Digging into Rangers History - What Little There is of It

Content Originally Published by The Bay Citizen on Monday November 1, 2010.

ARLINGTON, Tex._When they built the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington in 1994, they had enough space to devote 17,000 square feet to the Rangers' museum, which sits beyond the right-field bleachers, and has a wall of windows that overlooks the field.

In retrospect, this might have been too much.

The team has some interesting memorabilia, including one of the original Rangers jerseys from 1972—their first season after moving here from Washington. “They just took ‘Senators’ off and sewed ‘Rangers’ on,” pitcher Dick Bosman, who was with the team when it made the move from Washington to Texas, once told me. “I wasn’t smart enough to steal mine when I got traded.”

Sure enough, there was one of the jerseys, with the stitched outline of the old Senators logo underneath a Rangers patch.

There’s also some memorabilia from the first interleague game, played in this ballpark on June 12, 1997. The Rangers’ opponent that day: The San Francisco Giants. This is how then-Giants center fielder Darryl Hamilton’s jersey came to be in the Rangers’ museum; he was the game’s first hitter. (There’s also a signed ball hit by Stan Javier for the first home run in interleague history, and the plate from the game, autographed by many of the participating players—including Barry Bonds.)

(The museum’s San Francisco memorabilia is somehat analogous to the Giants fans in town for the World Series—a little sliver of orange and black in a sea of red, white and blue.)

All of this is great stuff, but it doesn’t run particularly deep. If one counts their original iteration as the Washington Senators, the Rangers have only been around since 1961. Many more of those years were awful than were adequate.

So when faced with the prospect of filling 17,000 square feet with memorabilia, the Rangers mostly didn’t. Wall after wall bears little more than large cut-out pictures of Rangers players, sans copy or context. Entire rooms are empty. There’s a good 900 square feet worth of quality memorabilia, with more certain to come following this season.

The rest of the space, however, is unnecessarily Texas-sized big.