Sunday, July 7, 1996

The Texas Rangers' best year, 1977, is easily their strangest. It all added up to: ONE BATTY SEASON

By Dave Caldwell
The Dallas Morning News

ARLINGTON - The 1996 Texas Rangers don't know how easy they have it. They only have to worry about the simple things. Like winning baseball games.

The 1977 Rangers had it a lot different. Oh, they won baseball games, too - 94 of them, a club record that the '96 Rangers are on a pace to break. But the '77 Rangers also had to sweat out a few more distractions.

Make that a lot more distractions.

The manager was assaulted by the disgruntled second baseman in spring training - for no apparent reason. That manager got fired with the Rangers at .500 and four games out of first place in the seven-team American League West. And that was just the beginning of a comical, eight-day stretch during which the Rangers were managed by not two or three people, but four.

Somehow, the Rangers won 20 of their last 26 games, but by then they were in a futile chase of the Kansas City Royals, who were even hotter than the Rangers.

The Rangers fell from first after they were swept in a weekend series by the New York Yankees at Arlington Stadium in the middle of August.

Funny thing. The man who was managing the team at the time has absolutely no recollection of that crucial series. Neither does the general manager, nor does a veteran outfielder.

They remember plenty about the other stuff. The most successful season in Rangers' history also is its most bizarre. The year 1977 gave Rangers' fans the immortal Lenny Randle and Eddie Stanky. It was the year that gave Rangers' fans The Ambush and The Never-Ending Managerial Search.

It was March 28. The Rangers - who were training in Pompano Beach, Fla., north of Fort Lauderdale - were traveling by busto an exhibition game against the Minnesota Twins in Orlando, Fla. Second baseman Lenny Randle, who had just lost his starting position to rookie Bump Wills, was sitting next to Tom Grieve.

Randle, generally thought by his teammates to be a nice guy, struck up a conversation with Grieve.

" 'What do you think would happen if I punched out the manager?' " Grieve, who has been with the Rangers for almost 28 years as a player, front-office official and now television announcer, remembers Randle saying.

Grieve was incredulous.

" 'What do you think would happen?' " Grieve remembers replying.

The subject was dropped. The ride continued. The Rangers got to the park. During batting practice, Randle struck up a conversation with Frank Lucchesi, the team's genial 48-year-old manager who had been hired midway through the 1975 season.

Then Randle punched Lucchesi in the face. He hit the manager at least two more times as he was falling to the ground. Blood poured from Lucchesi's mouth and nose. Randle then went to the outfield and ran wind sprints.

Lucchesi was taken to a hospital. He stayed there 11 days. He had a broken cheekbone and three broken ribs.

"It was a violent, unprovoked attack," Grieve says. "I lost all respect for Lenny."

Randle - who had come to the big leagues with the Rangers' predecessors, the Washington Senators, in 1971 - never wore a Rangers' uniform after that day. He was soon traded to the New York Mets.

"We got rid of him as soon as we could," says Eddie Robinson, who was then the Rangers' executive vice president.

Lucchesi, now living in nearby Colleyville, Texas, does not remember the assault. He does remember plenty about the painful aftermath.

"No one knows what I went through," he says.

The Rangers opened the '77 season April 7 in Baltimore. Lucchesi was told by his doctors that he was not quite strong enough to make the trip, but he did, anyway. He remembers showing up at Memorial Stadium with two black eyes.

"The key," Lucchesi says, "was that that day Bump Wills got the base hit that won the ballgame."
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Randle for 30 days. Randle pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of battery in an Orlando court and was fined $1,050. Lucchesi says he has run into Randle only once since - at an old-timers' game a few years ago. Not surprisingly, the two did not have much to say to each other.

To this day, Lucchesi is baffled that Randle's assault was reported as a fight between the two men. Lucchesi says he never had a chance.

"To be very, very honest with you," Lucchesi said, "if Lenny Randle had been on drugs, or insane, or intoxicated, I would have wrapped my arms around him and said, 'I forgive you.' But it was premeditated."

The '77 Rangers had been built by owner Brad Corbett to win the AL West. By the middle of June, though, the Rangers were floundering at .500 and were stuck in third place. Attendance was stagnant. The Rangers were averaging only about 15,000 fans.

"We felt like a move was needed," Eddie Robinson says.

The team was 31-31 after a 9-5 loss on June 21 at Minnesota. Lucchesi felt the club, only four games out of first at the time, would only get better. But he had a clue something was going to happen to him.

The clue came from his son, who heard a rumor on a Dallas radio station that Frank Lucchesi was going to get fired. Robinson remembers it another way: A reporter from a Dallas radio station stopped in at the Rangers' Arlington offices and just happened to overhear a conversation in which the team had decided to hire Eddie Stanky.

"In two minutes, everybody in the world knew," says Robinson, who is now a scouting consultant for the Red Sox and Twins.

After the game that night, Lucchesi heard from reporters that Stanky, a former major leaguer who was the coach at the University of South Alabama, was coming in to manage the Rangers. Lucchesi had to go to Robinson and ask for an explanation.

"I asked in a very diplomatic way - 'Why?' " Lucchesi says. "They told me that the team was 80,000, 90,000 behind the attendance last year. They told me I had lost my fan appeal that I'd had the year before. That kind of hurt."

Robinson thought the Rangers had made a good move - and a smart choice. Stanky, who had managed St. Louis during the 1950s and the Chicago White Sox during the '60s, arrived in Minneapolis and was so enthusiastic at an introductory news conference that everyone was convinced the Rangers were headed in the right direction. The Rangers beat the Twins that night, 10-8.
At about 8 a.m. the next day, Robinson got a call in his hotel room. It was Stanky.

"I said, 'Hey. You want to have a cup of coffee?' " Robinson recalls.

