Even Mark Cuban, who never seems to mind when the National Basketball Association fines him six figures for dissing the refereeing, had a far more difficult time withstanding Nolan Ryan's heat.
And the man who nailed his 5,000th strikeout in a Texas Rangers uniform and ultimately became the team's president now stands to own the team, Ryan's group finally outbidding Cuban by $9 million to get the approval of the court-appointed bankruptcy restructuring officer and creditors who thought the Rangers' sale price wasn't high enough.
Apparently, $590 million is just right to keep Cuban and his group from giving baseball government migraines. Cuban's reputation as an outspoken maverick, however, which may or may not have helped smother his bid to buy the Chicago Cubs, really should have proven to take second consideration behind the major one: he's not exactly a baseball man to begin with.
What a long, strange trip it's been. Ryan and his group (sports attorney Chuck Greenberg is his major co-partner) were approved as the new Rangers owners by baseball government a few months ago, but the team's creditors quaked. That was then, this is now. The creditors who were owed $525 million by departing owner Tom Hicks and his ownership group are likely to settle for $75 million apiece from the Rangers while taking the rest out of Hicks and company's hides elsewhere.
Quite a flip flop from over a week ago, when it began to look as though the Ryan group had blown it over a side deal they offered Hicks when they agreed to buy the team in January. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it, the deal gave Hicks $70 million for various assets around Rangers Ballpark. Hicks tried to insist those properties would be separate from the Rangers, not used as collateral on the $525 million in defaulted loans that started the whole mess. Not so fast, howled the creditors, compelling Hicks to go to bankruptcy and setting up the auction drama in the first place.
Nobody in their right mind thinks Cuban wasn't in bed with the Hicks lenders, enough to drive up the sale price to a level thought to be beyond the Ryan group's capacities. But Cuban the cobra may also have found his own mongoose — his unexpected partnership with Jim Crane, a Houston freight magnate who had been rejected already as a potential Rangers buyer, despite the Hicks lenders claiming his bid was actually higher than the Ryan group's.
The Rangers did their part on the field to make it all worth Ryan's while. Already having their best season in several years, the Rangers spent the day sinking the Seattle Mariners, 11-6, with David Murphy crowning the drowning with a go-ahead three-run bomb. Fifteen minutes after it ended, the Rangers learned the auction news.
"We have an owner!" went one yell.
Murphy got a lot more specific. "Ever since Nolan's been part of our franchise," he told reporters, "we've gone nowhere but up. He's not just a native Texan, a guy who is obviously very, very respected and admired in the state of Texas, but nationally he is one of the best pitchers ever. He's one of the most respected players ever. Of course we want a guy like that as our owner. In the end, we wanted the best group to represent us. Obviously, how could you not want a group with Nolan Ryan in it?"
That couldn't possibly be just effervescence over your company being taken over by a legend of your profession. Name me one player who doesn't think Ryan — who once became baseball's first million-dollar-a-year free agent (when he signed with the other team in Texas, well before he became a Ranger) — will prove a players' owner.
It would set an amazing precedent. Former pitchers who go to the front office are not historically renowned as profitable or agreeable bosses. Survivors of the 1960s Kansas City Athletics could probably tell you about Eddie Lopat, once a formidable Yankee pitcher ("Slow, Slower, Slowest" was one of his nicknames), who became the A's GM in the 1960s. Once upon a time, Lopat buttonholed one of his players at a team party and told him his incumbent season was good enough to guarantee him a nice fat raise for the following season.
Well, now. Come contract time, said player reminded Lopat of that remark.
"Prove it," Lopat deadpanned.
Clark Griffith was once a formidable major league pitcher. He went from there to become a pitcher-manager for four clubs, including the club he came to own, the Washington Senators. ("First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League," went the not-even-close-to-always-accurate gag.) Given his resources (his only income was the Senators and Griffith Stadium, the latter of which provided most of his profit, such as it was), he was reasonably generous with his players and almost unreasonably generous with his faith in youth. (To this day no man younger than Bucky Harris's and Joe Cronin's 27 — other than Lou Boudreau — has ever managed a major league team.)
Somehow Griffith's crazy Senators managed to win two pennants and a World Series along the way. More typical was the kind of team that once led Griffith to muse to a reporter, "The fans like to see home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff that is sure to please them." Something like that.
Ryan doesn't have those kind of problems on his hands. Name one incoming owner whose players have said, as did Michael Young, that his arrival gives the team "instant credibility." Or, whose players say, as did Ian Kinsler, that he'd already begun building relationships with his players, granted Ryan's slightly unfair advantage as the team's incumbent president.
They didn't even say that when George Steinbrenner's group bought the Yankees in 1973, and he had to beat out a group led by Joe DiMaggio to do it.
The pot gets sweetened, too. On the same day he learned his group would become the new Ranger owners, Ryan got some even sweeter news from the bankruptcy judge: despite baseball government's budget restrictions until the Ranger ownership and bankruptcy situation was resolved at last, the judge had "options" he could play that would allow Ryan to add or modify the roster as he saw fit.
Baseball government may have had to approve the Rangers' budget, but a court had to approve baseball government's budget orders. Ryan has already show more than a little economic savvy in the face of that balance — he never had to request permission to bypass a league-approved budget to land Cliff Lee, Bengie Molina, and others in recent trades; he merely traded from the Rangers' prospects pool without denting the farm too greatly, but with cash considerations in return to make it work.
The Rangers have been making things work right for them in the American League West. (It hasn't hurt them that the Los Angeles Angels have been struggling with injuries and with inconsistency enough to keep them at least a healthy distance in the Rangers' rear view mirror.)
Ryan once did a few amazing things wearing a Rangers uniform. He pitched his sixth and seventh no-hitters in those silks (and shook off Rickey Henderson breaking Lou Brock's lifetime theft record while pitching number seven); he won his 300th game in them; he wore them while making A. Bartlett Giamatti wish he could forget he was the commissioner and pump his fist in wild approval as Ryan blew one past Henderson for number 5,000.
This time, however, Ryan left his equally legendary wildness in the locker room. (It's difficult for his aficionados to remember that he retired with half as many walks as strikeouts, third all-time in losses, ninth in hit batsmen, number one on the wild-pitch list, and with a .309 on base percentage against. His Hall of Fame case rests almost entirely on his career value, which rests itself almost entirely on his surreal longevity.)
Now Ryan gets his crack at making a lot of Ranger fans forget that the team has had more moments resembling their origins as the second Washington Senators than moments in the sun. To say the entire state of Texas prayed nightly that Ryan would end up as the Rangers' principal owner is to say B.B. King is some guitar player somewhere.
This season's Rangers, with Ryan driving the engine and Ron Washington doing yeoman's work as the conductor, were already on the express toward more of the moments in the sun. But the engine driver buying the railroad doesn't necessarily guarantee just how smooth the tracks will remain.
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