The hero of Arlington

There’s probably no city in the country with a professional sports franchise that holds a coach or manager so close to its heart as Arlington, Texas.

In Atlanta, you can criticize Bobby Cox; in Miami, you could criticize Don Shula; in Boston, even Red Auerbach was questioned. But it’s a crime to say anything against Johnny Oates, who managed the Texas Rangers from 1995 until his resignation 28 games into the 2001 season.
Oates never won a world series; heck, he never won a postseason series. In fact, he almost never won a playoff game.

In 1996, Oates guided the Rangers to their first ever playoffs as champions of the AL West. They beat the Yankees in game one, but lost the final three of the series.

They would get swept by the Yankees in 1998 and 1999, making Oates 1-9 in the playoffs.

But more than six years after his retirement and two and a half years after succumbing to a malignant brain tumor, Johnny Oates is still a hero in Arlington.

He was born in 1946 into very modest conditions in the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina. Although his family was not poverty stricken, he did not have indoor plumbing or electricity until he was seven or eight.

“There was a lot of love and I would call it a Christian home,” Oates said. “It was especially Christian when my grandmother was there. I have a mental image of her kneeling and praying beside the couch, which was an army cot, in our living room.”

But his father worked hard, providing for him and his three brothers and one sister.

Although he was the fourth child, there was a huge gap between Oates and his older siblings. Additionally, there were no other children within five miles of his house. Therefore, Oates learned to play baseball throwing the ball around with his only younger brother in anything but professional conditions.

“The field where we played had a branch at one end and a cabbage patch at the other,” he said. “The branch was full of snakes, so you learned not to miss many.”

Despite this, Oates always wanted to be a baseball player.

In 1961, after his family had moved out of the mountains, his father took him to see his first professional baseball game in Washington, DC.

The newly reformed Senators, who are now the Texas Rangers, were playing against the New York Yankees for the weekend, playing once on Saturday and a double-header on Sunday. The home run race between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris was in full motion, and each hit home runs that weekend.

“I have an attic full of baseballs,” Oates recalled, “but the only autographed ball I have in the house is one signed by Mantle.”

Oates went to Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which is now more commonly known as Virginia Tech, and was signed by the Baltimore Orioles after his third year. He graduated that June before heading off into the minor leagues.

Finally, in 1970, he made it to the major leagues for the first time. By 1972, he was there to stay.

Although he was never a full time starter, Oates accumulated 410 hits for a .250 batting average over 11 seasons in the big leagues, retiring as a Yankee in 1981.

He moved directly into managing with the Yankees AA team, winning the championship in his first season. Oates would manage minor league teams for the Cubs and Orioles before finally returning back to the major leagues in 1991 with the struggling Orioles.

Oates went 291-270 in the four years there, leaving in 1995 to take over the Texas Rangers.

From 1961 until 1994, the Rangers had never made the playoffs. In Oates’s first five years, they made it three times without much of a team.

In 1999, Aaron Sele was the team’s ace, compiling a 4.79 ERA to lead the team. Even the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who went 43-119, had their ace maintain a lower ERA.

But through sharp maneuvering, the Rangers went 24-16 in one-run games, winning the AL West at 95-67. It was one of the best managing jobs in the history of baseball.

Buck Showalter, who played for Oates on the Yankees AA team in his first season managing, believed Oates to be the best manager he played for.

“He’s the best I ever played for,” Showalter said. “Just the whole package. … He’s the most ethical, moral man I’ve ever been around.”

But it’s off the diamond that Oates made his true mark on the Arlington and greater Dallas community.

Oates frequented baseball clinics all over the area, teaching kids and their parents a thing or two about the game. Additionally, he was always available as Rangers manager, appearing in commercials advertising the team and going out to meet the children who came to the ballpark.

After an 11-17 start to the 2001 season, the first with $252 million man Alex Rodriguez playing shortstop, Johnny Oates resigned. And in the rarest of all instances, the fans called out the organization for making the team so bad that Oates didn’t want to manage it.

He considered getting back in baseball, but in November, Oates was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was given less than a year to live.

But Oates, who had won three division titles in four years with one of the weaker teams in the American League, was not going to give up this fight.

Beating the Yankees in the playoffs was impossible for Oates, but fighting brain cancer was not.

For more than three years, Oates fought on, witnessing his daughter’s wedding and his grandchild’s birth.

Then in April 2003, doctors found more cancerous growths and decided that it was inoperable.

But possibly his greatest honor occurred a few months thereafter when he was elected by the fans into the inaugural class of the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame, alongside Nolan Ryan, Charlie Hough, and Jim Sundberg.

And despite being inducted alongside the Ryan Express, who pitched the last two of his record seven no-hitters as a Ranger, it was Johnny Oates, the humble man from the Appalachians, with a .250 career batting average, who had the largest standing ovation.

He said that he still dreamed about the Rangers winning the World Series and gave one request to his former player and then-Rangers manager Buck Showalter.

“The only thing I ask is, Buck, make it quick,” Oates said. “I want to see it.”

Oates didn’t get to see it, as the Rangers failed in both 2003 and 2004.

On Christmas eve in 2004, Johnny Oates died peacefully. But when you fight a terminal disease three times as long as anyone though possible, you don’t succumb.

By every standard, Johnny Oates won, and so did every person he ever knew.

“Nobody epitomized more than Johnny what we want to do and how we should handle ourselves as professionals in this game,” Showalter said. “The manager’s office here in Texas has his name on it and it will always be his. The rest of us are just passing through it.

“I can tell you there is one heck of a baseball game being played in Heaven today.”

In 2005, the Rangers retired his number. The only previous numbers to be retired by the franchise were 26 for Nolan Ryan and 42 for Jackie Robinson.

“But I think this would be very different,” said Andy Oates, his son. “You look out there and you see Nolan Ryan and Jackie Robinson… You look up there and you see Johnny Oates. Someday some kid is going to ask his dad, ‘Who is this Johnny Oates guy?'”

And that’s how it should be.

When he was inducted, Oates spoke about the other three players inducted and himself.

“There’s one big difference between each of them and myself,” Oates said. “Each one of them is here tonight because of what they did. I’m blessed and fortunate enough tonight to be here because of what others did for me.”

And unlike most people who talk modestly, Johnny Oates doesn’t fake it. He truly believes that he is not responsible for any of his success as a manager.

Johnny Oates was born modestly and lived it too a flaw. Peter Angelos fired Oates because Oates had a lack of self-confidence, and that haunted him his entire life.

He felt responsible for every loss and grateful that his players rescued him in every win.

But that’s wrong.

Players wanted to play their hearts out for Oates, they wanted to win for Oates.

The Rangers were terrible in 1999 on paper, but won 95 games and made the playoffs. Anyone can get everything out of his players, but few can get more.

Johnny Oates got a lot more than just more out of his players and he gave everything back: to the players and the organization and the fans.

The Rangers have been one of the worst run franchises since their inception as the Washington Senators in 1961, but for a brief six year run, they were in the thick of October baseball.

And to this day, it is a crime for anyone to criticize Johnny Oates.

“I regret any criticism I ever had of the late Johnny Oates,” said Tim Cowlishaw, a sports writer for the Dallas Morning News. “In hindsight, we see him as a combination of Earl Weaver and Casey Stengel.”

Not bad company for someone who won merely one postseason game, let alone any of the 14 pennants and 8 World Series Weaver and Stengel won between themselves.

And with the success he had with mediocre Rangers teams in the late 1990s, one could only guess how many pennants he would have had with a good team like the Yankees.

He’d have more than Torre. A lot more than Torre.