I started watching this game somewhere around the 6th inning. Nolan Ryan and Dwight "Doc" Gooden were standing toe-to-toe locked in a 1-1 tie and both were throwing right hooks back and forth. The tie went to the 7th, then the 8th, then the 9th. Ryan had thrown a complete game and then for good measure Doc Gooden freakishly comes back out in the 10th inning! Charlie Kerfield finally came in for the Astros and gave up the winning run to the Mets in the bottom of the 12th inning and my adopted team the Houston Astros were defeated only to die in game 6 the following day. But the damage to this 12-year old had already been done.
I grew up playing baseball. I loved it. But as most kids in Texas, I grew up watching the Dallas Cowboys and becoming a football fanatic. I also started to love the hometown Howe Bulldogs just as much. It was football, football, football and I couldn't get enough of Danny White, Tony Dorsett, and eventually Herschel Walker, but something changed in '86.Prior to that Astros/Mets October game sat a July 26, 1986 game in Arlington, Texas http://www.baseball-almanac.com/box-scores/boxscore.php?boxid=198607260TEX, which was my first visit to the hometown Texas Rangers' Arlington Stadium. I knew of the Rangers fairly well due to local hero Danny Darwin from Bonham who had pitched for the Rangers just a few years before. I remember watching him on T.V. and liking Buddy Bell and Jim Sundberg, but I didn't really know much about them...not nearly as much as the Astros. But all of that changed in October. I HAD to have a team...and they were the closest thing I could get.
By the time the spring of 1987 came around I was in full-force Texas Rangers mode. I had learned all of the players and my thirst for information grew and grew and grew. Pretty soon, my favorite players were "Inky" (Pete Incaviglia), "LP" (Larry Parrish), "Boo" (Steve Buechele), "OB" (Pete O'Brien), "The Governor" (Jerry Browne), "Scooter" (Scott Fletcher), and a young Latin hot-shot named Ruben Sierra may have been my favorite of all. Then there was Charlie Hough, the old-man who was so old all he could throw was a tired old knuckleball...but was still able to lead the team in wins. There was a young fireballer named Bobby Witt and the result of the Buddy Bell trade gave us a young strong-armed Jeff Russell. The "Wild Thing" Mitch Williams was fun to watch with his crazy left-handed leg kick motion and his lack of command of anything. But watching wasn't the best thing about that Rangers team which was my first. Listening was magical.
The games were on WBAP-820. It was "The 50,000 watt sports voice of the great southwest!" Broadcasters were the late Mark Holtz and Eric Nadel. Some of my most beloved days were sitting on the back porch in the summer of '87 and listening to Holtz call a game on the radio while I kept score in my scorebook. At the time, I remember being very upset that we only could see road games because that's all KTVT-11 out of Dallas would televise. I wanted to watch the games so badly, but am so thankful now that I couldn't because of the memories I have of the peaceful summer night of just me and the radio and the scorebook. Baseball was made for radio. It's the same argument people make that the book is always better than the movie. Well, same in baseball. The images you create in your mind are way greater than what you actually see on T.V. And add a dynamic and brilliant play-by-play man to that mix and you have magic. The summer of '87 was absolute magical...even though the team was mostly in the toilet. But that's the way Texas Rangers baseball was...and I got a heavy dose that year.
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I went back to Houston to stay with the cousins again that summer of '87. This time, I had changed. I was a Texas Rangers freak. I remember listening to the radio upstairs of my cousin Netha's house where I could juuust barely pick up that 50,000 watt sports voice of the great southwest. In 1987, the Rangers started off the season horribly losing a ton of games in April to Milwaukee and Baltimore and found themselves in a terrible hole to start the season. That night outside of Houston with my little radio, the Rangers had come from behind to win a game and had broke even at .500 and the entire country club could probably hear me screaming. 
From that summer on, it's been a roller-coaster ride of baseball. I was at the last game ever played at Arlington Stadium and the first game ever played at The Ballpark in Arlington. I took a trip took a trip at the age of 22 to Wrigley Field for a Saturday afternoon game and flew to Boston the next morning and caught a Sunday afternoon game at Fenway Park and saw Roger Clemens throw a shutout vs. California. I went to Cooperstown, NY in July of 1999 to see Nolan Ryan and George Brett get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I've been to nearly every Opening Day in Arlington since 1993. I was lucky enough to go the the All-Star Game in Arlington in 1995. 
Years into listening to games on the radio, I finally realized that I idolized the announcer Mark Holtz more than I did the players. It was Mark Holtz' quote of "It's Baseball Time in Texas" before each game that stood out to me...and of course his trademark of "Hello Win Column!" after each win. On Nolan Ryan Day in 1993, I was able to get Mark to autograph a baseball for me which is my prize possession. He was so shocked that someone asked HIM for his autograph. He smiled at me like that made his day. We both made each others day if that was true. Mark died in 1997 after a battle with leukemia and it shocked the entire Rangers family. Years later, I was asked to be a part of a radio broadcasting crew for high school football and I obviously jumped at the chance. I worked my way up to play-by-play announcer and my touchdown call was "It's Touchdown Time In Texas!" as a tribute to the man that gave me all of those visions in my head of pictures he so eloquently painted in my mind. I broadcasted for 16 years before hanging it up this year. I missed out on tickets for playoff games back in 1996, 1998 and 1999, but I'm making up for it in 2010. It's Time!
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