WASHINGTON SENATORS

Like magicians using sleight of hand, the Lords of Baseball played a round of "now-you-see-them-now-you-don't" with the Washington Senators in 1960, and then added a "now-you-see-them-again" to finish the trick.

Washington DC owned one of the American League's six original franchises, but after years of losing seasons, the fan base became disinterested and distracted. Owner Calvin Griffith saw greener pastures to the west and moved his franchise to Minnesota in 1960.

Knowing that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were not happy with a situation in which the national pastime would not be played in the national capital (the same lawmakers who decided whether baseball was exempt from antitrust laws) the Lords of the game awarded an expansion franchises to Washington right after Griffith departed with his team.

The second generation of Washington Senators picked up right where their predecessors left off, losing their first-ever game to the White Sox 4-3 on April 10, 1961 at Griffith Stadium. As the decade progressed, fans and lawmakers alike must have wondered why they wanted the Senators back. In their first four years, this edition of the Senators lost 100, 101, 106, and 105 games. In the next few seasons they were able to climb to the middle of the pack and when they hired Ted Williams to manage the team in 1969, they hit their high water mark with an 86-76 record and fourth place. They returned to their losing ways in 1970-71.

The only excitement for the franchise was the slugging of big Frank Howard, who had one of his best years for the 1969 team with forty-eight home runs, one-hundred eleven runs batted in and a .296 average. Howard hit over forty homers in 1968 and 1970 as well. While Howard was slugging and Williams was managing, new owner Bob Short (he bought the club in 1968) was being wooed by the city fathers of Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas. Baseball had seriously looked at this area for its 1969 expansion, but decided to go elsewhere.

Seeing his opportunity, Short closed a deal to move the Senators to Dallas for the 1972 season. With Washington lawmakers now indifferent to the move (due to the embroiling controversies of the era like the Vietnam War), baseball gave its approval. The Senators closed out an era of baseball history with a forfeit loss to the New York Yankees on September 30, 1971. Ironically, the Senators were leading the game 7-5 with two outs in the ninth when swarms of fans rushed onto the field, eventually forcing the forfeit.

TEXAS RANGERS

The newly named Texas Rangers opened for business on April 15, 1972 with a 1-0 loss to the Angels on the west coast. They won their first game the next day, 5-1. Williams retired after the 1972 season (the team lost one hundred games again which might have been a reason why).

After Whitey Herzog took the helm for the first one-hundred thirty-eight games of 1973, in which the team won only 35% of the time, Herzog was replaced by Billy Martin. Martin's force of personality and fiery demeanor lit a fire under the team and it had one of its best seasons in 1974, going 84-76, finishing second, five games behind Oakland. Jeff Burroughs won the Most Valuable Player Award with a .301 average, twenty-five home runs and one-hundred eighteen runs batted in, while Mike Hargrove was Rookie of the Year. Veteran Fergie Jenkins, (acquired in a blockbuster trade with the Cubs for Bill Madlock) won twenty-five games.

As was the case with many of Martin's managerial posts, he wore out his welcome and was gone the next season as the Rangers under performed to a 79-83 record. The Rangers had respectable second and third place seasons through the rest of the decade.

The Rangers plodded through the 1980's with mostly inconsequential seasons, their best showing being a second place finish under Bobby Valentine in 1986. They did enjoy some great individual feats, including Larry Parrish hitting three grand slams in one week (July 1982), Oddibe McDowell's cycle (July 1985), and Nolan Ryan's 5,000th career strikeout in 1989 (against Rickey Henderson). He would toss his sixth career no-hitter the next year and his seventh the year after that. Also of note — a group of businessmen headed by a fellow named George W. Bush bought the franchise in March, 1989. Businessman Thomas Hicks would purchase the club in 1992.

Pitching has always been the Achilles Heel for Texas, but by the mid-1990's they had assembled an offensive lineup devastating enough to overcome it. With a lineup that featured Juan Gonzalez (47 HR, 144 RBI, .314 and AL MVP), Rusty Greer (18 HR, 100 RBI, .332), Ivan Rodriguez (19 HR, 86 RBI, .300) and Dean Palmer (38 HR, 107 RBI, .280), the Rangers blasted their way to their first Western Division title in 1996 under manager Johnny Oates.

Although they won their first ever playoff game by beating the Yankees 6-2 at Yankee Stadium, New York won the Series. Texas would win the West again in 1998 and 1999, only to lose both Division Series to the Yankees in three game sweeps. During this four year span (1996-99), Gonzalez hit one-hundred seventy-three home runs, drove in five-hundred sixty runs and hit .329.

After a disappointing 2000 season, the Rangers made headlines by signing free agent shortstop Alex Rodriguez to a ten-year, $252 million contract. Rodriguez spent only three seasons with Texas, but took advantage of the hitter-friendly Ballpark at Arlington to post one-hundred fifty-six home runs (leading the league twice), three-hundred ninety-five runs batted in (an average of one-hundred thirty-one per year), three-hundred eighty-two runs scored (leading the American League twice) and a .305 average. However, without the offensive depth of the previous decade, the Rangers finished fourth all three years.

Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees for Alfonso Soriano just as Texas was unveiling an explosive battalion of new, young talent for 2004, including Mark Teixeira, Hank Blalock, Michael Young and Kevin Mench. The Rangers finished a surprising second behind manager Buck Showalter in 2004, but pitching waylaid them again in 2005 and they dropped under .500. With their new young players, the Rangers have developed a dynamic offense, but unless they solve their chronic inability to assemble a quality pitching staff, their fans will continue to wait for the team's first World Series appearance.