The Rangers announced this morning that Tom Hicks has passed away at the age of 79. Hicks owned the Rangers from 1998 to 2010. The club released a statement about Hicks’s passing.
“Mr. Hicks was a passionate and competitive owner and Texas Rangers fan,” the statement read. “The club extends its thoughts and prayers to Mr. Hicks’ wife Cinda, his six children and his entire family as they mourn a legendary Texas businessman, philanthropist, and sportsman.“
A private equity investor based in Dallas, Hicks made over $1B as part of a partnership that invested in soft drink brands Dr. Pepper and 7 Up and merged the two companies together in the late 1980s. Hicks moved into sports franchise ownership when he purchased the NHL’s Dallas Stars in 1995. It was just a few years later in 1998 that Hicks purchased the Rangers from an investment group managed by future U.S. President George W. Bush. He would later go on to purchase Liverpool F.C. in 2007.
The Rangers found immediate success under Hicks’s ownership with back-to-back AL West titles led by future Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez. The team began to struggle in 2000, however, and that led Hicks to sign superstar Alex Rodriguez to a ten-year, $252MM contract that shattered records at the time during the 2000-01 offseason’s Winter Meetings. While A-Rod hit an incredible .305/.395/.615 over the 2001-03 seasons with 156 home runs and 27.0 fWAR, his supporting cast left much to be desired around the rest of the roster and the Rangers lost 90, 91, and 89 games during his three years with the franchise.
That spurred Hicks to trade Rodriguez following the 2003 season, and he was dealt to the Yankees in exchange for Alfonso Soriano and Joaquin Arias during the 2003-04 offseason. New York picked up $112MM of the $179MM remaining on Rodriguez’s contract. The Yankees went on to win the 2009 World Series with Rodriguez in tow, and A-Rod added two more MVP trophies to his mantle after winning his first with Texas in 2003. Meanwhile, the Rangers continued to struggle to break back into relevance. They did manage to win 89 games the year after the Rodriguez trade in 2004, but finished third in a highly competitive AL West and missed out on the postseason nonetheless.
It took until the 2009 season for the Rangers to be back on the upswing, when they won 87 games and once again narrowly missed out on a postseason berth with a roster headlined by Ian Kinsler, Nelson Cruz, and the rookie season of Elvis Andrus. That season was stained, however, by the club’s inability to sign first-rounder Matt Purke. Purke and the Rangers verbally agreed on a $6MM bonus after he was drafted, but the Rangers ultimately backed out of it. While Hicks contended that the club simply was unwilling to spend that amount to sign the 14th-overall selection in that year’s draft, team president Nolan Ryan suggested that the team’s finances were being closely monitored by the league at the time, who rejected the $6MM expenditure.
In January of 2010, Hicks announced that he had agreed to sell the Rangers to a group led by Ryan and Chuck Greenberg. The sale was delayed by a number of legal and financial issues throughout the year, including Hicks Sports Group filing for bankruptcy in May. The franchise was ultimate put up for public auction in August of 2010, which the group led by Ryan and Greenberg won. That ended Hicks’s tenure with the Rangers, and he went on to sell Liverpool a few months later as well as the Stars the following year.
While Hicks’s time with the Rangers ended in rocky fashion, the personnel who were hired to oversee the team during his tenure (including Ryan, GM Jon Daniels and manager Ron Washington) managed to lead the Rangers to great success on the field in spite of this off-the-field drama. The Rangers won back-to-back AL pennants during the 2010 and ’11 seasons, with 90- and 96-win campaigns thanks to impact performances from stars Josh Hamilton and (in the case of 2011) Adrian Beltre.
MLB Trade Rumors extends our condolences to Hicks’s family, friends and loved ones.
RIP Mr. Hicks
Welcome to Dallas-Fort Worth, Chan ho!
Texas Rangers fans, we finally have our number one starter.
Very popular Korean baseball meme
RIP, Mr. Hicks
Lots of steroids in that group of players…I-Rod; A-Rod: Soriano…
I could be wrong, but Ivan Rodriguez doesnt have a failed test on record, does he?
Anyone who watched baseball during that time knew that I-rod was probably on it, especially since he was on the same team as canseco, palmeiro, Gonzalez
I don’t remember if Soriano took steroids but I’m probably not remembering something
Outlaw – I can’t remember if it was with Texas or during his brief stint in Florida at the time, but I remember an interview where Ivan was asked if he had done steroids. Pudge’s reply was “Only God knows.”
No indon’t believe he does so Im probably off-base in saying this, but I have no doubt that he cheated. Several Hall of Fame players likely did steroids. Mike Piazza almost certainly did.
Pudge’s numbers don’t indicate typical steroid use. He entered the league at 19 years old and showed significant improvement at the plate in terms of pitch recognition going from 8.4 K/BB to 3.04 K/BB in just 1 year, very close to his career average.
He maxed out at 35 HRs and never really saw a huge jump from year to year; basically increasing and decreasing as entered and left his prime. The 14 HR increase also comes with a 11 2B decrease, suggesting 11 of those 14 HRs were likely warning track doubles that he got just a little bit more of.
