Before that, he was an Astros fan from our Houston home. He took his kids to the old Astrodome every once in a while, where he taught me about singles, steals, and strikeouts--the basics of baseball.
Then we moved to Dallas, where you could buy a seat overlooking the Rangers' outfield for three bucks. We sat on those bleachers a few times every summer, where Dad passed out peanuts in the shell, washed them down with Dr. Pepper, and illuminated the finer points of the game: come-backers and pitchouts, small ball and the suicide squeeze. I didn't date much in high school, nor did I party much. But I learned baseball, falling asleep each summer night to the soothing rhythm of the play-by-play drifting out of my bedside radio. Another pitch, another 'tink' of numbers on the clock radio, another game in the record books. Night after night, summer after hot Texas summer, the Rangers had my ear as they predictably dropped through the standings like a Fergie Jenkins sinker ball.
I don't know that I ever even hoped to see them in the post-season. I simply understood that they wouldn't last much past July's All-Star break. I was right.
Childhood disappeared. I married and left Texas, and the clear-channel radio station that brought the nightly Ranger game to my home in Nebraska sadly quit its coverage. I shifted to the Kansas City Royals, whose daily broadcasts I could pick up. I joined my husband in rooting for the Red Sox, and used the back of a napkin at our local sports bar to teach my kids how to score a baseball game, pitch by pitch. And, like most stadium relics from the era before ballparks were named for orange juice or beer, the Rangers' Arlington Stadium literally bit the dust, and the old Astrodome crumbled into dilapidated disrepair.
Over the years, lots of things changed, but my dad still cheered for the Rangers. We still took in games together when we could, and the Rangers---no matter how far ahead they got in the spring and early summer standings---still died their annual deaths.
And in his nearly forty years of Ranger fandom, I never sat at a playoff game with my dad. I never had the chance.
Until this year.
Go Rangers! Thanks for the memories.
