New Rangers owners must receive Ryan’s input

By JIM REEVES

revo@star-telegram.com

It’s a bad joke, right? Somebody’s pulling our legs, both of them, all at the same time. Only I’m not laughing and, I suspect, neither are you.

The prospective new owners of the Texas Rangers are all going to troop out to The Ballpark at various times this week and next. Sort of a kick-the-tires, take-her-for-a-spin around Nolan Ryan Expressway adventure.

They’ll visit the clubhouse and stare at Michael Young’s locker, check out the view from the dugout, kick off their shoes in Tom Hicks’ plush underground bunker next door and, of course, talk to many of the department heads.

But as it stands now, they won’t be visiting with the most important person there beyond, apparently, a cursory "Hi, Nolan. Would you mind signing this ball for my kids?"

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The prospective new owners won’t be picking the brain of club president Nolan Ryan?

Astonishing and incredibly ludicrous.

"I guess it’s because of my relationship with [Chuck] Greenberg," Ryan told me this weekend. "I don’t know where it came from, whether it’s Tom, or Major League Baseball, or who decided that. That’s just what I was told when I was informed that the groups were coming in to visit."

Ryan, as any good Rangers fan knows by now, has aligned himself with Greenberg, the minor league baseball owner out of Pittsburgh. If Greenberg’s bid is accepted by Hicks, or Major League Baseball, or whoever makes the call, Ryan will be a minority owner.

But if I’m Dennis Gilbert or Jim Crane, the two men heading the competing groups, my immediate response to that nonsense would be somewhat like the one Gen. Anthony McAuliffe sent the Germans when they demanded the U.S. forces’ surrender at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII.

"Nuts!"

Only more profane.

If I’m about to spend upward of $500 million — give or take $50 million, but who’s counting? — the one man I have to talk to in the Rangers organization is Nolan Ryan.

For me, anything else would be deal-breaker.

Instead, the guy who may one day be calling the shots for the Rangers will get a business rundown from some other executive, I suppose. And they’ll get a CliffsNotes review of the baseball operation from general manager Jon Daniels.

Got no problem with that. Nobody knows the Rangers’ system, from the major league team right down to the Arizona Fall League team, better than Daniels.

But that’s not the point here. The man who oversees the entire operation is Ryan. Leaving Greenberg out of this because he already obviously talks to Ryan plenty, if I’m Gilbert or Crane, I demand an audience with The Man.

"Whatever they want me to do, I’ll do," Ryan said.

Look, Daniels will do a great job of bringing these guys up to speed on what the Rangers have, what they don’t have and where they’re going.

But he simply can’t do what Ryan can, and that’s give them the perspective of what he’s seen and learned in his two years (has it already been that long?) as team president, from a Hall of Famer’s viewpoint.

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