Sure, if you look at his rookie numbers and compare them to his PEAK slash numbers, .264/.276/.354/.630 75OPS+ vs .347/.375/.667/1.042 156OPS+, there’s a huge difference, but that’s 19 years old vs 28, and he shows reasonable incremental improvement year over year that you typically don’t see from someone doping. There is no mid 30s surge, in fact, no real surge at all, just a relatively natural incline and decline. The only way you’d expect to see that natural of incline and decline would be if he was already on roids in the minors… But you’d think someone doping at Single-A would do better than .238/.278/.355…
If you were planning out what your ideal stats to hide the fact that you were on the juice, you couldn’t hand pick them any better than Pudge Rodriguez’s stat lines.
What he said when asked was, “Only God knows.”
Which is not true, I’m pretty sure Pudge knows too, but he was wise enough to refrain from comment.
And he had the advantage of being a reasonable person and not a total jerk like Clements and Bonds.
Nice gent, nice family. Condolences and best wishes.
Condolences to his family and all due respect, but when reading about an owner like this, does anyone actually believe these people need a salary cap to ensure that the players who produce the revenues don’t get paid too much?
Workers are the ones who produce revenue for every business everywhere. Why does this come up with baseball players more than any other industry? These guys are babied coddled and are paid beyond anything most people can imagine. They do pretty good I think. You invest millions or billions in something you are allowed to make a good living for yourself. There are reasons some teams get away with doing absolutely nothing year after a year. Maybe people should look into it sometime instead of talking about a floor in a cap.
Shadowpartner: And MLB players are performers with rare skills, not unlike Billy Joel or Taylor Swift or Paul McCartney or Leonardo DeCaprio or Tom Hanks, who fans willingly pay a lot of money to watch.
Performers, without whom there would be nothing to sell tickets for, deserve their fair share of the revenues they generate, and appropriately compensating them doesn’t prevent anyone else from making a good living off of their talents and efforts.
Ok. Sorry.
The biggest difference between sports and “every business everywhere” is that at least with most businesses you can argue that you’re using the boss’s equipment, supplies, materials, etc. and adding value to that. Sure you can argue whether someone is being fairly compensated for their VALUE ADDED, but at least the business owner has the things the worker needs in order to add the value to.
Sports franchise owners have *NOTHING* players need in order to perform their jobs. They could play in a public park. *THEY* are the attraction. A stadium only functions as a place for them to do the attracting of spectators in order to be able to monetize the activity. The owners are DEPENDENT on the players in order to even have a business; if the owner were capable of playing at that level, he’d be playing as well as owning, but you can’t play these sports by yourself.
They give players everything they need to perform their job. The best of everything. All the time.
Does anybody recall why they invested in A-Rod, he goes ahead and wins two MVP’s while the Rangers fail to put anyone around him?? Or maybe they tried but everyone but A-Rod failed and flailed. Must have been frustrating for fans
A salary cap and a floor go hand in hand in any other successful league despite the large market apologists implying it does not.
This one belongs to the Reds: With the continued revenue growth in MLB, there’s no indication that it is not successful and that a salary cap would make it any more so.
You might want to take a closer look at where that so-called revenue growth is centered.
Then revenue sharing might be an issue, but that wouldn’t be resolved by a salary cap and floor.
I’d rather blame the current Reds owner for being cheap, buddy.
Hicks’s A-Rod era is a case study in why fWAR and OPS+ matter: elite individual stats didn’t translate to wins without a strong supporting cast.
Everyone already knew that. Didn’t need new stats to tell people that. It’s always been obvious.
@Shadowpartner
How was it obvious?
Old York-Because people weren’t stupid. One example I can remember was all the talk about André Dawson winning National League MVP in 1987 for a last place team.
You are aware that the Rangers led the league in HRs, were 4th in RBIs, 2nd in OPS, 4th in OPS+, and had the 2nd fewest caught stealing in all of MLB in 2001? fWAR and OPS+ had *NOTHING* to do with the Rangers not winning…
A league worst 5.71 team ERA, ERA+, Runs Allowed, Hits Allowed, WHIP, and 2nd worst FIP and HR Allowed played significantly larger roles…
If Pat Mahomes had put a tenth of the effort on the field as he did at home, maybe we wouldn’t have been the worst pitching team in this history of baseball… But then we probably wouldn’t have Baby Goat, now would we?
Question for Rangers Fans… Did Hicks have anything to do with the team getting a new ballpark?
I know Nolan Ryan pushed hard for the current ballpark.
Not in the least bit. Arlington Stadium was used through the 1993 season. The Ballpark in Arlington opened in 1994, 4 years before Hicks bought the team, and the team was taken out of his hands in 2010, 10 years before Globe Life Field opened.
A man who financially mismanaged every team he owned
RIP
One bad but very large decision (obsession) to acquire Alex Rodriguez and all his personal preferences demands as a free agent was the catalyst that ultimately spiraled into disaster.
The binder of ARod accomplishments that Boras used to sell to Hicks is an exhibit in the HOF.
RIP Tom…..
Texas legend fallen
It’s such a shame that we had to be subjected to this man’s terrible ownership. Tell me you know nothing about building a team without telling me… He’s the origin of the most ridiculous contracts in sports history, having been declined by A-Rod and then literally DOUBLING down, effectively forcing A-Rod to say yes to a cartoonish amount of money. But then refusing to spend on any one else. We had GREAT offenses every year A-Rod was here; he didn’t carry the team as much as we remember… we just had the worst pitching staff in baseball for 3 straight years. It doesn’t matter how many runs you score if you give up one more than that every game.
And then to use the team as collateral in order to buy the Liverpool Football Club? He never saw our sports franchises as anything more than a way to extort money from the fans. He won’t be missed in this household.