"He said, 'I'm at the airport.'

"I said, 'Why are you at the airport?'

"He said, 'I can't take the job. I'm getting on an airplane. I'm homesick for my family.' Then he hung up."

About 10 minutes later, Stanky was on a plane headed back to Mobile, Ala. He took back his old job at South Alabama.

"The players just joked about it," says Grieve. "The players started saying, 'Gee. What if we would have lost that game? What would he have done then?' "

Robinson says he has not spoken to Stanky since that day. Stanky could not be reached.

The Rangers suddenly needed another manager - their third in three games. Connie Ryan, a coach under Lucchesi, was named as interim manager. Ryan said later that he was offered the job permanently by Brad Corbett, but Grieve thinks that probably would not have been a good move.
Ryan was too old-school, too sour. (Ryan, 75, died in January of a heart attack.)

"He was a good coach, a very shrewd baseball man, but there would have been absolutely no way he would have succeeded as a manager," Grieve says of Ryan. "I don't think he could have motivated the guys."

The front office looked for a replacement. It talked to a couple of former major leaguers, Harmon Killebrew and Don Drysdale. Fourth on the list was Baltimore's third base coach, Billy Hunter. Robinson and Hunter were roommates when both played for the New York Yankees.

Hunter got a call from Dan O'Brien, the Rangers' general manager, after a game in Baltimore.

" 'Can you meet us downtown?' " Hunter recalls O'Brien saying.

" 'Downtown where?' " Hunter remembers replying. "I didn't realize that they were in town, in Baltimore, at the airport."

They picked him up at 11:30 p.m. Hunter met with Corbett and O'Brien until 4 a.m. It was early on a Saturday morning, and Hunter asked them that if they wanted to hire him, he wanted to get the job before that Monday morning, when the Orioles were to leave for a road trip that began in Cleveland.
Monday morning came; Hunter got no phone call. He left with the Orioles.

"Well, no sooner had we checked into the hotel that I got a call in my room," Hunter says. "They wanted me in Oakland that night."

Hunter, a taskmaster who paid a lot of attention to the fundamentals, got to work fast. He made a priority of improving the Rangers' infield, which included a shortstop playing third base (Toby Harrah), two newcomers (free-agent shortstop Bert Campaneris and Wills) and a hobbled first baseman (Mike Hargrove, now the Indians' manager).

"When another team bunted on us, it was like hitting a triple," Hunter says. "There had been no fundamental work done in spring training."

So Hunter started another spring training, requiring the Rangers to report to Arlington Stadium at 4 p.m. for basic drills in the 100-degree June heat. It was not popular.

"But the players seemed to come together under him," says Robinson.

Corbett said on July 4 that he was putting the team up for sale, then said a month later that he was taking the team off the market. By then, the Rangers were not distracted by much of anything.

The Rangers won 35 of their first 50 games under Hunter and were in first place entering the disastrous weekend series Aug. 19-21 against the Yankees - which Robinson, Hunter and Grieve do not remember. After losses of 8-1, 6-2 and 1-2, the first-place Rangers had become the fourth-place Rangers.

Then the Royals got hot. And although the Rangers won 20 of their last 26 games, the Royals repeated as division champions by eight games.

"They played well," says Robinson, who still lives in Fort Worth. "I'd like to remember that season as the year that Billy Hunter came in and did such a good job. Kansas City just had such a powerhouse."

"It was a great season," Hunter, 68, says from his home in Towson, Md. "The only thing that could have made it better is if we would have won it."

After a game in Detroit in July 1978, Corbett called Hunter and told him there would be two contracts on his desk when he got back to Arlington. One would be for three years. The other would be for five years.

"I was in Texas without my family," Hunter says. "I called my wife, and she said, 'I'm not moving to Texas, but I know how much it means to you to win for Mr. Corbett. I can put up with you being away for another year.' "

So Hunter signed for another year. After the Rangers ended a disappointing 1978 season in Seattle, Robinson took Hunter out for dinner and told him he would not be back. At the same time, Corbett took coach Pat Corrales out for dinner and told him he would be the Rangers' next manager.

Corrales hired a third-base coach. His name was Frank Lucchesi.

Hunter went back to Baltimore. He became the baseball coach at Towson State, and he retired a year ago as the university's athletic director. His stint with the Rangers was his only managerial job.

The baseball stadium at South Alabama is called Eddie Stanky Field.

And in 1980, Lenny Randle launched a new career. As a stand-up comedian.

The regular position players and starting pitchers:
POS. PLAYER KEY STATS
1B Mike Hargrove 18 HRs, 69 RBIs, .305 BA.
2B Bump Wills 9 HRs, 62 RBIs, .287 BA.
SS Bert Campaneris 5 HRs, 46 RBIs, .254 BA.
3B Toby Harrah 27 HRs, 87 RBIs, .263 BA.
C Jim Sundberg 6 HRs, 65 RBIs, .291 BA.
OF Dave May 7 HRs, 42 RBIs, .241 BA.
OF Juan Beniquez 10 HRs, 50 RBIs, .269 BA.
OF Claudell Washington 12 HRs, 68 RBIs, .284 BA.
P Doyle Alexander 17-11 W-L, 3.65 ERA.
P Gaylord Perry 15-12 W-L, 3.37 ERA.
P Bert Blyleven 14-12 W-L, 2.72 ERA.
P Dock Ellis 10-6 W-L, 2.90 ERA.
X X X
'77 STANDINGS
AL WEST W L Pct. GB
Kansas City 102 60 .630 -.
Rangers 94 68 .580 8.
Chicago 90 72 .556 12.
Minnesota 84 77 .522 17-1/2.
California 74 88 .457 28.
Seattle 64 98 .395 38.
Oakland 63 98 .391 38-1/2.