Richard Rodriguez
Cheryl Springer and Jeff Holman, World Series trophy chaperones.
We sang hosannas and brought out the incense for a very special guest that dropped by our office on Monday.
The Texas Rangers World Series trophy. We are coveting our baseball neighbors’ trophies no longer. We’ve got one of our own, and she paid a visit so our friends — and us, of course — could take pictures with it.
No touching or snuggling allowed, though a few of us did sing it some sweet nothings. The Rangers have made some of us crazy over the years, so, why stop now?
“One guy tried to pick it up,” says Cheryl Springer of one overzealous fan in Arlington. “I grabbed his arms and said, ‘Put it down.’”
Soon, a story arose that she “had taken him to the ground and all this stuff.”
“It makes for a better story,” she says, laughing.
Springer and Jeff Holman have the niftiest job going if you were to ask me. They are the trophy’s chaperones — trophy coordinators — taking it from place to place so the team’s fans can share in the World Series glow. The home team earned the bling by defeating the Arizona Diamondbacks four games to one in the World Series.
They generally make two or three stops a day, Holman says. The Rangers are focusing on areas where people buy tickets, relying on a market analysis for the data. They came to us because, well, we have friends.
The trophy, which weighs about 30 pounds, is made of sterling silver and features 30 24-karat gold-plated flags representing each of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball. The center of the trophy is engraved with longitude and latitude lines symbolizing the world overlaid with 24-karat gold stitching representing a baseball.
Usually, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 fans come out to see and take pictures at each stop, Holman says. Holman says they have an appointment next week in Fort Worth in which 1,200 are expected. He and Springer were going out there later on Monday to do advance work to better ensure a good flow for visitors and safeguarding the holy grail.
The trophy is at every home game with Springer and Holman by its side. They make stops in suites before it settles in public address announcer Chuck Morgan’s office. Fans can see it there.
Springer and Holman handle almost all of the scheduling, too. The farthest they’ve taken it has been Oklahoma City, but trips to Shreveport and Rangers farm teams in North Carolina are on the itinerary. They were squeezed from upcoming trips to Cooperstown for Adrian Beltre’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the traditional World Series champion’s trip to the White House.
As sports competition teaches so well, you can’t win all of the time.
Springer, an Arlington native, is a longtime Rangers employee on the team’s security detail. She even has a World Series ring.
Holman is retired PD. He left the Fort Worth Police Department in February after 32 years of taking a bite out of crime. He retired as a sergeant in the Electronic Surveillance Unit.
His brush with World Series fame is an early-bird-gets-the-worm kind of deal. Like usual, he was up early one morning with his dogs. He turned on the TV to catch up on what had happened in and to the world overnight.
“I was watching ‘Fox and Friends’ one morning, and [the anchor] was talking about how [the Rangers] were looking for a trophy coordinator,” he says. “I'm, like, ‘That sounds pretty good.’”
He had been retired for a couple of months and was looking for something to do, right?
“Not really. Just maybe something to stay busy. My wife works from home, and I think I started to bug her a little bit. So, she was like, ‘Hey, something you can do?’”
Holman’s police career began with an almost speeding ticket on Hulen Street. By then a 1986 graduate of Southwest High School, Holman had been clocked at something higher than the posted speed limit. Allegedly. He was, nonetheless, granted a full pardon, told to go and sin no more.
One of the reserve officers knew Holman’s sister. Out of that traffic stop sprouted a friendship and a career in law enforcement. The next day, Officer Chip Jones, one of the officers who blew the whistle on Holman's Camaro, called to invite Holman, who at the time owned a window tinting business, to ride out with him on his Saturday shift. That led to more rideouts and more curiosity.
“I just got hooked,” he says.
He worked for three years as a reserve officer before graduating from the full academy in 1993.
His first 13 years were in patrol before he started promoting. A shooting incident in 2001 “accelerated my desire to get off the street and in an office.”
Today, he is safeguarding Major League Baseball’s most prized possession, which is in the hands of the team he grew up rooting for.
“It’s fun."