Keeping up with my personal policy of reading a book relevant to the sporting event I am attending, I read this book while on a bus trip to Yankee Stadium. I gave myself brownie points for not only reading a baseball book, but the subject was one of the teams I was seeing that night, the Texas Rangers. I won't say the Rangers won that game because I enjoyed the book - but if one wants to believe so, go ahead! Here is my review.
Title/Author:
“The Texas
Rangers and Me: A Baseball Writer’s Thirty-Two Years in Arlington” by T. R.
Sullivan
Rating:
4 of 5 stars (very
good)
Review:
If a reader
wants to get the inside scoop for their favorite baseball team, the best source
of information would be one of the beat writers who cover the team
regularly. T.R. Sullivan was one of those
writers for the Texas Rangers and his career covering the team is a good
collection of his time performing that task.
Sullivan’s
career covered a lot of ground for the history of the team, through the good
times and the bad ones. Players he
highlights in the book could make up a Who’s Who of Texas Rangers history. There is great information on stars who had
great seasons with the Rangers. These
include Nolan Ryan, Michael Young, Adrian Beltre, Josh Hamilton and Alex Rodriguez. Not only are their exploits on the field
covered, but Sullivan also shares personal stories about interactions he had
with them and for some, such as Rodriguez, how they ended up becoming Rangers.
The stories are
not limited to the players. Sullivan also shares anecdotes on managers and
front office leaders as well. The best of the managers during Sullivan’s time
covering the team, Ron Washington, gets a great write up. For front office staff, that honor would go
to Jon Daniels. It probably is no coincidence
that these two individuals got this amount of text in the book as they were the
field manager and general manager respectively when the Rangers won back-to-back
American League pennants in 2010 and 2011.
Sullivan retired after the 2020 World Series (played in Arlington even
though the teams were the Dodgers and the Rays) so he did not cover the first
championship for Texas in 2023, but he did include his observations on that
team as well.
Through these
personal stories, Sullivan also takes the reader through the Rangers’ seasons,
both good and bad. He starts with an
event where the Rangers were not playing – the 1989 World Series between the
Athletics and Giants and the earthquake in San Francisco that interrupted it
for ten days. From there, he works for a
Dallas-Fort Worth newspaper covering the Rangers and occasionally will give the
reader a peak of life as a beat reporter.
Because of all these interconnected stories about the people and the team,
there is repetition of many events in Rangers history. From that, it appears that Sullivan wrote
each chapter without looking back to see if an event had already been
addressed. That is the only true flaw I found
in this book and if that’s the worst thing one can find, it’s truly a book
worth a reader’s time. Even if that
reader is not a Rangers fan, it’s still fun to read about this team’s personalities
and history.
I wish to thank
University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley.
The opinions expressed in this review are strictly my own.
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