter took the job on a permanent basis.

The Rangers not only broke an American League record with four managers in one season, they did so in one week.

We — as in 8-year-olds — had never heard of the term “catatonic trance” until Roger Moret came into our lives. But that’s what reportedly happened to the pitcher before a game against the Detroit Tigers. Moret walked off the field during batting practice, went to the clubhouse, stripped to his underwear, threw his uniform in the trash, and went into … a “catatonic trance” in front of his locker.

It was the strangest of times.

Corbett had setbacks in business that compromised his ownership.

“I always wondered what if Brad Corbett had unlimited resources,” Grieve said. “He would have been a legendary baseball owner if he had a ton of money and stayed there a long time.”

In 1980, in came Eddie, another eccentric, bigger-than-life Fort Worthian.

“He was a maverick,” said Jim Reeves, a retired sports reporter. “He was used to doing things his way and people snapping to his orders. It had worked for him.”

It didn’t work in baseball, however.

A roasting mad Chiles flew up to New York to demand that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn end the players’ strike in 1981. To Chiles, Kuhn was simply another employee. And like others before him, Chiles could simply fire Kuhn, if need be.

The commissioner told him to leave.

On another occasion Chiles put armed guards at Arlington Stadium on an off-day while the team's manager, coaches, and players spent the day doing personal goal-setting.

The oil crash in the mid-1980s did the Chiles ownership in.

But Eddie showed us what was possible.