With Rangers winning, an overlooked Texas city is in the spotlight
During baseball season, Houston’s public buses display a message as they rumble through the city: “Go Astros!!”
A similar kind of communal baseball spirit has not typically surrounded the Texas Rangers, a team that laid claim to the hearts of all Texans until their World Series win over the Arizona Diamondbacks was hampered Wednesday by the fact that they had never won a championship in the 51 years since moving to the North Texas city of Arlington.
Sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth, the city is an almost seamless part of a vast urban agglomeration, a fast-growing and sports-crazed area of a fast-growing and sports-crazed state, where winners are valued and football in particular. the Dallas Cowboys – has been dominant.
But as the Rangers kept winning and winning, fans showed up. The excitement in October was palpable in the connected cities.
By Halloween night, people in suburban Dallas were holding viewing parties in driveways, lighting outdoor televisions or projecting a crucial game 4 on garage doors. Children with buckets full of candy passed each other on the sidewalk with short updates: “The Rangers are up!”
When the team’s second baseman, Marcus Semien, hit a three-run home run in the third inning to give the Rangers a 10-0 lead, cheers echoed through the neighborhoods.
The feeling had been a long time coming.
Tim Cowlishaw recalled going to the first Arlington game in 1972 when he was 17 years old. The Washington Senators were lured to the city and named after the Texas Rangers, an elite law enforcement division of the state police with a complicated history of heroism and cruelty.
“It was a very, very minor league park, and they just threw in some bleachers,” said Mr. Cowlishaw, a veteran sports columnist for the Dallas Morning News. “We were really happy to see the other teams that came to visit.”
The Astros, on the other hand, already had the Astrodome, a colossal covered stadium with the competition’s first artificial turf field.
The Rangers were cherished by Arlington residents and civic leaders, who built newer stadiums for them over the years. But they frustrated fans in the Dallas area, who watched other sports franchises come in and win it all: the Stars (Stanley Cup champions in 1999), the Mavericks (NBA champions in 2011).
“The Rangers are for everyone,” Arlington Mayor Jim Ross said Wednesday in an interview before Game 5. “We have struggled. But it is our baby.”
For years, the Rangers were overlooked, even in Texas, like the city they come from, lost among much larger neighbors. “Arlington has a population of 400,000,” Mayor Ross said. “That’s bigger than Pittsburgh, Cleveland and St. Louis.”
Now Arlington, like those cities, will finally reach it host a World Series victory parade Friday for the first time.
Tommy Bird, 54, who works at O’Reilly Auto Parts, watched the final game of the Series Wednesday night at Bobby V’s Sports Gallery Cafe, an Arlington restaurant founded by former Rangers Manager Bobby Valentine. It was the same place where Mr. Bird’s last appearance came when his team reached the World Series in 2011 against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with other fans, he recalled the feeling of anticipation that year – with victory still a long way away – followed by crushing disappointment after the win. a missed fly ball opened the door to their ultimate defeat in seven games.
“All we had to do was catch that ball,” Mr. Bird said. “There was a completely dead silence in this place. It was creepy. Everyone was shocked.”
In the years since, the Houston Astros have played a major role, winning two World Series titles and becoming a regular presence in the postseason. Their success and the Rangers’ failures have been a point of pride for some Houstonians, who often see themselves in a league with Dallas.
“It’s basically a one-way rivalry,” said Bud Kennedy, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, describing the competition among the state’s largest metropolitan areas. “Houston fantasizes about Dallas all the time. Dallas isn’t even thinking about Houston. You talk about Houston to people here and they say, ‘oh yeah, Houston.’
The Rangers’ road to a World Series championship passed through Houston and the defending champion Astros. In a bitterly fought series last month, the Rangers won in seven games.
Even after that, some Houston buses still favored the Astros, as did most of the city’s baseball fans. Most Halloween trick-or-treating in Houston did not involve World Series watch parties or game updates. While North Texas newspapers offered commemorative editions of the Rangers on Thursday, the Houston Chronicle barely noticed the news on the front page.
On Wednesday evening, Angela Rivera quietly watched the first few innings in a booth at Bobby V’s. Ms. Rivera, 60, said she had been a Rangers fan since moving to Arlington a year before the team arrived there, and that she went to the original stadium with her father as a child.
She sat with a turpentine towel from the 2011 World Series neatly folded in front of her. Every now and then she would whisper, “Come on, guys.”
Fans have been gathering at Bobby V’s since the 1980s, when Mr. Valentine opened the restaurant. Back then, you could find him walking around and chatting with customers, recalled Mr. Bird, who said he had been coming to the restaurant since the early days. Memorabilia from the Rangers and other Dallas-area teams line the walls, including the Cowboys, who moved to Arlington from the nearby city of Irving in 2009.
That year, the city of Arlington, home to the original Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, attempted a rebranding of sorts, adopting the slogan: “And the Crowd Goes Wild.” It did not take long.
Still, Arlington remained confident in the baseball team’s financing a new retractable domed stadium – the team’s third in the city – to keep the Rangers.
“These are the people who put their money and their passion into supporting Rangers baseball,” Mr. Kennedy said. “They feel like Dallas is in the back of the wagon and being pulled along.”
As Wednesday’s game continued without points, Chad Bowlin pulled out his phone at Bobby V’s to show friends how expensive tickets were for a possible Game 6 to be played Friday in Arlington, in the event of a Rangers loss.
He flipped through the lists and talked as he did so. Then he looked down and saw an unexpected and unwanted message: “Order placed.” When he called to try to cancel the purchase of the tickets, he was told that all sales were final.
“I paid $960,” he said, astonished.
Soon the Rangers scored the first run and the restaurant came alive. When the Rangers took a 5-0 lead in the ninth inning, everyone stood still. Ms. Rivera waved her ghost towel and started Rangers chants.
And when the Rangers secured the victory with a strikeout, the crowd erupted. A man wiped tears from his eyes. Mr. Bird hugged his son.
Mr. Bowlin threw his hands in the air, happy for two reasons: After 40 years as a fan, his team finally won a World Series for his hometown. And the tickets he bought were now invalid. He was assured a refund.
“I’m not going to the World Series!” he screamed.